Retrieved after World War II from metal boxes and milk cans buried beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Oyneg Shabes Ringelblum Archive was clandestinely compiled between 1940 and 1942 under the leadership of historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Members of the secret Oyneg Shabes organization gathered thousands of testimonies from natives of Warsaw and refugees from hundreds of other localities, creating a documentary record of the wartime fate of Polish Jewry. Now housed in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the archive comprises some 35,000 pages, including documents, materials from the underground press, photographs, memoirs, belles lettres, and much more. This first comprehensive description of its contents is meticulously indexed to facilitate location of documents and information. By aiding access to this unique archival treasure, the catalog and guide advance study of the daily lives, struggles, and sufferings of Polish Jews at a crucial time and place in the history of the Holocaust."

In his comprehensive examination of the Lodz Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explain the tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in 1939. Lodz had been home to nearly a quarter million Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877 living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed masses of enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident of Lodz, reconstructs the organization of the ghetto and discusses its provisioning; forced labor; diseases and mortality; crime and deportations; living conditions; political, social, and cultural life; and resistance. Included are translations of the 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume."