June 5



POLAND:

Polish girl's Holocaust diary unveiled


The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne
Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a
Jewish ghetto at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby
away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.

The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was
deported to Auschwitz, was released by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust
museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account
of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the
life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.

"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," the teenager 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exposing a riveting historical document.

"Rutka's Notebook" . The 60-page memoir includes innocent adolescent
banter, concerns and first loves combined with a cold analysis of the
fate of European Jewry.

Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II, after
European Jews were herded into ghettos, banned from most jobs and forced
to wear yellow stars to identify them.

"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."

Reports of the gassing of Jews, which were not common knowledge in the
West by then, apparently had filtered into the Bedzin ghetto, which was
near Auschwitz, Yad Vashem experts said.

The following day she opened her entry with a heated description of her
hatred toward her Nazi tormentors. But then, in an effortless transition,
she described her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a
first kiss.

"I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was
taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone's hands
to stroke me," she wrote. "I didn't know what it was, I have never had
such sensations until now."

Later that day, she shifted back to her harsh reality, describing how she
watched as a Nazi soldier tore a Jewish baby away from his mother and
killed him with his bare hands.

The diary chronicles Rutka's life from January to April 1943. She shared
it with her friend Stanislawa Sapinska, who she met after Rutka's family
moved into a home owned by Sapinska's family, which had been confiscated
by the Nazis to be included in the Bedzin ghetto. Sapinska came to inspect
the house and the girls one Jewish, one Christian formed a deep bond.

When Rutka feared she would not survive, she told her friend about the
diary. Sapinska offered to hide it in the basement under the floorboards.
After the war, she returned to reclaim it.

"She wanted me to save the diary," Sapinska, now in her 80s, recalled
Monday. "She said 'I don't know if I will survive, but I want the diary to
live on, so that everyone will know what happened to the Jews.'"

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. Only at the behest of her young nephew did she agree to hand
it over last year.

"He convinced me that it was an important historical artifact," she said
in Polish.

In 1943, Rutka was the same age as Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager whose
Holocaust diary has become one of the most widely read books in the world.
Yad Vashem said Rutka's newly discovered diary was authenticated by
experts and Holocaust survivors.

Rutka's father, Yaakov, was the family's only survivor. He died in 1986.
But unlike Anne Frank's father, he kept his painful past inside. After the
war, he moved to Israel, where he started a new family. His Israeli
daughter, Zahava Sherz, said her father never spoke of his other children,
and the diary introduced her to the long-lost family she never knew.

"I was struck by this deep connection to Rutka," said Sherz, 57. "I was an
only child, and now I suddenly have an older sister. This black hole was
suddenly filled, and I immediately fell in love with her."

"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.

(source: Associated Press)





UKRAINE:

WWII Jewish mass grave uncovered


Mass grave found by chance in May when workers were laying gas pipelines
-- Nazis established concentration camp near grave in 1941 -- 5,000 Jews
were killed at or near the site

A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed
by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community
representative says.

The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay
gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, Roman
Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community, said Tuesday.

The Nazis established two ghettos during World War II near the village and
brought Jews there from what is now the nearby nation of Moldova as well
as Ukrainian regions including Odessa, Shvartsman said. In November 1941,
they set up a concentration camp in the area and killed about 5,000 Jews
there, he said.

"Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there," Shvartsman said.

Shvartsman said the Jewish community had known about the mass killing in
the area, but had not known exactly where the bodies were left.

Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust scholar and a former director of the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, said he was not surprised by the discovery
because the village was a known site of mass executions of Jews during the
Holocaust. He said some 28,000 Jews were brought to the area from
surrounding towns in November 1941, and put the death toll at 10,000, with
500 people dying every day.

Holocaust expert Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, said he did not recall Gvozdavka-1 specifically, but
was not surprised by the reported finding.

"I'm not surprised that, even in these days, there are discoveries such as
these. It underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of
the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe," Zuroff said.

Hundreds of mass graves exist in Ukraine, likely with many yet to be
uncovered, Zuroff said. "Ukraine was an enormous killing field, hundreds
of thousands of Jews were murdered," he said.

Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies,
said there are believed to be some 250-350 mass grave sites from the Nazi
occupation, during which some 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews are believed to
have been killed -- including those massacred near their homes and those
deported to camps elsewhere.

Podolsky said most of the sites had been discovered, many since the 1991
Soviet collapse, but that there were still some left to find.

Ilia Levitas, the head of Ukraine's Jewish Council, put the number of mass
Jewish graves in the country at more than 700.

According to Shvartsman, the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozsdavka-1
site have been established. He said Jewish community members planned to
conduct studies at the newly found site to identify victims.

"We must figure out their names. It is our debt before victims and
survivors," he said.

Odessa's chief rabbi, Shlomo Baksht, has voiced plans to put a fence
around the site and erect a monument to the victims this year.

Ukraine's Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar,
a ravine outside the capital, Kiev, where the Nazis slaughtered some
34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the
tragedy.

About 240,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Odessa region,
according to Shvartsman. He said a mass grave with remains of about 3,500
Jews was found in the region last year.

(source: Associated Press)