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Young girl's Holocaust diary emerges

A POLISH woman who for 60 years had been holding onto the diary of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis in 1943, presented the journal to Israel's Holocaust memorial overnight.

"I have a feeling that I'm writing for the last time. There is a (round-up) in town. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house," 14-year-old Rutka Laskier wrote while living in a Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, Poland on February 20, 1943.

Laskier hid her diary under the floorboards of her house before her family was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp.

It was later found by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Bedzin native, who lived in the house before the German occupation and had befriended Laskier.

"She wanted the journal to survive, even if she didn't, so the world would see how the Jews suffered," said Mrs Sapinska, 82, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Read entire article at Australian