Broken Wor(l)ds: Rutka's Notebook

Abstract

Rutka's Notebook is a diary kept by a young Jewish girl who lived in Bedzin, Poland during the Holocaust. Rutka Laskier started to keep her diary four months before she was deported to Auschwitz. In this diary, written in a school notebook, she recounts her adolescent life in the ghetto as well as her distress vis-à-vis the atrocities the Nazis inflicted upon her and her people. Aware of the risk she ran to be moved to Kamionka, Rutka agreed with Stanislava Sapinska, the apartment owners' daughter whom she had befriended, that she would hide her notebook in the apartment before leaving. In 1945, when the war was over, Sapinska returned to the apartment and found the diary in the place Rutka had indicated  to her back in 1943.