The Oyneg Shabes project was history as survival. Anton Lesser narrates a 10 part series based on a remarkable archive of the life & destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Episode 8-Uprising. 80 years ago this month the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto were played out in revolt & fiery destruction.

Before the Ghetto & its people perished, historian & activist Emanuel Ringelblum led a clandestine project to collect and record the world of half a million people. Codenamed Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath), the archive gathered diaries, poetry, statistical studies, interviews, art & ephemera. The voices and thoughts of a people under Nazi occupation. Once it became clear that the Nazis intended to kill them all, it was buried for survival & the judgement of history.

By late 1942, few doubted that life in the Ghetto would last more than a matter of months. Those who had avoided deportation to Treblinka now contemplated resistance. For many that meant constructing deep shelters-living was resistance. A few hundred desperately acquired arms to fight the German murderers. A full scale uprising began on April 19th, 1943. The largest civilian uprising in Europe. A month of fighting would write a new legend of Jewish revolt, humiliate the Nazi occupiers and see the Ghetto burnt to the ground. Emanuel Ringelblum witnessed the first days of the fighting whilst Ghetto poet Wladyslaw Szlengel wrote words for battle.

Narration by Anton Lesser with the voices of Eliot Levey, Alfred Molina & Simon Russell Beale. Translation Emily Julia Roche, Marcel Weyland & Samuel Kassow. Written & produced by Mark Burman. For more information on the Oyneg Shabes archive go to https://www.jhi.pl/en/research/the-ringelblum-archive-and-the-oneg-shabbat-group/about-the-ringelblum-archive Show less