Rutka (Ruth) Laskier: "The Polish Anne Frank" in Historical Context

decent, but no frank | Rutka's Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust | Editors of Time Magazine, Yad Vashem

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	• Rutka's Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust Editors of Time Magazine, Yad Vashem Time / Yad Vashem, 2008 - 96 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Unadorned

There are some stories that need no adornment. This is one. Rutka Laskier was 14 and she knew she was going to die. Likely, contacts from the underground told her family of the death camps. She wrote in a diary. She sees an old man beaten to death. A soldier bludgeoning a child. She does not believe there is a God. "if only I could say, it's over, you die only once...but I can't, despite all these atrocties I want to live, and wait for the following day. That means, waiting for Auschwitz or labor camp." She tells a friend where she is hiding the diary and asks her to find it when the war is over. Rutka then leaves for a camp and is killed. The friend, two years later, finds the diary, hidden under a house's floorboards. The impulse to live and to be remembered and to bear witness survived. The book is short, has excerpts from the diary(it was kept over a short period of time), commentary and photos. It deserves to be read.

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Rutka (Ruth) Laskier: "The Polish Anne Frank" in Historical Context

Rutka lived in the town of Bedzin in SW Poland, not far from Auschwitz, where she and most of her family later perished. Rutka's diary itself is brief, and is supplemented with helpful information. The reader learns that the Star which the Jews were required to wear by the Nazis had similarly been required, in different places and times past, by both Christian and Muslim leaders (p. 29). There are many photos from the Nazi occupation.

The life of Jews in prewar Poland is often portrayed as one of unrelieved misery. In contrast, the prewar lives of Rutka's relatives and friends are shown in terms of happiness. There is a photo of Rutka's parents enjoying skiing at Zakopane in 1930 (p. 41), of Rutka and her friend Danusia in a private airplane in 1932 (p. 17), and scores of uniformed Jews participating in activities (such as Zionist movements; p. 80).

No sooner had the Germans entered Poland than they burned the Bedzin synagogue with worshippers inside. As reported by Holocaust historian Bella Gutterman, a Polish Catholic priest, Mieczyslaw Zawadzki, saved scores of Jews by offering them sanctuary at his nearby church (p. 71). During the German Nazi rule over Poland, the Germans took practically everything owned by Jews, as noted by Bedzin Holocaust survivor Dasha Rittenberg (p. 45).

Fourteen year-old Rutka entertained revenge fantasies against the Germans (February 6, 1943, p. 24): "I would like to torture them [the Germans], their women and children, who set their doggies on us, to beat and strangle them vigorously, more and more."

Well-to-do Jews tend to be nonreligious, and this is exemplified by Rutka's thinking. At one point (January 28, 1943; p. 18) Rutka would like to know if it would be all right to confess to a Christian priest. When she expresses a loss of faith in God as a result of the circumstances (February 5, 1943; p. 22), she acknowledges that she had little faith in God's existence in the first place. She repeatedly expressed sympathy for Communism (p. 38, 50), and this fact is also noted in the commentary by Dreifuss (p. 81).

Rutka wasn't alone. Although the diary of Anne Frank is by far the best known, there are many little-known diaries in existence written by Jewish children and adolescents during the time of the Holocaust. At the end of the book, Havi (Ben-Sasson) Driefuss provides a bibliography of them (p. 86-89). Some of them haven't yet been translated into English.

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decent, but no frank

I bought this after the Time Magazine Review, but have to say that although informative and inspiring- it was due mainly to the editorial interjection and afterward by the editors rather than the author. The work required a great deal of explanation.
Be prepared that although it is a great work of history, you will need the labors of the editors and translators to understand fully whereas Frank was easily understood by any audience.

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Nice book

This journal is short, but valuable for history telling of a young Polish girl during World War II. The narrations are important for perspective.

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Rutka Laskier, a 14-year-old Jewish girl in the town of Bedzin in Poland, died in Auschwitz in 1943. But she left behind a notebook in which she recorded her thoughts, fears and dreams. Some are the musings of any adolescent girl; others are the despairing cries of an individual caught in history's vortex. Now, after 60 years in the keeping of a friend, that notebook has been recovered - and it opens a unique, moving window into the everyday life of Polish Jews caught in the throes of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution. Hailed as the "Polish Anne Frank," Rutka Laskier now speaks to us across the decades: a witness to evil, a voice for the silent, and a timeless symbol of resolve. The editors of TIME add annotations, photos, maps, and quotations that help bring this tragic era into compelling focus for today's readers.

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