What about his wife and son, Ringelblum asked

Over the course of the disaster, the purpose of the project -- and Ringelblum's understanding Rosetta Stone of his mission as a historian -- changed. In the early stage of occupation, before anyone suspected the Nazis would carry out mass murder, the aim was to write for future generations of Polish Jewry. Later, as the dimensions of the Final Solution became known, their testimony would be both evidence of the crime and a chronicle of how ghetto inhabitants tried to hang on to some morality in the middle of hell.But Ringelblum never succumbed to what he defined as the ultimate despair: the failure to record what one saw. He wrote while he was starving, he wrote in a crowded underground bunker. He wrote Rosetta Stone Software until the end, literally. In March 1944, after the whereabouts of his bunker outside the ghetto walls were betrayed, the Germans took all 38 Jews hiding there as well as the two Poles who tended to them to Warsaw's Pawiak Prison to be shot. Writer Yekhiel Hirschaut let him know that other Jewish prisoners were intent on trying to save him. What about his wife and son, Ringelblum asked? No, that was not possible. Ringelblum declined the offer.Some of the Oyneg Shabes writers included their own last testaments in the archive. Nineteen-year-old David Graber wrote, "What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground." Journalist Gustawa Jarecka, last seen with her two small children on Jan. 18, 1943, being marched toward the death trains, left this behind: "We have nooses fastened around our necks. When the pressure abates Rosetta Stone Portuguese for a moment we utter a cry. Its importance should not be underestimated. Many a time in history did such cries resound, for a long time they resounded in vain, and only much later did they produce an echo."Steinman, author of "The Souvenir," is at work on "The Crooked Mirror: A Conversation With Poland."