From: Yahoo News
JERUSALEM - The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto — at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.
The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.
"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," the teenager wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die."
Whenever I hear about a new journal from the Holocaust or from a very significant period in time I'm reminded of the power of the written word. It was through the written word that we now know of this little girl, Rutka, and her family as they survived the for a time before being deported to Auschwitz. If it wasn't for such a journal coming to the surface so many years later, she and her family could have been lost to the black hole of historical obscurity - where history becomes not legend nor myth, but simply forgotten.
Always the Quest,
-T
Photo Credit: Atlas Shrugs
1 comment:
Oddly enough, Tom, I woke up this morning dreaming of the firestorm of Dresden. I have dreamed of it off and on my entire life. The bombing of Dresden and the Blitz have both been in my consciousness since I could barely speak.
I have also had the images of the Holocaust in my mind since an early age, and as powerful as these images are, I am still moved by the words of the diarists and memoirists who gave voice to the emotions of that horrible time.
Thank you for posting this.
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