Letters and milk jug: Warsaw Ghetto archive goes on display

WARSAW, Poland – Letters and other witness accounts of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto — the records of a community destroyed in the Holocaust — have gone on display for the first time.

The exhibition, "What we were unable to shout out to the world," opened at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw this week. It includes letters, journals, official records and other documents in Polish and Yiddish as well as an old metal jug used to hide the documents.

Historian Emanuel Ringelblum and dozens of helpers collected the records to preserve a record for posterity of Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the German occupation of Poland during World War II.

They hid their trove in 10 metal cases and two metal milk cans, evidence that was recovered after the war.