06 June 2007
A Polish woman who for 60 years had been holding onto the diary of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis in 1943 has presented the journal to Israel's Holocaust memorial institution, Yad Vashem. Rutka Laskier, who was 14 in 1943, lived in the Jewish ghetto of Bedzin, Poland. The girl hid her diary under the floorboards of her house before her family was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. It was later found by Stanislawa Sapinska, who lived in the house before the German occupation and had befriended Rutka. "She wanted the journal to survive, even if she didn't, so the world would see how the Jews suffered," said Sapinska, 82, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said that Laskier was probably killed in Auschwitz in August 1943.
Throughout the 60-page manuscript Rutka talks about love, death and everyday life in the ghetto. Yad Vashem has collected hundreds of diaries and poems written by Jews during the Holocaust, but Laskier's diary stood out from the others, including the well-known ‘Diary of Anne Frank’, because of the story of its discovery, Bella Gutterman, chief editor of Yad Vashem Publishing, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying. "The diary itself is wonderful, about personal life, loves and envies in the shadow of the Holocaust. But it was found by her friend and we only now read it 60 years later," Gutterman told Reuters.
