On Katarzyna Person, and the archive that outlived its keepers.

Katarzyna Person is Deputy Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and Head of the Scientific Department at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she directs the full-edition publication of the Ringelblum Archive. Her scholarship works across the history of Polish Jews during the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Oneg Shabbat Archive, and the marginalized voices of victims.

She is the author or co-author of five volumes of the ŻIH edition of the Ringelblum Archive; her book Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (Cornell University Press / USHMM, 2021) reads the ordinary complicity and moral catastrophe of the Ghetto through its most compromised institution. The Dan David Prize honored Person for her work on Holocaust archives and the recovery of marginalized and silenced voices, for scholarship that returns the Warsaw Ghetto's own record to the room where its history is being told.

The Ringelblum Archive was a time capsule. People in the most horrifying conditions, without enough to eat, decided that documenting what was happening around them mattered more than what might have been spent on themselves. Ringelblum's collectors included the people historians usually miss on the first pass, ordinary people, women, children, and those who worked under conditions we now find it difficult even to picture. He gathered testimony, diaries, sociological surveys, photographs, drawings, and buried them in milk cans and metal boxes so that the record would survive its authors.

The film's task was to join Person's documentation and give the story a voice. We wanted to use the actual objects, the documents recovered from the archive itself, as the visual material of the film, and to give Emanuel Ringelblum a place to be seen. His name is not widely known, even in Israel in 2026, and outside of scholarly work most people have not heard the story. The archive, and the people who risked their lives to bury it, deserve to be honored in the room where the film does its work. To hold, even for two and a half minutes, the argument the archive itself was written to make.

So the film is built from that material. Postcards with their stamps, identity and ration cards, a poster for a children’s performance, handwritten testimony and a German proclamation sit beside the ghetto’s own photographs, redrawn, while the narration names whose voices the archive gathered: “women, children, refugees, those dying of hunger, and those considered to be collaborators.” Emanuel Ringelblum himself appears in the film twice: in the ghetto, crouching beside a boy to give him a sweet, and at the very end, in his portrait, as the narration quotes him, “We are writing history, however complex it may be.”

Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.