Monument unveiled to remember buried Warsaw Ghetto archive

A new monument unveiled in Warsaw on Monday consisting of a glass cube above an underground chamber commemorates the extraordinary history of a Holocaust-era archive hidden by Jewish volunteers.

The somber memorial has been erected on ground now surrounded by Soviet-era buildings where the trove of documents about life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto was buried in total secret in 1942.

Inside the cube is a page from the archive — a handwritten will by 19-year-old Dawid Graber, one of the volunteers who helped hide the documents from the Nazis.

A photo taken on April 19, 2021 shows a monument dedicated to the underground archives of the Jewish ghetto, after its unveiling ceremony at the site where the Ringelblum Archive was hidden during Nazi occupation during the Second World War, in Warsaw. (Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

The will, written on a page torn out of a school book, states that “what we were not able to pass through our cries and screams, we hid underground.”

The monument is being inaugurated on the 78th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — a failed revolt by hundreds of Jewish fighters against their Nazi oppressors in 1943.