As Roberta Grossman points out, the world has long been captivated by the diary of Anne Frank.

“And rightly so,” says the filmmaker, calling the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles.

“But there are hundreds of diaries in the Oyneg Shabes that have never been translated or read. It’s the largest eyewitness cache to survive the Holocaust, a remarkable trove of incomparable importance, and yet it hasn’t been really widely known outside of academic circles. I think of it as the Dead Sea Scrolls rising from the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

When the Jewish section of Warsaw was segregated by occupying Nazis in 1940, a historian named Emanuel Ringelblum snapped into action, covertly gathering a band of some 60 allies to maintain, at enormous risk, a record of his community’s experiences. This secret group and the archive they built was called Oyneg Shabes.

It was all very nearly lost.

Only three members of the group made it out of the war alive. One of them happened to know where some of the archives were buried. Even then, the ghetto was flattened beyond recognition.

Based on Samuel Kassow’s 2007 book of the same name, Grossman has brought this extraordinary if little-known tale to vivid life in Who Will Write Our History, arriving at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre next Thursday (November 1) as the gala opening film of the 30th annual Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.

“I thought that I was more knowledgeable than the average bear,” says Grossman, whose previous work includes a documentary about Jewish Second World War hero Hannah Senesh.

“I was shocked that I didn’t know this story. But that’s the kind of juice that allows a person to spend seven years making a film. ‘This story has to be known.’ ”

Executive produced by Nancy Spielberg (Steven’s sister), Who Will Write Our History seamlessly mixes archival material and dramatic reconstruction to make its story known, focusing not just on Ringelblum—played in the film by Polish actor Piotr Głowacki and voiced by The Pianist’s Adrien Brody—but on the journalist Rachel Auerbach, who decided to stay in the ghetto at Ringelblum’s request.

Grossman reports that she was particularly haunted by Auerbach’s words.

“When you see something in the flesh, when you see the few photographs that survived the archive, and you see the diaries, and you see the posters that people risked their lives to tear off the walls during the great deportation—there’s a sense that this really happened,” she says. “There’s an authenticity and a gravitas to it, which is one of the reasons the archive is so important.”

Although providing the highest-resolution picture available of the appalling deprivations and suffering that instantly gripped the ghetto, and the terror of the deportations and hopelessness of the uprising, the Oyneg Shabes also records the “blazing anger” of a community sometimes turning on itself (largely, it should be noted, through the diabolical manipulation of its captors).

“Ringelblum wanted the good, bad, and the ugly to all be there,” Grossman says. “It’s a very full portrait of humanity, not ‘good Jews, bad Germans’. So it’s a very, very nuanced and true account.”

This partly explains why the archives remain relatively unknown. In the immediate wake of the Holocaust, Grossman offers, “what was needed were simpler heroes.”

But it also suggests why the Oyneg Shabes is so crucially important right now.

“Even on the most superficial level, the archive was about truth versus propaganda,” Grossman says. “I’m thinking about the murder of the Saudi journalist and, on one hand, the attempts to cover it up and be cynical about it, [and] on the other hand the outrage around the world, and I think that even in that one story, you can see the kind of struggle that the members of the Oyneg Shabes were facing between barbarism and humanity. And it certainly behooves us to take a look at what happens when barbarism is given the upper hand.” 

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival takes place from next Thursday (November 1) to December 2.