“I have a feeling that I’m writing for the last time. There is a (round-up) in town. I’m not allowed to go out and I’m going crazy, imprisoned in my own house,” 14-year-old Rutka Laskier wrote while living in a Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, Poland on February 20, 1943.
We have heard of “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank and “Night” by Elie Wiesel. But after 60 years, another journal recounting the horrors of the Holocaust has emerged. This time, it is the diary of a Jewish girl named Rutka Laskier who was killed by the Nazis in 1943.
Laskier was only a teenager (around the same age as Anne Frank) when she wrote the entries.
For fear of not living through the whole ordeal, she had entrusted the diary to her Polish friend, Stanislawa Sapinska. The latter had offered to hide the written testimony under the basement floorboards.
The entries spanned only from January to April of 1943.
Throughout the 60-page manuscript, handwritten in Polish, Laskier talks about love, death and everyday life in the ghetto. She begins one paragraph recounting the “torment” and “hell” of anticipating her own death, but finishes it with an adolescent rant about a boy she loves.
Although having been hidden in Sapinska’s home for many decades, the diary has been authenticated by experts and Holocaust survivors.