Who Will Write Our History

"Who Will Write Our History" is a docudrama directed by Roberta Grossman who co-wrote the film with Samuel Kassow based on his novel of the same name. The film tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and a group called the Oyneg Shabes, the secret archive he created and directed in the Warsaw Ghetto. With 30,000 pages of writing, photographs, posters, and more, the Oyneg Shabes Archive contains eyewitness accounts documenting not only how the Jews of the ghetto died, but how they were forced to live. Most interesting is the fact that the actual films shown (obtained through the British archives) were taken by German soldiers so the audience sees the torture and inhumane acts thrust upon these vulnerable and defenseless individuals through the camera lenses of their captors. This is a review of a film that rates a 9 for, although it is not entertainment in any sense, it does outline and display man's inhumanity to man and how those, faced with almost certain death, attempted to guarantee that the outside world (from which they were excluded) would some day learn the horrors they faced and the evils they encountered. As with all such acts of intolerance and terror, one must ask "why", and, sadly, it is a question that still remains unanswered even as of today.