Original Diary of Rutka Laskier in English now available from Yad Vashem Publications

"I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this hell began. The days pass by quickly; each day looks just like the previous one. Every day it's the same frozen and oppressive boredom. There is great excitement in town. A lot of people are about to leave for 'the land of our forefathers,' to Palestine..." (Jan 19, 1943)

"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter. Next month there should already be a ghetto, a real one, surrounded by walls. In the summer it will be unbearable. To sit in a gray locked cage, without being able to see fields or flowers, and it reminded me that one day I would be able to go to Malachowska Street without taking the risk of being deported. Being able to go to the cinema in the evening. I'm already so "flooded" with the atrocities of the war that even the worst reports have no effect on me..."(Feb. 5, 1943)

“I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time. There is an Aktion in town. I’m not allowed to go out and I’m going crazy, imprisoned in my own house… For a few days, something’s in the air… The town is breathlessly waiting in anticipation, and this anticipation is the worst of all. 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…” (20 February 1943).
Rutka Laskier, a young girl from Bedzin, Poland, kept a diary for a few brief months in 1943. The outside world slowly closed down on her, but these few sheets of paper - some 60 handwritten pages in a notebook – reflect both the horrors of the Holocaust and the entire universe of an adolescent Jewish girl in the shadow of death.
Rutka shared the diary with her friend Stanislawa Sapinska. The two met after Rutka’s family moved into a home owned by Sapinska’s family that had been confiscated by the Nazis so that it could be included in the ghetto.The two became friendly and when Rutka told her that she felt she would not survive, Stanislawa offered to hide the diary in the basement under one of the floorboards. At the end of the war, Stanislawa returned to the house and found the hidden diary. She kept the diary in her home library for more than 60 years and recently decided to make it available to the public.
The last entry is from 24 April 1943. In August, Rutka and her family were deported to Auschwitz. She is believed to have been murdered upon arrival. Rutka’s father, Yaakov, was the family’s only survivor. He moved to Israel where he began a new family, a family who has now been given the rare opportunity to get to know a sister and an aunt who was murdered long before they were born.
Rutka’s Notebook, published by Yad Vashem, includes a foreword by Rutka’s sister, Dr. Zahava Scherz, a historical introduction by Dr. Bella Gutterman, and the diary itself, written between January and April 1943.
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