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Book Description: Rutka Laskier, a 14-year-old Jewish girl in the town of Bedzin in Poland, died in Auschwitz in 1943. But she left behind a notebook in which she recorded her thoughts, fears and dreams. Some are the musings of any adolescent girl; others are the despairing cries of an individual caught in history's vortex. Now, after 60 years in the keeping of a friend, that notebook has been recovered - and it opens a unique, moving window into the everyday life of Polish Jews caught in the throes of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution. Hailed as the "Polish Anne Frank," Rutka Laskier now speaks to us across the decades: a witness to evil, a voice for the silent, and a timeless symbol of resolve. The editors of TIME add annotations, photos, maps, and quotations that help bring this tragic era into compelling focus for today's readers. Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-24
Nice book
This journal is short, but valuable for history telling of a young Polish girl during World War II. The narrations are important for perspective. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-14
Disappointing...
I was very anxious to get a copy of this book as it was so highly recommended through the Yad Vashem Museum. But, when I finally got it and read it (it was very short), I was disappointed that there was so little written by the girl herself. And, what was written, was mostly the emotional ups and downs of a young teen about her relationships with piers and family. Simply, it did not compare with "The Diary of Anne Frank". Rating: 
Date: 2008-05-31
decent, but no frank
I bought this after the Time Magazine Review, but have to say that although informative and inspiring- it was due mainly to the editorial interjection and afterward by the editors rather than the author. The work required a great deal of explanation.
Be prepared that although it is a great work of history, you will need the labors of the editors and translators to understand fully whereas Frank was easily understood by any audience. Rating:
Date: 2008-05-18
Unadorned
There are some stories that need no adornment. This is one. Rutka Laskier was 14 and she knew she was going to die. Likely, contacts from the underground told her family of the death camps. She wrote in a diary. She sees an old man beaten to death. A soldier bludgeoning a child. She does not believe there is a God. "if only I could say, it's over, you die only once...but I can't, despite all these atrocties I want to live, and wait for the following day. That means, waiting for Auschwitz or labor camp." She tells a friend where she is hiding the diary and asks her to find it when the war is over. Rutka then leaves for a camp and is killed. The friend, two years later, finds the diary, hidden under a house's floorboards. The impulse to live and to be remembered and to bear witness survived. The book is short, has excerpts from the diary(it was kept over a short period of time), commentary and photos. It deserves to be read. Rating: 
Date: 2008-05-11
"I'm turning into an animal waiting to die"
So wrote 14-year old Rutka Laskier in the diary she kept during the first four months of 1943. Living in the Jewish ghetto in Bedsin, Poland, Rutka and her family were finally deported to Auschwitz, where it's believed all of them perished in August 1943. Rutka told a Christian friend of hers, Stanislawa Sapinska, about the 60-odd page diary. After the war, Sapinska found the manuscript hidden in the basement of the empty Laskier home.
Much in the Rutka's diary is unexceptional, and rather what one might expect from a girl hovering between childhood and adolescence. But there are passages in the diary in which Rutka tersely describes the horrors of living under the Nazi sword that are breath-taking, and they become even more surreally terrifying when read against other passages that describe the banalities of everyday existence.
In early February, for example, Rutka writes that she's losing faith in God: "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." The very next day (6 February 1943), she becomes a dreamy school girl again when she writes about her growing crush for a boy named Janek--but then cold reality rushes in, and she concludes the entry with a chilling description of seeing a German soldier murder a Jewish baby.
Rutka displays the same joy in living and hope as her Dutch counterpart, Anne Frank. But it's a sober hope, one that recognizes that the chances of a happy ending diminish with each passing day. In late February, she writes: "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." By the time the diary ends, Rutka seems to have been worn down by her ordeal. Her final entry: "I'm very bored. The entire day I'm walking around the room. I have nothing to do."
Rutka's diary is an incredibly moving document, all the more poignant because it's written by a young girl who has seen and endured too much for her years. The volume is printed on the thick glossy paper characteristic of Time-published books, and it's generously illustrated. But more gripping than any of the photographs are Rutka's words of hope and despair, budding love and deep anger, and, finally numbness.
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