In the fall of 1940, the German authorities of occupied Poland created a sealed district for the Jewish population in the capital of the so-called General Government.1 The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe; by April 1941, some 450,000 Jews were forced to live behind its walls. As a result of the Grosse Aktion, a ghetto-clearing operation carried out from July 22 to September 21, 1942, about 75 percent of the ghetto's inhabitants were deported and murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.On April 19, 1943—eighty years ago now—an uprising broke out in the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the most important literary testimonies to the uprising is Hanna Krall's Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem [Shielding the flame].2 There are three main thematic threads in this book, written in the form of an extended interview with Marek Edelman, the deputy commander of the uprising. The first is Edelman's story about deportations which the Nazis called “the resettlement of the population to the East” in an effort to disguise its true nature. Jewish militants at the time displayed posters with the warning: “Resettlement is death.” The assembly point for the deportations was the Umschlagplatz, located in the center of prewar Warsaw. The second thread of Krall's book is the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and a group of insurgents from the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), headed by Mordechai Anielewicz. The uprising lasted twenty days and ended in defeat. On May 16, 1943, the German troops set the ghetto on fire and demolished the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street. This action was personally led by SS General Jürgen Stroop. A few days earlier, the insurgents, including their commander, Anielewicz, had been surrounded in a bunker at 18 Miła Street. Most of them committed suicide there. Only a few managed to get out of the bunker and cross to the so-called Aryan side. The third thread, and the leitmotif of Krall's book, focuses on the traumatic memories of Dr. Edelman who became a well-known cardiologist after the war.The most complete record of the experience of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is the monumental Emanuel Ringelblum Archive. The original documents were placed in metal containers and buried in the ghetto. Some of the containers were recovered after the war and the materials they held were deposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. In 1999, UNESCO placed the archive in the Memory of the World Program. Before World War II, Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944), a Polish-Jewish historian and activist, was a member of the Historical Section and the Commission for the History of Jews in Poland, a Warsaw-based agency of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilnius (YIVO). During the war, he launched the clandestine Oneg Shabbat (Oyneg Shabes) Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto to collect documentation about the experience of the Polish Jews under Nazi occupation. As Jacek Leociak notes: The materials collected in the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto are an invaluable historical source, but they are also a testimony to the experience of the Holocaust, understood in moral and existential terms. They bear witness to an experience that is radically new, in the face of which previous forms of expression fail and language seems helpless.3In late 2021 and early 2022, archaeological work began on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto (now the Muranów district), at the location of the insurgents’ bunker at 18 Miła Street. This project is coordinated by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, Christopher Newport University and Aleksander Gieysztor Academy in Pułtusk, the Historic Preservation Office of the Mazowsze Region (represented by Professor Jakub Lewicki), and a rabbinical commission appointed by Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland. Using such modern methods as geo-radar surveys, the project is expected to uncover one of the major sites of Holocaust memory in Europe.4The articles collected in this special issue of The Polish Review—under the title Lessons from the Archive: Rereading Accounts from and about the Warsaw Ghetto—present little-known materials and engage an interdisciplinary framework of humanistic understanding, founded on the belief in the irreducible dignity of men and women and in the efficacy and worth of human freedom and hence also of human responsibility (to use Maria Janion's terminology). The voices of scholars of life-writing (Anita Jarczok) and Hebrew literature (Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska) join those of a literary historian (Sławomir Buryła), a Miłosz scholar (Marek Bernacki), and a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre and drama (Halina Filipowicz).The special issue opens with Anita Jarczok's article on Rachela Auerbach's ghetto diary which she kept at Ringelblum's request. Written mainly in Polish and covering the period from August 1941 to July 1942, Auerbach's journal is little known in the United States, as it has not been translated into English in its entirety. Jarczok analyzes Auerbach's distinct, original literary style and contextualizes her journal by considering other autobiographical accounts written in the Warsaw Ghetto, such as the diaries of Chaim Aron Kaplan and Abraham Levin.The sermons of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro from Piaseczno, addressed to the ghettoized Jewish community in Warsaw, are the subject of Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska's article. To understand the wartime writings of the Piaseczno rabbi, who was killed by the Germans in the Trawniki labor camp in April 1943, she approaches his sermons as a special kind of personal document. Focusing on how Rabbi Shapiro sought answers to the difficult questions troubling his fellow Jews during the dark days of the Holocaust, she analyzes his use of tropes that are characteristic of traditional biblical rabbinic exegesis, such as the motifs of the exodus from Egypt and Moses’ leadership.Sławomir Buryła, co-editor of a major publication, Literatura polska wobec Zagłady (1939–1968) [Polish literature on the Holocaust],5 provides an overview of the most important works of Polish poetry, prose fiction, and drama on the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto, written between the mid-1940s and 2000. Along the way, he identifies recurrent motifs in this rich body of literature. The American reader deserves an explanation of the origins of the metaphorical term “the Columbus generation,” used by Buryła. The term draws on the title of Roman Bratny's famous and widely read 1957 novel, Kolumbowie, rocznik 20 [The Columbus generation of 1920], that describes the fate of the first generation of men and women born and raised in free Poland after the restoration of independence in 1918. The term is well-established in Polish literary discourse.6In my article, I discuss five little-known texts by Czesław Milosz from 1946–1968. They were published only in 2020, in a volume entitled Z archiwum. Wybór publicystyki z lat 1945–2004 [From the archive: Selected journalistic writings, 1945–2004]. The article analyzes Miłosz's statements concerning the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. My aim is to present Miłosz not only as an eyewitness to the Holocaust and a firm opponent of antisemitism but also as a moral witness. I argue that his testimonies in the form of poems, essays, and journalism create a community of memory, while also expressing his empathy and solidarity with the victims of genocidal violence.In the closing article, Halina Filipowicz develops a new interpretation of Miłosz's only play, Prolog [Prologue], written in occupied Warsaw in late 1942. She structures her argument around Miłosz's metaphor of ruins. Her analysis of Miłosz's dramaturgical, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies enables her to demonstrate that in this “compact, at times enigmatic play, the Holocaust seems to be nowhere, while in fact it is everywhere.” In reclaiming Prologue for Holocaust literary studies, she argues that the play is an essential text in the history of Holocaust memory and an early contribution to debates about the conundrum of aesthetic pleasure in literary representations of what happened to the Jews during World War II.The articles gathered in this special issue of The Polish Review offer, each in its own way, existential, ethical, and religious reflections on the trauma, memory, and representation of the Holocaust. Methodologically, this cluster of articles draws on the cultural theory of literature, and especially Ryszard Nycz's idea of the poetics of experience.7As the editor of the special issue, I would like to share a brief reflection of a personal nature. In 1987, when I was twenty-two years old and a third-year student of Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, I read with great interest as well as apprehension an essay by my mentor, Professor Jan Błoński—“Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” [The poor Poles look at the ghetto], first published in Tygodnik Powszechny on 11 January 1987. For me, his essay became an ethical imperative to face painful truths about the past. The fact that I write about these issues here and in my contribution to the special issue is no accident. I remember Professor Błoński's words well: We must stop haggling, trying to defend and justify ourselves. [. . .] We must say first of all—Yes, we are guilty. We did take Jews into our home, but we made them live in the cellar. [. . .] [I]f only we had behaved more humanely in the past, had been wiser, more generous, then genocide would perhaps have been “less imaginable,” would probably have been considerably more difficult to carry out, and almost certainly would have met with much greater resistance than it did. To put it differently, it would not have met with the indifference and moral turpitude of the society in whose full view it took place.8I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Irena Grudzińska-Gross, the author of the inspiring book Czesław Miłosz i długi cień wojny [Czesław Miłosz and the long shadow of war, 2020], and the anonymous readers of the articles for their very helpful comments and suggestions.