Rutka's Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust

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As horrifying as these events were, Rutka had not yet felt compelled to take up her pen. Why did she wait so long to begin recording a response to Nazi persecution? Perhaps a clue can be found in her entry for January 30th. Rutka's 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 1986.[citation needed] According to Zahava Scherz, interviewed in the BBC documentary "The Secret Diary of the Holocaust" (broadcast in January 2009),[4] he never told Scherz about Rutka until she discovered a photo album when she herself was 14, which contained a picture of Rutka with her younger brother. Zahava explains that she asked her father who they were and he answered her truthfully, but never spoke further about it. Zahava went on to explain that she learnt of the existence of Rutka's diary in 2006, and she expressed how much it has meant to her finally to be able to get to know her half-sister, to whom she felt a closeness after reading her diary.

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But despite her awareness of gas chambers and Auschwitz (these words are used in her diary) she fills an important part of her notebook with musings about boys and kisses.

After her death, Zygmunt took possession of the diary and wrote the final few entries about hiding Renia outside the ghetto and about her death. “Three shots! Three lives lost! It happened last night at 10:30 p.m. Fate decided to take my dearest ones away from me. My life is over. All I can hear are shots, shots shots....My dearest Renusia, the last chapter of your diary is complete,” he wrote. The diary of Rutka Laskier, a 14-year-old Jewish girl writing in 1943 just before her deportation to Auschwitz, was released by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, in cooperation with Rutka’s family. More than 60 years later, her words provide a rare and authentic perspective of history and tragedy, offering both a daily account of life in the Polish ghetto of Bedzin and the memoir of a teenager trapped in the the Holocaust. The Germans came to Norway in 1940. Two years later, Ruth was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. On arrival she was led straight to the gas chambers. Writing on February 5 1943, she said: "I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy.Most of the diary is similar to any teenage girls. Rutka writes about her friends, difficulties with her parents, and her crush on a boy named Janek. One moment she loves him; the next she hates him. These entries could have been taken straight from my own journal. Although from a historical perspective I longed for more information about the occupation, the personal details Rutka includes make the diary heartbreaking. She could be any other young girl—except that her life is stolen from her. Shortly after arriving in the US in 1944, her diary was published in American newspapers in serialized form, making it one of the earliest accounts of the Holocaust. Her diary was published as a book the following year. Tanya Savicheva Tanya was the youngest of five children in the Savicheva family. She had two sisters, Nina and Zhenya, and two brothers, Mikhail and Leka. The family was going to spend the summer of 1941 in the countryside but the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union ruined their plans. Only Mikhial left earlier to join the partisans while the rest of family stayed in Leningrad. They all worked hard to support the army. Her mother sewed uniforms, Leka worked as a plane operator at the Admiralty Plant, Zhenya worked at the munitions factory, Nina worked at the construction of city defenses, and Uncle Vasya and Uncle Lesha served in the anti-aircraft defense. Tanya, then 11 years old, dug trenches and put out firebombs. Epstein, Catherine (2010). Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford University Press. p.103. ISBN 978-0-19-954641-1.