Rutka's Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust

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Before Petr was deported to the camp, he kept a diary about his life. It was first published by his sister Eva as Diary of My Brother. The English translation was published in 2007 as “ The Diary of Petr Ginz 1941–1942.” Miriam Wattenberg (Mary Berg) The Polish Anne Frank—did I miss something? Then I remembered Rutka Laskier’s diary. Apparently she was the Polish Anne Frank, a detail that had completely escaped me. The Germans came to Norway in 1940. Two years later, Ruth was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. On arrival she was led straight to the gas chambers.

Rutka’s diary shows that she was trying to maintain a normal life, even in her drastically restricted circumstances. She still made plans to meet with her friends. She indulged in gossip and daydreams. She even tried to imagine that she still had a future and pretended to plan for it with her closest companions. Unfortunately, reality was becoming harder to deny. She wanted to be angry with her friends who didn’t show up for an appointment, as if they were simply irresponsible. She knew, however, that it was also possible that they had been taken away or killed. After all, mass murder had already begun and Auschwitz was only a few kilometers away. How could she possibly respond to such a situation? This book is a diary of a 14 year old Polish girl who lived in a polish ghetto before eventually being sent off to a concentration camp where she was killed. Rutka kept the notebook and recorded many of her thoughts and some of the details of what was happening before the ghetto was cleared out. Rutka hide the notebook and told her non Jewish friend of its location, which is how the notebook survived after her death. Bella Gutterman, editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Publications, says Rutka's diary offers much more than a history book can offer. Philip’s family concealed his letters in their Amsterdam house, where they were discovered more than 50 years later when the house was being demolished. 86 letters, including postcards and a telegram were found hidden in the ceiling of the third floor bathroom. The hidden letters eventually came into the possession of Philip’s cousin, in 1999, who published them as a book called Hidden Letters. Rywka Lipszyc Rutka's Notebook is one of the many diaries & journals written during a dark period in history, the Holocaust, and rediscovered many years later thanks to a former friend coming forth with the notebook. Her book covers the 4 month period she spent in the ghettos of Bedzin before her deportation to Auschwitz, which she did not survive. But her writing lends another voice that has awoken from the genocide, cementing her legacy in both literature and Jewish culture. Rutka has been dubbed as the "Polish Anne Frank", which I can see the similarities when reading her journal. She was one of the millions of children who had to learn to grow up fast as her freedoms were stripped and forced into captivity by the Nazis. She details both her budding womanhood: her physical and emotional changes, confusion on love; while noting her fears and hatred going on outside. She mentions the violence and sadism the Nazis acted on the civilians, her poor working conditions in the shops, her questioning of God's existence during the crisis and her yearn to be freed from the terror.During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews, among them one-and-a-half million children, were killed. In this diary excerpt from Feb. 20, 1943, as German soldiers conducted a raid, or aktion, in her town, it seems that Rutka had some idea of her fate: Last November I received a letter from a publisher, asking if I was interested in writing a preface to Rutka Laskier’s diary. I had no clue who exactly Rutka Laskier was, but since I knew the translator of the diary personally, I didn’t want to say no right away. She knew how to describe things. She was very gifted in writing, and the story about her everyday life, such banal things get a special impact when you know she was living under the German rule with the danger. Every day people were missing," Gutterman says. "This is something. You feel like she was talking to you." Hailed in the international press as the ”Polish Anne Frank,” RUTKA’S NOTEBOOK was unveiled in Jerusalem in spring 2007. The diary chronicles the horrors Rutka witnesses in Bedzin, juxtaposed and intertwined with the private, everyday thoughts and dreams of a young girl growing up – anywhere.

Just a few months later, Rutka was dead and, it seemed, her diary lost. But in 2006, a Polish friend who had saved the notebook finally came forward, exposing a riveting historical document. Rutka couldn’t have known that her emotional state was very normal for someone who had experienced such traumatic events, but we can recognize that this was just one more of the many facets of the crime of the Holocaust. She wanted me to save the diary," Ms Sapinska told the Associated Press. "She said 'I don't know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live on, so that everyone will know what happened to the Jews'." In this excerpt dated Feb. 5, 1943, Rutka describes how all of the Jews in her town were being forced to move to a ghetto. Also, Jews were not allowed to leave their homes without a yellow star sewn to their clothing: Epstein, Catherine (2010). Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford University Press. p.103. ISBN 978-0-19-954641-1.

Walking in the footsteps of Jewish Będzin means constantly taking steps between what may or must be imagined and what has been saved, or restored, or recreated.

As the Nazis tightened their grip on Poland, Rutka asked her non-Jewish neighbor, Stanislava Shapinska, where she should hide the diary if she had to leave home suddenly. They agreed she should leave it hidden beneath some stairs in Rutka's house. The last entry is dated April 24 1943, at which point she hid the notebook in the basement of the house her family were living in, a building confiscated by the Nazis to be part of the Bedzin ghetto. In August that year, the teenager and her family were transported to Auschwitz and it is thought she was killed immediately. It must have been difficult for Rutka to come to grips with the fact that her childhood was over and that she was in a struggle for her life. She realized that precarious nature of her situation when she wrote, “The town is already empty. Almost everyone lives in Kamionka. We will probably move there this week.” A few days later, her fears came true. Her family was moved into the closed ghetto. She gave her diary to a Christian friend for safe-keeping. A few months later, she was deported to Auschwitz to her death. Rutka’s reflections from April 24th turned out to be the last of her words to be preserved. I also greatly appreciated the extra content within the book. There are photographs, footnotes to help, and there are pieces by Rutka's half-sister, Zahava Laskier. This is a diary from an approximate four month period from a teenage girl. The notebook she was writing in was hidden beneath her stairs when her and her family was sent from the ghetto where they were living to a Nazi camp. It's believed that Rutka and her entire family, with the exception of her father, died in that camp soon after.

Rutka, en cambio, sabe bien cuál es su destino, sabe bien dónde acabará. Por ello, no merece la pena malgastar el tiempo escribiendo sobre lo que desea hacer cuando el conflicto cese. Es este contexto en el que las palabras de Rutka se amontonan. Al contrario que Frank, entra y sale constantemente de su domicilio; discute con sus padres por su insistencia y control constantes; también viaja para ver a los amigos; cree en el amor, aunque no sabe con certeza qué se siente al estar enamorada. En definitiva: se entrega de lleno al poco tiempo que le queda de vida. —I wanted to inform the publisher that I didn’t feel like writing a preface to this notebook, but while putting away the manuscript that was sent to me, my eye fell on this sentence: íI’ll give you a detailed description of my body. Well, I’m tall, thin, with pretty nice legs, very thin at the waist. I’ve got elongated hands but ugly, or more accurately, uncared-for fingernails.ë Rutka Laskier kept a diary for a little more than three months at the beginning of 1943. At the time, she was 14 years old. Her hometown, Bedzin, had already been occupied by the Germans for over three years when she began her writing. Over the course of that time, the Jews of Bedzin had been subjected to many harsh regulations. They had been required to move into restricted housing and much of their property was confiscated. They were forced to wear the “Jewish star” and were subjected to forced labor. All of these depredations were carried out under the constant threat of violence and murder. Lia Roshkovsky, of the education department of Yad Vashem, says a personal diary like this one helps students focus on individual lives among the many who died in the Holocaust. Rutka's father was the only member of the family who survived the Holocaust. Following World War II, he emigrated to Israel, where he remarried and had another daughter, Zahava Scherz. He died in 1986. [10] According to Zahava Scherz, interviewed in the BBC documentary The Secret Diary of the Holocaust (broadcast in January 2009), [11] he never told Scherz about Rutka until she discovered a photo album when she herself was 14, which contained a picture of Rutka with her younger brother. Scherz asked her father who they were, and he answered her truthfully, but never spoke of it again. She went on to explain that she only learned of the existence of Rutka's diary in 2006, and she expressed how much it has meant to her to be able to get to know her half-sister through Rutka’s words. [12] Diary [ edit ]