The Oyneg Shabes Archive and the Cold War: The Case of Yehoshue Perle's Khurbn Varshe Available to Purchase

This article traces the vexed reception of one document from the Oyneg Shabes archive, the vast underground archive assembled in the Warsaw Ghetto under Emanuel Ringelblum's leadership and largely recovered after World War II. Yehoshue Perle's Khurbn Varshe (Destruction of Warsaw) proved the most shocking text of the second Oyneg Shabes cache for the way it vehemently alleges Jewish complicity in the systematic murder of the Jews of Warsaw and even harshly criticizes the victims themselves. This article analyzes the East-West polemic over Holocaust memory that erupted around Khurbn Varshe after its publication in a Stalinist-era Warsaw journal. The complex reception history of Perle's chronicle shows how the explosive issues that it and other Oyneg Shabes texts thematize were initially framed and mediated and how they could—and could not—be assimilated into emerging paradigms of Holocaust memory.