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."

Within a few months Rutka was dead and, it seemed, her diary lost. But last year, a Polish friend who had saved the notebook finally came forth, exposing a riveting historical document.

"Rutka's Notebook" . The 60-page memoir includes innocent adolescent banter, concerns and first loves — combined with a cold analysis of the fate of European Jewry.

Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II, after European Jews were herded into ghettos, banned from most jobs and forced to wear yellow stars to identify them.

"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," she wrote on Feb. 5, 1943.

"The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death."

Reports of the gassing of Jews, which were not common knowledge in the West by then, apparently had filtered into the Bedzin ghetto, which was near Auschwitz, Yad Vashem experts said.

The following day she opened her entry with a heated description of her hatred toward her Nazi tormentors. But then, in an effortless transition, she described her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a first kiss.

"I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone's hands to stroke me," she wrote. "I didn't know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now."

Later that day, she shifted back to her harsh reality, describing how she watched as a Nazi soldier tore a Jewish baby away from his mother and killed him with his bare hands.

The diary chronicles Rutka's life from January to April 1943. She shared it with her friend Stanislawa Sapinska, who she met after Rutka's family moved into a home owned by Sapinska's family, which had been confiscated by the Nazis to be included in the Bedzin ghetto. Sapinska came to inspect the house and the girls — one Jewish, one Christian — formed a deep bond.

When Rutka feared she would not survive, she told her friend about the diary. Sapinska offered to hide it in the basement under the floorboards. After the war, she returned to reclaim it.

"She wanted me to save the diary," Sapinska, now in her 80s, recalled Monday. "She said 'I don't know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live on, so that everyone will know what happened to the Jews.'"

Sapinska stashed the diary in her home library for more than 60 years. She said it was a precious memento and thought it to be too private to share with others. Only at the behest of her young nephew did she agree to hand it over last year.

"He convinced me that it was an important historical artifact," she said in Polish.

In 1943, Rutka was the same age as Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager whose Holocaust diary has become one of the most widely read books in the world. Yad Vashem said Rutka's newly discovered diary was authenticated by experts and Holocaust survivors.

Rutka's father, Yaakov, was the family's only survivor. He died in 1986. But unlike Anne Frank's father, he kept his painful past inside. After the war, he moved to Israel, where he started a new family. His Israeli daughter, Zahava Sherz, said her father never spoke of his other children, and the diary introduced her to the long-lost family she never knew.

"I was struck by this deep connection to Rutka," said Sherz, 57. "I was an only child, and now I suddenly have an older sister. This black hole was suddenly filled, and I immediately fell in love with her."

"I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time," Rutka wrote on Feb. 20, 1943, as Nazi soldiers began gathering Jews outside her home for deportation.

"I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell. I try to escape from these thoughts of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it's over, you only die once ... but I can't, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day."

However, Rutka would write again. Her last entry was dated April 24, 1943, and her last written words were: "I'm very bored. The entire day I'm walking around the room. I have nothing to do."

In August, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, where she is believed to have been killed upon arrival.

It's written quite tabloidy though. I mean, they actually explain what the Holocaust is, for those who are retarded!

no, there is not one single particle of yellow press in that article.

do you start liking jews when it's all drama and tragedy?

I hate people that go into SOMEONE ELSE'S LAND to evict them and kill them and take over their land because of some zealous right wing ideal, and become a horrible state that can do as it pleases because they have economic power all over and they bribe and threaten and kill and what not. Damn Mossad.

That I hate. I do not hate jews, because not all jews are like that. I just hate evil and Israel is evil.

I just love when she says she wants to live. I almost cried.

it reminds me of something Angelina Jolie said when people gave her a hard time for talking about suicide and death and all those things, and she said that if she talks about that is maybe because she loves life more than other people, I kinda agree.

israel is shitty in many many ways, but that's a state not a religion/race nor an excuse for racism

tell a neo nazi that hitler caused israel to exist and watch their face twist in several different ways

in a way yes, if the holocaust hadn't happened there would be no israel. What a disgrace. It's like NOTHING good came out of the Holocaust. It's so evil that the abomination and the hatred and the death continues to live on IRONICALLY through Israel.

it's a triumph that the holocaust has been made dorothy enough to end your racism

I didn't get ya.

at times like this i consider buying a sub just so i can positive rep

i read this earlier today and it upset me, because i consider the Holocaust the biggest horror in all of history. i live in a place heavily populated with jews, so i know a few survivors. i actually got a free signed book from a woman who lived through Auschwitz.

It's still amazing how it could happen. The scope of the evil. It's unbelievable.

There's always been evil but I think that World War II was the biggest and darkest manifestation of it.

you know, many people want to live.all over the world and history.
in the past, present and future. many people have been, are and will be persecuted like Jews.
look at your window. read press. travel. meet people.
pls open your eyes. and i guess you would cry too. not only because it' a book.

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ps: i really loved Anne Franck' diary.

and i've met people who HAVE SEEN jews going from a concentration camp to another when Russians attacked in the East. i knew someone whose whole family (i mean WHOLE family: cousins, far cousins, parent, grandparent, sister, broothers, aunts,...EVERYONE) were killed in Holocaut.he was the only survovor of his whole family.

but i think the sadest part is that humanity is made of unhumanity too.
it happened again, and it will. and there will be many others Anne Franck's diaries.just to realize that.

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So Who Is This Angelina Jolie Of Whom The Lady Is Speaking About? I Would Like To Know For I Am Visiting The Future And Am Unaware Of Many Things And Events That Have Transpired Between My Decade Of The Eighties And The Current Stage.

Oh, I wasn't aware that Britney Spears gossip was hard hitting news.

I don't post tabloid shit IN THE NEWS AND POLITICS SECTION.

HCH, of all your mildly annoying habits, this one is one of them: NEWS IS NEWS! OK? It doesn't have to be superworthy or about tragedies or whatever to be viable. And in this case, I have to call you on something: how is "The Polish Anne Frank" not a tabloidy phrase? How is singling out one individual to give a shit about