WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY
With Guests Executive Producer Nancy Spielberg with Writer, Producer and Director Roberta Grossman

Excerpt from the Director’s Statement
Which side of the story becomes the official narrative? Whose accounts do we elevate to the level of “truth,” and whose do we ignore or even bury? What is real, and what is fake? These are top-of-mind questions in 2018. They also preoccupied a courageous group of resistance fighters imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. The moment I found out about this secret band of journalists, scholars and historians, I knew I had to make a film about them. Their story, captured in Who Will Write Our History, is, in my opinion, the most important unknown story of the Holocaust.

Created and led by Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the Oyneg Shabes was an organization of 60+ members engaged in spiritual resistance against the Nazis, fighting hatred, lies and propaganda with pen and paper. They wrote and commissioned diaries, essays, jokes, poems and songs. They also collected artifacts such as photographs, German pronouncements, labels on Ghetto goods, official and underground newspapers and more -- anything that would help future historians tell the story of the Ghetto from the Jewish point of view, not from the Nazi perspective. On the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Oyneg Shabes members buried 60,000 pages of documentation in the ground in the hopes that the archive would survive, even if they did not, to “scream the truth to the world.”

The magnitude of this story drew remarkably talented people to the project. First and foremost was historian Samuel D. Kassow, whose book Who Will Write Our History? We were joined by my frequent collaborator Nancy Spielberg, who has masterful storytelling instincts in her DNA. Three-time Academy Award nominated actress Joan Allen and Academy Award winner Adrien Brody voiced the film’s two main characters.

In order to ground the film’s cinematically dramatized scenes in historical accuracy he words spoken by actors in the film come directly from the writing of the Oyneg Shabes Archive and/or in the case of the film’s narrator, Rachel Auerbach, from her post-war writing. As with the historical people they portray, the actors switch freely from speaking Yiddish to Polish in the film.

In 1999, three document collections from Poland were included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register: the masterpieces of Chopin, the scientific works of Copernicus and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Historians concur that the Oyneg Shabes Archive is the richest cache of eyewitness, contemporaneous accounts to survive the Holocaust. Despite its importance, the archive remains largely unknown outside academic circles. It is my hope that Who Will Write Our History will change that in the way that only a film can do, by making the story accessible to millions of people around the world.