Teen’s concentration camp diary, a fairy tale, to be published in Israel

JERUSALEM, April 13 (JTA) — “The Diary of Anne Frank” may soon have some competition. A Holocaust-era diary written by a 16-year-old Jewish Dutch girl for her younger sister, documenting life in a concentration camp in fairy-tale form, will soon be published by the Holocaust commemoration center at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot. The diary, written while the two girls from Amsterdam were at the Westerbork camp in Holland, tells the tale of a family of forest dwarves uprooted from their home and forced to a far-away camp in a big city. The author of the story also kept a diary for herself, in which she documented life in the camp. The journal was found in a box at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany following the liberation, and preserved for many years by a relative of the two girls who volunteered at the facility at Lohamei Hageta’ot, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported. The two girls died in the gas chambers. The volunteer first revealed the journal to the institution a month ago. After it was authenticated, the museum decided to publish it. Officials at the center noted some similarities between the tale and Italian director Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-award winning film about the Holocaust, “Life Is Beautiful” in that both works emphasize the role imagination played in helping Jews cope with the horrors of the Holocaust.