Time passed and I forgot about Rutka Laskier. A few days ago, I found a message in my mailbox with the question: íDid you have time to read the diary of the Polish Anne Frank?ë Writing on February 5 1943, she said: "I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy. 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. Hélène Berr started writing at the age of 21. She wrote about her everyday life in Paris, her studies, her friends, and her growing affection for one young man. Gradually, she began to write about the Nazi occupation and the growing restrictions imposed by the occupiers. Because the Final Solution was never made explicit to the public, Berr was initially unaware of the gas chambers and the mass killings that were taking place. She wondered naively why women and especially children were included in the deportations to the camps.

And I really did enjoy the diary, as much as you can enjoy something that breaks your heart. It doesn't matter how many times I read about it, I still cannot wrap my brain around the Holocaust. Rutka's story is, in some senses, harder to read than Anne's. While Anne had to stay hidden from the Nazi's, Rutka had to interact with them first hand, and her diary tells of some incredibly disturbing incidents as her family is forced to move to a ghetto and go through "selections" where you don't know if you will end up going home or being sent to a concentration camp. For nearly every day during her two-year-stay in Warsaw Ghetto, Miriam observed long queues of people heading down the street to the trains that would take them to Treblinka. She later wrote: “We, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other. Had we the right to save ourselves? Here everything smells of sun and flowers and there—there is only blood, the blood of my own people.” 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.[8] The two girls were approximately the same age when they wrote their respective diaries (Laskier at age 14 and Frank between the ages of 13 and 15). But Rutka would write again. Her last entry was dated April 24, 1943. ”I’m very bored,” she wrote. “The entire day I’m walking around the room. I have nothing to do.”

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.

Tanya didn’t survive the siege. Although she was evacuated out of the city along with about 150 other children, she was already too ill and weak from malnutrition. She died of intestinal tuberculosis in July 1944 at age 14. 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. She was living in a new world, but it was the world of Nazi destruction. Her family had already been dislocated once and was threatened with imminent relocation again to an enclosed ghetto. Above that loomed the ever-present threat of Auschwitz. Occasionally, Rutka wrote directly about the occupation and of her fear of the Germans, but mostly she confined her attention to personal matters. Perhaps she was trying to make sense of her relationships at a time when they could change or disappear in a moment. Maybe she was simply focusing on things that were at least somewhat under her control. In either case, the subtext of her diary reveals that she was aware of her broader circumstances and their effects on her life.

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. Even though Rutka was only fourteen years old, she already had a job. She had been assigned to work in a factory a few weeks earlier and was still getting used to the job. She was grateful to have work, because Jews with jobs were safer than those without even though no Jewish person was entirely safe. As time wore on, more and more people were being forced into the closed ghetto. From there, Rutka knew many were sent on to the Auschwitz death camp. The people of Rutka’s town knew Auschwitz was a killing center, so avoiding deportation was the main goal to everyone. Still, Rutka missed the life she had before and she recorded her feelings of loss. She wrote, “The summer is already here. It’s difficult for me to sit still in the ‘shop.’ The sun is shining so brightly. Outside the windows apple trees and lilacs are blooming, and you have to sit in this suffocating and stinking room and sew. The hell with it.” Rutka Laskier’s notebook, including an introduction by a family member, contains no more than than one thousand words. The comparison with Anne Frank seemed to me slightly unfair to Anne Frank. Besides the fact that Anne Frank has become a cliché—sometimes an unpleasant cliché: I’m not sure what to think about Anne Frank, the Musical, which will open in Spain in the near future—Anne’s diary is not only powerful from a historical point of view, but also from a literary point of view. Rutka Laskier was fourteen years old during the period when she kept her diary. For the most part, her entries covered a three month period between January 19th and April 24th, 1943. During this time, her family lived in the open ghetto of Bedzin, but would soon be forced to move into a closed ghetto nearby. Rutka’s diary ended at that point. THE INESCAPABLE FINAL SOLUTION On February 6, 1943, Rutka made a startling admission in her diary, one that seemed completely out of character for her. She wrote, “Something has broken within me. When I pass by a German, everything shrinks in me. I don’t know whether it is out of fear or hatred. I would like to torture them, their women and children, who set their doggies on us, to beat and strangle them vigorously, more and more.” After that violent verbal outburst, she changed gears and began to write about her friends as if her previous statement had been like a lone cloud passing over the sun on a clear day. How can we account for such sentiments? Was Rutka simply indulging in a moment of revenge fantasy or was the cruelty of her oppressors rubbing off on her? Later in the same diary entry, we find out rest of the story.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. 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. 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 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. Rutka (Ruth) Laskier (1929–1943) was a Jewish teenager from Poland who is best known for her 1943 diary chronicling three months of her life during the Holocaust.

According to her diary, she used to believe in God, but became a atheist when the Nazis began persecuting the Jews in Poland. Si Dios existiera no permitiría que seres humanos fuesen arrojados vivos a hornos crematorios ni que aplastaran las cabezas de niños pequeños a golpes de culata o que los metieran en sacos para que murieran gaseados. Al final, esto se parece a un cuento de abuela: quienes no lo hayan visto no lo van a creer, pero no es ningún cuento, es la verdad.» 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. I have a feeling that I'm writing for the last time. There is an aktion in my town. I'm not allowed to go out, and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my house ... I wish it would end already, this torment, this 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 need to die once ... but I can't because despite all these atrocities, I want to live and wait for the following day."Epstein, Catherine (2010). Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford University Press. p.103. ISBN 978-0-19-954641-1. As horrifying as these events were, Rutka had not yet felt compelled to take up her pen. Why did she wait so long to begin recording a response to Nazi persecution? Perhaps a clue can be found in her entry for January 30th. Laskier's diary is the focus of the 2009 BBC One documentary The Secret Diary of the Holocaust [18] [19] This article does not have any sources. You can help Wikipedia by finding good sources, and adding them. ( August 2023)