I was 14 when, behind the arranged and starched bedsheets in our home in
Israel, I found a red photo album that I had never seen before. It hadn’t
been hidden away, but it hadn’t been shown to me either.
There was a black and white picture of two children, a beautiful girl of about
eight and a baby boy. I thought the girl looked like me and I asked my
father who she was. And, for the first time, he told me about Rutka and
Henius, his children with his wife Dorka, who perished in the Holocaust.
Rutka was 14 when she died, exactly my age when I found out about her
existence, and Henius was six. That is how I heard about my father’s dead
children and about his first life.
It was a huge shock: I knew that my father’s relatives had died during the war
but not that my father had had another family. I was raised as an only child
with all the psychology that goes with that, so it rather unbalanced my
sense of self. I was a respectful Israeli girl and I could tell that it was
a delicate subject so I didn’t ask any more questions.
I was lucky that, despite my parents’ experiences of the Holocaust, I was
raised in a healthy family with no shadows from the past. I was just like
all the other kids at school; the relatives of many of my friends had died
in the camps. The Holocaust was all around us, so it was our reality and we
lived with that knowledge. About half of the children in my class had been
affected by the Holocaust in some way.
It was strange because, although I knew nothing about Rutka and had seen only
one picture of her, I felt very close to her – despite the fact that I
thought of her as my father’s other daughter rather than as my sister.
I thought about her often as I was growing up. The subject of my father’s
other family was never off limits, although we spoke about them rarely, and
whenever he and my mother did, they did so with great respect but without
emotion.
When I gave birth to my own daughter I named her Ruthie after this sister I
had never known. My father smiled when I told him his granddaughter’s name
but he would never have asked me to do that. I knew he appreciated the
gesture, though.
Forty-three years after finding the photograph – on January 13, 2006, a Friday
morning, after I had returned from a business trip to England – I received a
phone call from Menachem Lior, a man I had never heard of.
Menachem said he was from Bedzin, a town in Poland, and asked if I was Yaacov
Laskier’s daughter. When I acknowledged that I was, he told me that two
weeks ear-lier a diary of a girl written during the Holocaust, which had
been hidden for 62 years, had been found in Bedzin.
It was the diary of Rutka Laskier and she was being hailed as the new Anne
Frank.
That morning I started to get to know my sister Rutka – a talented and
beautiful girl, who, while aware she wouldn’t survive, wanted to document
those days – following her life and understanding her death.
January 19, 1943:I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this
hell began . . . Every day it’s the same frozen and oppressive boredom. I
discovered that the first Laskier family lived in Bedzin, which had a
population of about 60,000 people. When the Germans took it over, the
Laskiers were moved from their home into one room in a requisitioned
apartment in the “open ghetto”.
It was owned by a nonJewish Polish family, the Sapinskas. Stanislawa, the
Sapinskas’ 20-year-old daughter, befriended Rutka, who told her about her
diary. Stanislawa asked Rutka to hide it in the staircase and said that,
after the war, she would look after it for her. She had now revealed the
diary after keeping it for 62 years.
I was sent a Xerox of the diary but I couldn’t read the Polish. I asked for a
translation in Hebrew, and although it wasn’t very good it still made me
weep.
The diary is incredible because it recounts the life of a young girl, with all
the usual angst and heartache but with this appalling backdrop. Rutka wrote
that you die only once but that she didn’t want to.
She wanted to live, despite the horrors she had seen.
January 26: Micka came with loads of news. Somebody told her that I had cut my
hair in order to please Janek, that I had put on stockings for Janek, and so
on. That’s a total lie. As if I even cared about him.
January 27: I had my photo taken. I wonder if it looks good.
Although usually I don’t look pretty in photographs, in reality I am very
beautiful . . . I’m tall, thin, with pretty nice legs, very thin at the
waist, I’ve got elongated hands but ugly, or more accurately, uncared-for
fingernails.
I have big black eyes, thick brown eyebrows and long eyelashes, even very
long. Black hair, trimmed short and combed back, small but pug nose, nicely
outlined lips, snow-white teeth . . . I would like to pour out on paper all
the turmoil I am feeling inside, but I’m absolutely incapable. It was about
five months later that I travelled to Poland and saw the diary for the first
time. It was written in a school notebook. The diary shocked and upset me
but it was also incredibly heart-warming because I was finally getting to
know my family after all these years. I absolutely fell in love with Rutka.
I think that she looked like a cross between me and my daughter Ruthie. I have
blue eyes, whereas Rutka’s were dark, but I am very tall like her. I’m not
so sure about our personalities.
While she was very logical she also seemed very artistic. Perhaps she would
have been a writer, whereas I am a scientist. I teach at the department of
science teaching at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.
Rutka was a very adventurous, modern girl. I loved an entry in the diary where
she described going outside just in her pants. It was 1943, so she really
was a rebel. She was also very secular, which makes her death at Auschwitz
all the more ironic. Her family was not religious at all and she went to a
secular school.
February 5:The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter . . . 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 the butt of guns
or be shoved into sacks and gassed to death. There were so many questions I
wanted to ask my father when I read the diary – he had died in 1989 – but I
was also glad he did not know about it. He may not have been able to move on
from what happened and be able to have a new family.
It could have been how it was for Anne Frank’s father and become an obsession
for him. Instead, he was able to marry again and have another child and some
more happiness in his life.
February 6:Something has broken in me. When I pass by a German, everything
shrinks in me. I don’t know whether it is out of fear or hatred. I would
like to torture them, their women and children, who set their doggies on us,
to beat and strangle them vigorously . . .
And now another matter. 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 . . . I didn’t know what it was, I have
never had such sensations until now . . .
Today, I recalled in detail the day of August 12, 1942 [the Aktion, or mass
round-up, of Bedzin’s Jews to select some for deportation]. I’ll try to
describe that day so that in a few years, of course if I’m not deported,
I’ll be able to remember it . . .
It was terribly hot. Then, all of a sudden, it started pouring. The rain
didn’t stop . . . Little children were lying on the wet grass, the storm
raging above our heads. The policemen beat them ferociously and also shot
them . . . I ran away. My heart pounded. I jumped out of a window from the
first floor of a small building, and nothing happened to me . . .
Oh, I forgot the most important thing. I saw how a soldier tore a baby, who
was only a few months old, out of his mother’s hands and bashed his head
against an electricity pylon. The baby’s brain splashed on the wood. The
mother went crazy.
I am writing this as if nothing has happened. As if I were in an army
experienced in cruelty. But I’m young, I’m 14, and I haven’t seen much in my
life, and I’m already so indifferent. Now I am terrified when I see
uniforms. I’m turning into an animal waiting to die. One can lose one’s mind
thinking about this.
Now to everyday matters: Janek came by this afternoon . . . While we were
talking he suddenly blurted out he’d like it very much if he could kiss me.
I said “maybe” . . . February 15: I have decided to let Janek kiss me.
Eventually, someone will kiss me for the first time, so let it be Janek. I
do like him. What I found really shocking was that she was so aware of what
was going on. I thought that the Jews didn’t know about Auschwitz or what
went on there, but they clearly did.
February 20: I have a feeling that I’m writing for the last time. There is an
Aktion in town . . . I must not think about this, so now I’ll start writing
about private matters. I was hopelessly foolish about Janek. Now my eyes
have been opened . . .
February 24: Micka came over. We went out. We met Jumek and Mietek. Had a
stroll with them. On the way we met Janek in his brown suit . . . God, he’s
so disgusting!
Things with Mum are getting more and more complicated . . . Lately, I love my
parents even more. But sometimes they are so mean to me, it hurts me so
much, and then I become hurtful and bad. March 7: I don’t understand why I
can’t pour out my heart even on paper. It’s very difficult to self analyse.
I’m persuading myself that I’m not in love with Janek, but in the meantime I
miss him, and sometimes I suffer because I don’t see him and hear his voice.
Sometimes I regret I was so cold towards him. I laughed at him until he bit
his lips and bled . . .
I wish I could leave all this behind and run away very far from Janek, Jumek,
Mietek, my house and all this greyish rotten-ness. 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 . . . no pretending. March
8: What’s happening to you, Rutka? You’re incapable of controlling yourself.
That’s not good. I must pull myself together and not wet my pillow with
tears.
Because of whom or what am I crying? Because of Janek, certainly not. Then
because of whom? Probably because of freedom. I am sick and tired of these
grey houses, of the steady fear seen on everybody’s faces. This fear
clutches on to everyone and doesn’t let go.
Today, probably Nica, Jumek, Janek will come to me. Damn it, Janek again. I
decided not to think about him, but thoughts about him keep coming back.
Have I really lost my head because of him? I don’t know. Is this what they
call love? April 24: I’m very bored. The entire day I’m walking around the
room, I have nothing to do. That was the last entry. That month the Laskier
family moved into Bedzin’s closed ghetto, and in August my father, his wife,
Rutka and Henius were sent to Auschwitz.
The two children and their mother were sent to the gas chamber within 24 hours
of arriving. My father was sent to do hard labour and then had to forge
currency for the Germans. He did all this with the knowledge of what had
happened to his family.
In the last stages of the war, and with the advance of the allied troops, the
group he laboured with was sent to the Ebensee camp in Austria for
extermination.
The American troops were approaching. The guards and soldiers fled before they
had the time to murder all the prisoners. The camp was liberated, and that
is how my father survived.
He was a fantastic father, and never compared me to Rutka. Considering we
looked so alike, he could have called me her name by mistake, but he never
did. I never felt that I was a replacement child.
After the war, Stanislawa Sapin-ska returned to Rutka’s apartment, now empty,
dilapidated and plundered. The diary, which comprised 60 handwritten pages,
was in the assigned hiding place underneath the double flooring of the
staircase. It had survived almost in its entirety.
Stanislawa took the diary and kept it. She read it from time to time, and
remembered Rutka. When she turned 80, she told her family about the diary,
and her nephew became convinced that it was of historical value and should
be given to the municipal museum.
It was handed over to Adam Szy-dowski, a researcher of Jewish life in Bedzin.
He started to investigate Rutka’s life and to look for survivors of the
family, which is how he contacted me through Menachem Lior.
During my journey in Rutka’s footsteps I met, among others, Linka Gold,
Rutka’s good friend who today lives in London. She told me about their lives
before the war and in the ghetto, and how they both managed to escape from
one of the first round-ups in Bedzin.
In May 2006 I visited Bedzin together with my husband Avigdor. We followed
Rutka and the Laskier family’s footsteps in the streets of Bedzin, and we
visited the homes in which the families had lived before the war, and in the
ghetto.
I shuffled up the staircase of the house in which the diary had been hidden,
and I sat on the bench in the yard where Stanislawa and Rutka used to meet
and talk. I saw how the wide world of the adolescent, curious, beautiful and
talented Rutka closed in on her until the bitter end.
I am so glad I know this sister now. She wanted the world to read her diary
because not only did it document what her life in Poland was like as a Jew
during the war, but it was a testimony to the Holocaust, one of the darkest
periods in history.
One of the most important things about Rutka’s diary is that it proves the
Holocaust happened to all those people who try to deny it. It is living,
breathing and murdering in the pages of that diary.
Zahava Scherz was speaking to Jessica Jonzen.
The diary, Rutka’s Notebook, has been published in English by Yad Vashem
Publications. More information is available at www.yadvashem.org
Rights for the Laskier family pictures are reserved to Dr Zahava Scherz
