The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture. [...]
“Science is the next frontier that will speak about these sites,” Freund says. Geophysical techniques provide a way to locate and preserve sites that have been built over, as is often the case in Holocaust sites across Europe, even locating them under the canopy of vegetation. While certain sites will be excavated, the process of discovering them does not have to be destructive, as with traditional archaeology. Using non-invasive techniques means archaeologists can hold history in situ. Such non-invasive methods are a matter of being sensitive, too. “These are mass graves of people who are victims,” Freund says. “They have been victimized once and we don’t want to disturb them again by disturbing their burials.” [...]
Geoscientists have another ambitious project planned for this summer—searching for a lost cache of information about Nazi crimes and Jewish heroes in Warsaw. Between 1940 and 1943, an organized underground operation, comprising dozens of contributors, collected thousands of documents: photographs, drawings, writings, journals and tabulations, signed and dated. They put them into 2-feet-high metal milk cans and metal boxes, and buried them in the Warsaw Ghetto. Called the Ringelblum archives after historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the caches were buried in three different locations. In 1946, a survivor found the first of the milk cans. According to Freund, the archives were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The second part was discovered in 1950. The archives were used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. No one has found the third cache.
No comments:
Post a Comment