A Jewish Teen’s Diary Recounts Pain and Resilience in a Nazi Ghetto

It has not had the impact of Anne Frank’s classic journal, but another teenager’s diary from World War II has long provided a vivid picture of the miseries of life in a Jewish ghetto and the striking ways its doomed inhabitants endured.

Now, beginning on July 17, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan will focus attention on the diary of the teenager, Yitskhok Rudashevski, by making it the second installment in what the institute calls its “online museum” of Jewish history.

In June 1941, at age 13, Yitskhok, began chronicling daily life in Vilnius, Lithuania (Vilna in Yiddish). He recorded the German army’s takeover of the city from its Soviet occupiers, depicting the confinement of Vilnius’s 55,000 Jews into two ghettos and documenting the first reports of systematic massacres at the forested suburb of Ponar, where ultimately 70,000 Jews, 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 2,000 Polish intelligentsia were shot or machine gunned to death by Nazi “einsatzgruppen” killing squads and Lithuanian volunteers.

Yitskhok was murdered at Ponary in October 1943. His cousin located the diary, written in Yiddish, in an attic hideaway and gave it to the poet Abraham Sutzkever, who had rescued scores of precious books, manuscripts and letters from YIVO’s original library in Vilna. The diary has been exhibited before, most prominently in a Hebrew translation at Yad Vashem in Israel, but not in a complete English text and not with a new translation by Solon Beinfeld.

Alexandra Zapruder, the co-curator of the online exhibition said the diary was notable among 85 Holocaust diaries by Jewish teenagers for its youthful eloquence.

“He was an extraordinary literary talent,” she said, “Having read dozens of teenage diaries, very few meet this level of literary ability, command of language and spirit of observation.”