The scholarly legacy of Ruta Sakowska

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ruta Sakowska spent her entire professional career at the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) in Warsaw, and her scholarly legacy is inextricably linked to Oyneg Shabes, the clandestine documentation project organized by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto that became the focus of her work. Sakowska belonged to a generation of Jewish youth that came of age as second-class citizens in a newly independent Poland; most of her cohort was murdered during the Holocaust. Although she survived the war in the Soviet Union, she lost many years performing relatively menial jobs and did not receive her doctorate in history until she was in her fifties. Her fraught relationships with her colleagues at ŻIH were another significant obstacle to her professional advancement. Notwithstanding, she made several major scholarly contributions, both in her analysis of the Ringelblum Archive and in her preparations for its publication.