‘Two and a Half Years of War.’ Unfinished Research Project in Warsaw Ghetto
Abstract
In 1940, a Warsaw historian and activist Emanuel Ringelblum established Underground Ghetto Archive that collected materials and testimonies concerning the life of Jews in Warsaw and other Polish cities under German occupation. Apart from the collecting focused on the late 1941 and early 1942, archivists were conducting research project ‘Two and half years of the war,’ the aim of which was to prepare a monograph devoted to the various aspects of Jewish life during the war. Among detailed problems to be investigated, many dealt with social life during the war. The project went beyond borders of historiography; its main goal was the analysis of current reality and it was rooted in the intellectual traditions of interwar Jewish and Polish sociology. The aim of this paper is to present ‘Two and a half years’ project from the sociological perspective; to focus on its innovative methodology and to stress that the project was developed in response to the extreme, war-time situation, simultaneously with events, requiring researchers to be flexible and to go beyond their ordinary ways of thinking.