Polish teen’s Holocaust diary surfaces

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The diary of a Polish Jewish girl who died during the Holocaust surfaced in Israel.

Yad Vashem announced this week that it had received a journal kept by 14-year-old Rutka Laskier in Poland’s Bedzin ghetto. Laskier is believed to have been deported to Auschwitz with her family in the summer of 1943 and killed.

The diary was brought to Yad Vashem by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Pole who had befriended Laskier and then kept hidden the 60-page manuscript.

The discovery enhances a canon of eyewitness Holocaust literature including perhaps most famously “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Laskier’s diary, whose content ranges from musings about love to terrified contemplations of death, has been published in Polish, with translations in English and Hebrew.

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