The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl that chronicles the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto has been revealed.
Rutka's Notebookwas written by Rutka Laskier in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, and was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she wrote it.
The 60-page memoir is a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland, and a memoir of the life of a teenager in those circumstances. The book also includes innocent adolescent banter, concerns and first loves - combined with a cold analysis of the fate of European Jewry.
In the diary, she described how she watched as a Nazi soldier tore a Jewish baby away from his mother and killed him with his bare hands.
"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," the teenager wrote in 1943, shortly before she was sent to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die."
Within a few months Rutka was dead and her diary apparently lost. But last year, a Polish friend who had saved the notebook brought it to public notice.
When Rutka feared she would not survive, she told a friend, Stanislawa Sapinska, about the diary. Ms Sapinska hid it under floorboards and returned to reclaim it after the war.
Ms Sapinska stashed the diary in her home library for more than 60 years. She said it was a precious memento and thought it to be too private to share with others. It was only after encouragement from her young nephew that she agreed to hand it over last year.
Rutka's last entry was dated April 24th, 1943; in August, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, where she is believed to have been killed upon arrival.