Sometimes You Write to Be Remembered, Not to Feel Better

Sometimes You Write to Be Remembered, Not to Feel Better

I have been sitting with this chapter for a while, because the material is heavy. But I think it holds the truest answer to the question.

Not everyone writes to feel better. Some people write so they will not be erased.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, during the Second World War, a historian gathered a secret group around him. Their task was simple and almost unthinkable. Write everything down. What people ate. How children played. Who died, and how. The soup kitchens. The fear.

They called themselves by a quiet code name - Oyneg Shabes, "the joy of the Sabbath" - because they met on Saturdays.

These were ordinary people. Teachers. Writers. Social workers. More than sixty of them. By then, they understood what was coming for them. And they kept writing anyway.

What gets me is what they chose to save. Not only the horror. The ordinary, too. A child's game. A street song. A joke told to get through the day. As if to say: we were not only victims. We were people, with whole lives - and that is worth keeping.

When the deportations to the death camps began, the group did something extraordinary. They sealed their pages into metal boxes and old milk cans. Then they buried them under the city.

They were writing for a reader who would only arrive after they were gone.

Think about that for a moment. They did not expect to survive their own diaries. The writing was not for their own comfort. It was a message thrown forward in time - to strangers, to us.

After the war, almost none of them were alive. But searchers dug under the rubble and found the boxes. The milk cans came up out of the ground, full of pages. The voices had outlived the people.

The man who started it had left a coded note near the end, wondering whether the world would ever read what they had hidden.

It did. We are, in a small way, doing it right now.

A different reason to write

This is where my idea of journaling cracked open a little.

I had been thinking of writing as a tool for the self - a way to calm down, to sort through things, to heal. The ghetto archive is none of that. It is the opposite of private. It is writing as witness. Writing as a refusal to vanish without a trace.

And it is not only history. The same reflex is alive in the Ukraine war diaries. Researchers who studied diaries shared openly online found something striking. People were not only writing to cope. They were writing to record - to leave proof of what was done, in case anyone later tried to say it never happened.

So there seem to be at least two very different reasons a person writes in the dark.

One is turned inward. I need to get this out of my chest. The other is turned outward. Someone has to know this happened.

A lot of wartime writing is quietly doing both at once.

What I keep returning to is this. The inward kind and the outward kind are not really enemies. To write "this happened, and it happened to me" is, in the same breath, a way to survive it and a way to make it count.

Which leaves one honest question I have been avoiding. The witness writing makes sense on its own terms. But the inward kind - the writing-to-heal - does it actually work? Or do we just tell ourselves it does?

There is, at last, hard evidence on that. And it comes from soldiers.

References

• Kassow, S. D. (2007). Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Indiana University Press.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Oneg Shabbat Archive. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-oneg-shabbat-archive
• Polishchuk, O. (2024). Digital war diaries: Witnessing the 2022 Russian War against Ukraine. Memory, Mind & Media, 3, e15. https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.11