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'Polish Anne Frank' on display
05/06/2007 16:45 - (SA)
Jerusalem - The sad journal of an adolescent Jewish girl from Poland and victim of the Nazis, likened to a "Polish Anne Frank", went on display on Tuesday at the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
The Yad Vashem memorial said it received the 60 yellowing handwritten pages in a notebook from Stanislawa Sapinska, 89, who was a friend of author Rutka Laskier.
Sapinska kept the diary, translated into Hebrew and English, for more than 60 years until a relative convinced her to donate it to Yad Vashem.
Laskier's family lived in an apartment owned by the Sapinskas in the town of Bedzin.
The diaries cover the period from February 1943 to April 24 of the following year just before Laskier was forced into the town's ghetto and then sent to her death at Auschwitz extermination camp.
"I would like to pour out on paper all the turmoil I am feeling inside," the girl wrote on January 27 1944.
'Writing for the last time'
As her despair grew, she wrote on February 5: "Oh good Lord. Well Rutka, you've probably gone completely crazy. You are calling upon God as if he exists. The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered.
"If God existed, he would have certainly not have permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with the butt of guns, or be shoved into sacks and gassed to death."
Her entry on February 20 was full of foreboding: "I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house."
In August 1945, Rutka, her mother and brother were deported from the ghetto to Auschwitz and sent to the gas chamber upon arrival.
"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," Rutka wrote as the end neared.
- AFP
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