Rutka Laskier

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rutka Laskier
Born	1929 Free City of Danzig
Died	1943 (aged 14) Auschwitz concentration camp
Occupation	Posthumously published writer

Rutka Laskier (1929–1943) was a Jewish teenager from Poland who is best known for her 1943 diary chronicling four months of her life during the Holocaust.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Diary 2.1 Discovery of Laskier's diary 2.2 Publication of diary 3 References 4 Further reading 5 Printings 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Biography

Laskier was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, a port city in northern Poland), then a predominantly German-speaking autonomous city-state, where her father, Jakub (Yaakov) Laskier, worked as a bank officer. Her family was well off, her grandfather serving as co-owner of Laskier-Kleinberg and Company, a milling company that owned and operated a grist mill. In the early 1930s she moved with her family to the southern Polish city of Będzin, from whence her father's parents had come. While there, in 1943, at the age of 14, Laskier wrote a 60-page diary in the Polish language, chronicling several months of her life under Nazi rule, which was not released to the public until 2005.^photo[1]

Laskier's family was forced to move to Będzin's Jewish ghetto during World War II. Laskier is believed to have died in a gas chamber, along with her mother and brother, upon her arrival with her family in August 1943 at the Auschwitz concentration camp, at the age of 14. ^[1] Her father was the only member of the family who survived the Holocaust. Following World War II, he emigrated to Israel, where he remarried and had another daughter, Zahava Scherz. He died in 1982. He never told Scherz about Rutka, and she only learned about her half-sister's existence after finding an old photo of Rutka in a family photo album (the Polish edition of the diary, as well as Zahava herself on NPR, tells a somewhat different story) has spoken about the closeness she felt to Laskier after reading her diary.

[edit] Diary

From January 19 to April 24, 1943, without her family's knowledge, Laskier kept a diary in an ordinary school notebook, writing in both ink and pencil, making entries sporadically. In it, she discusses atrocities she witnessed committed by the Nazis, and describes daily life in the ghetto as well as innocent teenage love interests. She also writes about the gas chambers at the concentration camps, indicating that the horrors of the camps had filtered back to those still living in the ghettos.

The diary begins on January 19 with the entry "I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this hell began."^[1] One of the final entries says "If only I could say, it's over, you die only once... But I can't, because despite all these atrocities I want to live, and wait for the following day."^[1]

[edit] Discovery of Laskier's diary

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 Sapiński's Roman Catholic family, which had been confiscated by the Nazis so that it could be included in the ghetto.

Laskier gradually came to believe that she would not survive, and, realizing the importance of her diary as a document of what had happened to the Jewish population of Będzin, asked Sapińska to help her with hiding the diary. Sapińska showed Laskier how to hide the diary in her house, under the double flooring in a staircase, between first and second floor.^[2] After the ghetto was evacuated and all its inhabitants sent to the death camp, Sapińska returned to the house, found the diary and retrieved it. She kept it in her home library for 63 years and did not share it with anyone, but her family. In 2005 Adam Szydłowski, the chairman of the Center of Jewish Culture of the Zagłębie Region of Poland, was told by one of Sapińska's nieces about the existence of the diary.^[3] With help from Sapińska's nephew, he obtained a xerox copy of the diary and was instrumental in publishing of its Polish edition. Its publication by Yad Vashem Publications was commemorated with a ceremony in Jerusalem by Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority), Israel's Holocaust museum, on June 4, 2007, in which Laskier's half sister Zahava Scherz took part. At this ceremony, Sapińska also donated the original diary to Yad Vashem.

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.^[4] 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). Some scholars have found Laskier's accurate and highly developed thoughts and emotions inconsistent with her age, in comparison with the more simple thoughts and emotions in the diary of Anne Frank.

[edit] Publication of diary

The manuscript, as edited by Stanisław Bubin, was published in the Polish language by a Polish publisher in early 2006. In June 2007 Yad Vashem Publications published English and Hebrew translations of the diary, entitled Rutka's Notebook: January-April 1943.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Rutka Laskier diary page from Yad Vashem site
• Photo of Laskier's original diary
• Article about the diary of Rutka Laskier (Polish)
• Articles about Rutka Laskier (Polish)

[edit] Printings

• Laskier, Rutka (2006). Pamiętnik Rutki Laskier (Rutka Laskier's Diary). Katowice, Poland. ISBN 83-89956-42-X.
• Laskier, Rutka (2007). Rutka's Notebook: January-April 1943. Foreword by Dr. Zahava Sherz; historical introduction by Dr. Bella Gutterman. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem Publications.[1]

[edit] See also

• List of posthumous publications of Holocaust victims
• Anne Frank and The Diary of a Young Girl

[edit] External links

• NPR story from All Things Considered program, July 5, 2007
• WPR Interview with Zahava Scherz, Rutka Laskier's half sister, read excerpts]