Peretz Opoczynski (1892–1943)

Peretz Opoczynski was a Jewish journalist, writer, and educator in Poland during the interwar years. After Nazi Germany invaded his country in World War II, he was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, where he worked as a mail carrier. In this capacity, he visited many homes and observed first-hand the misery of human life there. Opoczynski also was a member of the Jewish underground in the Ghetto and its secret archive, Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath). He documented the sights he saw and his experiences in many articles for the archive. He was most likely rounded up and deported in January 1943. A collection of his articles was published in Yiddish in 1954. His work was published in English in 2015 in a volume called In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz.