Rutka's Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust

Product Information

The manuscript, as edited by Stanisław Bubin, was published in the Polish language by a Polish publisher in early 2006. In June 2007, Yad Vashem Publications published English and Hebrew translations of the diary, entitled Rutka's Notebook: January–April 1943. [12] Printings [ edit ] Most of the diary is similar to any teenage girls. Rutka writes about her friends, difficulties with her parents, and her crush on a boy named Janek. One moment she loves him; the next she hates him. These entries could have been taken straight from my own journal. Although from a historical perspective I longed for more information about the occupation, the personal details Rutka includes make the diary heartbreaking. She could be any other young girl—except that her life is stolen from her. Shortly after arriving in the US in 1944, her diary was published in American newspapers in serialized form, making it one of the earliest accounts of the Holocaust. Her diary was published as a book the following year. Tanya Savicheva The rope around is getting tighter and tighter, Rutka wrote in 1943, shortly before her deportation. ”I’m turning into an animal waiting to die.”

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.The diary was found after the war by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Christian whose family owned the house lived in by the Laskiers, and who had met Rutka several times during the war.

Discovery of Laskier's diary[edit] In 1943, while writing the diary, Laskier shared it with Stanisława Sapińska (21 years old, at that time), whom she had befriended after Laskier's family moved into a home owned by Sapińska's Roman Catholic family, which had been confiscated by the Nazis so that it could be included in the ghetto. Petr Ginz was born in 1928 in Prague. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic, which made him a “Mischlinge”—children of a “mixed marriage”. According to the anti-Jewish laws of the Third Reich, such children were to be deported to a concentration camp at the age of 14. 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. Laskier, Rutka (2007). Rutka's Notebook: January–April 1943. Foreword by Dr Zahava Sherz; historical introduction by Dr Bella Gutterman. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem Publications. [12] Rutka Laskier was born Rut Laskier on 12 June 1929 in Kraków, Poland, the eldest of two children. Her mother was a housewife, whilst her father Jakub Laskier, worked as a bank officer.

Credits

This book was another powerful testimony to the Holocaust, though I feel all testimonies of this time period are significant and powerful. 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. En las notas de Ana Frank, se puede observar un aislamiento de su persona considerable; sus palabras generan un sentimiento esperanzador que te lleva a continuar con la lectura para ver si la situación que viven tanto ella como su familia se revierte. Tiempo y espacio son uno solo y, en su transcurso, el único "leitmotiv" de la obra es seguir creyendo en la vida. According to her diary, she used to believe in God, but became a atheist when the Nazis began persecuting the Jews in Poland.

Rutka Laskier’s diary covered a brief three month period of her life, from late January through April 1943. She wrote her last entry on April 24th. She knew her family could be sent to the closed Kamionka ghetto at any time, but it doesn’t seem as though she knew that on this day she would end her diary. She did not write a final message or try to sum up her feeling about the tragedy of the Holocaust that was closing in on her. Philip was initially sent to work at a labor camp located just north of Hardenberg. From there he wrote to friends and his family almost daily, giving an eyewitness account of life in the camp. Philip wrote his last letter on 14 September 1942, and then escaped from the camp. He returned to Amsterdam where he remained in hiding for some time moving from one location to another. Philip was about to escape to Switzerland when he was caught and arrested at the railway station trying to board a train.The few passages about the Nazi occupation are all the more disturbing in contrast with Rutka’s “normal” life. She writes, “Something has broken inside me. When I pass by a German, everything shrinks in me.” In another entry she derides herself for calling on God. “If God existed,” she writes, “He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with butts of guns.” The diary was found after the war by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Christian whose family owned the house, and who had met Rutka during the war. Ms Sapinska took the diary and kept it secret for more than 60 years until one of her nephews last year persuaded her to present it to 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'." 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." 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 ] The diary, which has been authenticated by Holocaust scholars and survivors, has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank, the best known Holocaust-era diary. Coincidentally, Rutka Laskier was born the same day as Anne Frank, [3] and, in both cases, of their entire families, only their fathers survived the war. [17] Publication of the diary [ edit ]

Rutka Laskier was born in Kraków [1] to Dwojra Hampel, daughter of Abram Chil Hampel, and Jakub Laskier, who worked as a bank officer. [2] [3] Her family was well off. Her grandfather served as co-owner of Laskier-Kleinberg & Co, a milling company that owned and operated a grist mill. [4] I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time,” Rutka wrote on February 20, 1943, as Nazi soldiers began gathering Jews outside her home for deportation. ”I wish it would end already! This torment, this is hell. I try to escape from 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…but I can’t, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day.” 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. Later she wrote: "The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter. I'm turning into an animal waiting to die." Her final entry is brief: "I'm very bored. The entire day I'm walking around the room. I have nothing to do."

Broadcasts

Rywka Lipszyc, a Polish-Jewish teenage girl, started writing her diary while living in the Łódź Ghetto. She was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in August 1944, along with her sisters and cousins. She survived the camp. She also survived a death march to Bergen-Belsen, and lived to see her liberation there in April 1945. But too ill to be evacuated, she was transferred to a hospital in Niendorf, Germany, where she breathed her last. She was 16 years old.