Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but it didn’t come up in my searches.
Her name was Rutka Laskier, she lived in the the Bedzin ghetto, and the diary was hidden by a friend for 63 years until it’s release. It’s only 60 pages, but it describes among other things the murder of a baby by Nazis.
Like Anne Frank she did not survive the war and (also like AF) the only member of the family who did was her father. He emigrated to Israel, remarried, and had another daughter, but never told her of her half-sister.
Thanks for the heads up. This school year, my 16 year old daughter had to do a “major paper”. She came to me for help picking a topic. The teacher gave them a long list of pre-approved topics and the “good” topics were going fast.
The general theme was, “Discuss how life in the US is different because of. . .”. The “good” topics that were being snapped up were things like cell phones, rap music, etc.
I suggested she pick The Holocaust. At first she thought I was kidding, but after we discussed the idea, and I offered my help, she acquiesced. She ended up writing a great paper, and reading much of what she could find on the topic. This diary will make her day.
I am not sure if ‘excited’ about this new find and subsequent publishing is the correct word, but reading about this horrible time period and collecting books and stories about it is so very fascinating.
I am glad her story, however brief, is not lost and her voice is heard.
Another not so often heard of story about a teen age boy taken by Russians and his escape across Russia after a brutal stay in a slave labor camp during WW2: Donbas First chapter. ( It goes up to the third chapter.) Donbas at Amazon.
Should be required reading by all ages.
I’ll shut up now. vetbridge kudos to your daughter for not taking an easy subject to write about.
Thanks for the heads up, Sampiro. I remember reading about this recently but didn’t catch any info. I figured someone on the Dope would bring it up.
Another Holocaust memoir (this time by a survivor), was “Europa, Europa”, by Solomon Perel, which was turned into a movie. Perel’s story is interesting. His family fled Germany to Poland after Hitler came to power. When the Germans invaded, he and his brother fled to the Soviet occupied part of Poland. They were seperated, and he was put in a Communist orphanage. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, he was captured by a German army unit (who didn’t know he was Jewish), and became their translator and ended up “adopted” by the unit. He was then sent to a Hitler Youth school back in Germany, where he stayed until he was captured by the Americans near the end of the war. He managed to find his brother, but his parents and sister had been killed by the Nazis.
Another book suggestion is Corrie ten Boom’s “The Hiding Place”. She was a Dutch gentile living in the Netherlands, who, after the Germans invaded, along with her sister, brother, and father, joined the Dutch resistance, and hid Jews and resistance members. They were eventually captured and sent to concentration camps. This isn’t a new story…the book was published in 1971, but she doesn’t tend to get the attention I, at least, think she deserved.
The scene where Joop reconstructs his foreskin has got to be the most vicariously viscerally painful I’ve ever seen.
That was good- so’s the movie. I remember watching her speak on a televised Billy Graham Crusade and she was incredibly modest.
Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and family (or more precisely helped them hide- the “attic” was of their own devising) is in her 90s and still alive but shuns publicity. I would love to read her memoir.
Wow, I forgot about Corrie ten Boom. I must have read that book at some point. I do have a first edition Diary of Anne Frank. I’ll have to look up this latest one as well as some of the suggestions.
Is that the one where Veronica is Corrie, Betty is her sister, Archie’s the dad and Jughead’s the Gestapo officer, or the one where Reggie is Himmler and Betty is Corrie? Either way, it’s worth a ton if you still have the original Scratch’n’Sniff card that came with it.
