Samuel D. Kassow, Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, will discuss his new book, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, on Jan. 22 at 7 p.m. at the Consulate General of Poland in New York City.

The speech is sponsored by the American Society for Jewish Heritage in Poland and the Polish Consulate. Kassow is the world’s leading authority on Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian who, in 1940, established a clandestine organization named Oyneg Shabes in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve the events for posterity.

Although Oyneg Shabes was decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work until the spring of 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelbaum and his family perished in March 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. The buried caches were discovered in 1946 and 1950.

Who Will Write Our History tells the gripping story of Ringelbaum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

Kassow is also the author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884-1917, and co-editor of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia.