The teams constructed tunnels and ventilation shafts under piles of smashed bricks

He wrote his last work in Polish in hopes that future generations of Poles and Jews would, together, look honestly at their entwined history."Who Will Write Our History?" is a heroic act of synthesis and contextualization. Ringelblum's diary was published in English in Rosetta Stone Language 1958 and served as the inspiration for John Hersey's novel "The Wall," but until now his work has never been viewed within the rich cultural and social life of Polish Jewry. Kassow renders a plex portrait of the historian, drawing on thousands of documents -- in Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew -- archived at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. In addition, he has sought out and interviewed descendants of the Oyneg Shabes writers. He honors the efforts and restores the names of men and women who wrote though they knew their lives and those of their families and even their culture were doomed.His narrative opens in the ruins of the ghetto. On Sept. 18, 1946, teams of searchers -- Poles and Jews together -- dug through the rubble of what was a school on Nowolipki Street. The ground was unstable. The teams constructed tunnels and ventilation shafts under piles of smashed bricks. "And then a probe hit something solid: a tin box covered in clay and tightly bound in string -- and then nine more," writes Kassow.What they had found was one of three buried caches of the Oyneg Shabes archive. This first cache wasn't welded shut; water seepage and mold ruined many documents and photographs. The Language Learning Software second, packed in rubberized milk cans and discovered by construction workers in 1950, fared better. A search for the third cache yielded only a few charred diary pages. The rest had vanished.One of Ringelblum's biggest fears was that no one would survive to dig up the archive. His fear wasn't unfounded. Of the 50 to 60 members of the society, there were only three survivors: Hersh Wasser (who miraculously escaped a train to Treblinka); his wife, Bluma; and journalist Rachel Auerbach. Without Wasser to direct the search after the war, it's unlikely the archive would have been found.Who were the participants in this unprecedented effort to document the destruction of a munity as it happened? The members of Oyneg Shabes included economists and teachers, rabbis and artisans, businessmen and munists. Kassow's biographies of the "band of rades" are illuminating and heartbreaking as he shows how their participation gave them a sense of purpose in the midst of chaos and despair. Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitch called prewar Warsaw Jewry "a sprawling mosaic of different Jewish tribes and subcultures." There were Zionists, socialists and munists. There were those who believed in Yiddish as the language of a secular future and assimilationists who spoke only Polish. That spectrum of beliefs was present within Oyneg Shabes, but there was no room for ideological quarrels. Ringelblum made sure his "brotherhood" focused on the task at hand: writing, gathering, copying and burying documents. Apart from the three survivors, hardly any of the society Portuguese Learning Software members had graves, and many left little more than a name. Part of Kassow's magnificent achievement is to help us "hear" their silenced voices by laying out the cultural context that shaped their values.