Diary of another young girl
The diary of a teenage Jewish girl written in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943 has been authenticated and published in Hebrew and English by Israel’s Holocaust museum as Rutka’s Notebook, The Guardian reports.
Rutka Laskier was 14, the same age as Anne Frank, when both were writing their diaries. Rutka wrote her 60-page diary over a four-month period before she and her family were taken from their home in the Bedzin ghetto to Auschwitz. Her father was the only member of the family to survive, and he later moved to Israel. Rutka hid the diary in the basement of her family’s home, and it was found after the war by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Christian whose family owned the house, and who had met Rutka during the war.
Sapinska kept it secret for more than 60 years until one of her nephews last year persuaded her to present it to the Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum. “She wanted me to save the diary,” Ms Sapinska said. “She said ‘I don’t know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live, so everyone will know what happened to Jews’.”
The Guardian story has a few excerpts from the diary, including this one:
14, February 20 1943 ”I have a feeling I am writing for the last time. There is an Aktion [a Nazi arrest operation] in town. I’m not allowed to go out and I’m going crazy, imprisoned in my own house. For a few days, something’s in the air. The town is breathlessly waiting in anticipation, and this anticipation is the worst of all. I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell. I try to escape these thoughts, of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it’s over, you only die once. Despite these atrocities I want to live, and wait for the following day. That means waiting for Auschwitz or labour camp.”
