“At daybreak, I got up and ran to the window. A tiny bit of golden sunlight was already peeking over the horizon. Less than half an hour later, I was at the foot of the mountain. I climbed higher and higher. More and more often, rocks blocked my way. Piles of rocks stained with moss and roots of trees twisted like embracing snakes. The sun flooded the mountain with its golden rays and outlined the green of the grass. In the distance, a thin bluish streak of smoke, lit by shepherds, could be seen far away.”
These words are lifted from the pages of a thin diary whose ink dried over three-quarters of a century ago, penned by a fourteen year-old adolescent girl born into the “Silent Generation,” a generation keen to find their own voice.
Unfortunately, this young girl’s voice was silenced prematurely.
The sixty-page journal, which she wrote without her family’s knowledge, chronicles just three months, between January and April 1943 of the life of Rutka Laskier, a Jewish Polish girl who, with her father, mother and younger brother, found themselves under Nazi rule in 1943. The diary remained in the hands of a surviving friend for sixty four years before being released to the public in 2005.
It is a potent mix of the intimate thoughts and feelings of a teenage girl alongside vivid descriptions of Nazi atrocities.
“The quality of her writing is remarkable. Rutka offers us insight … especially from the young eyes that are a mixture of youth and adult all at once. An adult experience with youth emotions,” noted Dr. David Silberklang, Senior Historian at the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
Rutka’s hometown of Bedzin, Poland was occupied within days of the Nazi invasion in September 1939 and, as if instantaneously, five centuries of vibrant Jewish life and culture, came to a brutal end. The Nazis began by confining the Jews to a small area of town, referred to as the ghetto.
Rutka’s diary entries move seamlessly between the everyday thoughts of a young girl and the inhuman reality of life in the ghetto:
“Something has broken in me. When I pass by a German, everything seems to shrink inside me. I don’t know whether it’s out of fear or hatred … I’m writing this as if nothing has happened, as if I was in an army and experienced in cruelty. But I am young; I’m 14. I haven’t seen much in my life and I’m already so indifferent. I’m turning into an animal waiting to die.”
“I’m so saturated with the horrors of this war that even the worst things I hear have no effect on me. I just can’t believe that one day I’ll be able to go out without a yellow star; or that this war will ever end.”
“I wish I could leave all this behind and run away from all this grayish rottenness. Spread out wings and fly high and far away, hear the wind howling and run wild on my face, feel its breeze. Fly to places where there are no ghettos,’ shops,’ no pretending.” The next day she added, “Because of whom or what am I crying? Probably because of freedom. I am sick and tired of these gray houses, of the steady fear seen on everybody’s faces. This fear clutches onto everyone and doesn’t let go.”
“It sounds like a fairytale. Those who haven’t seen these things would never believe it. But it’s no myth. It’s the truth.”
Although it was believed Rutka died in the crematorium shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, along with her mother and younger brother–who was half her age, a startling new revelation, made during the production of a 2009 documentary, found that Rutka may not have been taken to the gas chambers with the other members of her family.
Adam Szydlowski, who first published Rutka’s Notebook, and was presented the prestigious “Preserving Memory” Award, in 2017 for his work, had been contacted with a disturbing new piece of information. In 1947, a young girl named Sofia Minc had dictated a witness statement detailing her memories of Auschwitz.
A single paragraph from her statement references the tragic death of Rutka Laskeir:
“There was a girl who slept next to me in the barrack, Rutka Laskier from Bedzin. She was so pretty that Dr. [Josef] Mengele (considered one of the most heinous Nazi criminals) had noticed her. A cholera epidemic broke out at that time. Rutka contracted cholera and within a few hours, had changed beyond recognition. I took her, myself, to the crematorium in a wheelbarrow. She begged me to take her to the electric fence so that she could kill herself, but an SS officer with a gun was following us and wouldn’t allow it. I myself suspect that Rutka died in the crematorium. She was taken there because she didn’t have the strength to walk.” – Sofia Minc
American psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton in his 1986 book, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, describes Mengele as sadistic, lacking empathy. According to an Auschwitz fellow-SS physician, Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to exploit the incarcerated for human experimentation. His medical procedures showed no consideration for the health, safety, or physical and emotional suffering of the victims.
As if supernaturally ordained, Rutka Laskier was born the same day as another brilliant young writer, Dutch diarist and Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust, Anne Frank. Both were born, Wednesday, June 12, 1929, and, in both cases, of their entire families, only their fathers survived the war.
Rutka’s diary begins on January 19, 1943, with the entry, “I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this hell began.” 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.”
Sadly …a day that never came.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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