Polish girl's Holocaust diary unveiled

[Kadie]

Polish girl's Holocaust diary unveiled
By ARON HELLER, Associated Press Writer
38 minutes ago


JERUSALEM - The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl, dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank," was unveiled Monday by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after the teenager vividly described the world crumbling around her as she came of age in a Jewish ghetto.

"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," Rutka Laskier 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 But last year, a Polish friend who had saved the notebook finally came forth, exposing a riveting historical document.

snip...
"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."

more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070604/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_holocaust_diary_3

[derby378]

1. To quote Lydia Lunch...

"There are some things too inaudible for words, and others too horrible."

:cry:

[Behind the Aegis]

2. And yet some still deny it happened...

[helderheid]

5. I will never be able to wrap my mind around that.

[Phredicles]

7. Including plenty in Poland. I hope this will shut some of them up,

not that I'm holding my breath, I'm afraid.

[Rydz777]

9. I have been to Treblinka three times (for reasons that are

irrelevant to the point.) I've also been to Auschwitz, but Treblinka is even sadder. In an isolated rural area about 100 miles northeast of Warsaw, nothing remains now except the infamous railroad track and a vast field of nameless memorial stones. The Nazis leveled the camp before leaving, including the Commandant's Zoo (he was an animal lover.)

Only one stone bears a name: "Janusz Korczak i dzieci." Korczak was a popular writer and medical doctor who ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. He had a chance to escape but he chose to go to his death with his orphan children in Treblinka in August 1942. The Poles keep votive candles lit around this stone.

Because of its remoteness (unlike Auschwitz), Treblinka gets few visitors and the silent bleakness that hangs over the place deepens the gloom.

[Behind the Aegis]

10. Thank you for that story.

I have never been. I don't know that I could.

[helderheid]

3. oh wow...

Amazing and heartbreaking.

[rockymountaindem]

4. K & R

[Jokinomx]

6. Just these few words made tears well in my eyes....

I ask the same question Rutka.... how can a merciful God allow such things to happen?

When I a child growing up in the sixties, I thought that man would never allow such things to happen again. That we certainly would have learned and grown from such a terrible time in the history of man. Yet, we had the "Killing Fields" in Cambodia, We have had the Slaughter in Zimbabwe, the raping of women in the Congo and Sudan....

Now we have Iraq....

Will we ever learn? I don't think it will happen in my lifetime....

[raccoon]

11. Free will. God gave the Nazis, and all of us, free will.

"I ask the same question Rutka.... how can a merciful God allow such things to happen?"

"When I a child growing up in the sixties, I thought that man would never allow such things to happen again. That we certainly would have learned and grown from such a terrible time in the history of man. Yet, we had the "Killing Fields" in Cambodia, We have had the Slaughter in Zimbabwe, the raping of women in the Congo and Sudan...."

And don't forget Rwanda. I thought the same as you did in the 1960's.

"Will we ever learn? I don't think it will happen in my lifetime.... "

Or mine either.

[hedda_foil]

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

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.

[raccoon]

12. Anybody know if this has been published? I looked on Amazon but

didn't find it.

I read this yesterday but read it again today, and a hopeful thought occurred to me.

How many people living now have read Anne Frank's diary?

How many people have read MEIN KAMPF?

[LeftishBrit]

13. k&r

Heartbreaking.