Who Will Write Our History recounts the work of Emanuel Ringelblum and his resistance to Nazi oppression. In the Warsaw Ghetto of 1940, Ringelblum established Oyneg Shabes, a clandestine organization chartered to document all facets of Jewish life under Hitler and to preserve a historical record. Though decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work into the spring of 1943. Before Ringelblum and his family perished in March 1944, he and his associates managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes, which they buried beneath buildings not long before the ghetto was burned, ensuring that the voice and culture of a doomed people would outlast the efforts of their enemies to silence them.

Samuel Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and author of "Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archives”. He served as a consultant for the documentary film version of “Who Will Write Our History,” directed by Roberta Grossman with Nancy Spielberg as executive producer. He was born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany to two Holocaust survivors. As a child of survivors, Kassow’s first language was Yiddish and he was very much affected by his background.  He developed an interest in Jewish history at a young age. After graduating from college in 1966, he took a Fulbright Scholarship in England at the London School of Economics and studied at Oxford until eventually deciding to get his PhD in history at Princeton. In 1972, he went back to Trinity as a professor, where he has been teaching ever since. Kassow’s first 15 years of teaching had very little to do with Jewish history and more to do with Russia, but after his parents died, things changed. He said, “I realized so many survivors were dying off; the day would come when no one would really care or understand what happened, so I decided I would write about the Holocaust.” Register now