Rutka's Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust

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News of the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and the brutal killings of Jews, filtered through to her. Brazil, Rocco; Czech Republic: Academia; France: Laffont; Germany, Aufbau Verlag; Greece, Patakis; Holland, De Geus; Hungary: Jaffa; Italy, RCS Libri; Japan: PHP Institute; Poland, Polskapresse; Portugal: Sextante Editora; Spain, Suma; USA, Time Books From to time to time, a Dutch publisher will ask me to write a preface or an afterword to a book he plans to publish. I have written prefaces for authors as different as Machiavelli, Stendhal and Boris Vian. Epstein, Catherine (2010). Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford University Press. p.103. ISBN 978-0-19-954641-1.

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: Heyman's diary was published first in Hungarian. It was translated into Hebrew in 1964, then into English in 1974. Petr Ginz 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. Rutka's diary is a lot shorter than Anne's, but it is by no means inferior to hers. Like Anne's, Rutka's serves as insight to the generations after of the horror going on during WWII. I knew there was no happy ending, as I watched the documentary in the last week of 2022, but it still tugged on my heartstrings.

The Secret Diary Of The Holocaust (WW2 Documentary) | History Documentary". Reel Truth History . Retrieved 26 January 2022. Her diary was recovered by her sister Nina, who had survived, unknown to Tanya and her family, when she returned to Leningrad after the war ended. Her short diary was presented as evidence of Nazi atrocities during the Nuremberg Trials. Tanya’s diary is now displayed at the Museum of Leningrad History. Hélène Berr When the Przemyśl ghetto was established in July 1942, Renia and her sister were forced to move there along with her grandparents. After a few weeks, Renia’s boyfriend, Zygmunt Schwarzer, who had a work pass, smuggled the sisters out of the ghetto and hid them and his own parents in the attic of his uncle's house. Their hiding place was eventually exposed by an informer, and Renia along with Zygmunt’s parents were executed in the street. 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.”

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 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. People have such old-fashioned ideas about friendship between adolescent boys and girls. They are incapable of grasping the new world.” 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?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.”