Rutka's Notebook: January-April 1943

Descriptions of alarming moments are intertwined with private and banal thoughts in the notebook of 14-year-old Rutka Laskier from Bedzin, which documented her life during a few months in 1943. The outside world slowly closed down on her, but these few sheets of paper – some 60 handwritten pages in a notebook – reflect the entire universe of an adolescent Jewish girl in the shadow of death. Initial buds of womanhood, first loves, deceptions, friendships, jealousy and disputes are recorded in detail in the midst of deportations, fear, horror and death. These provide not only a moving, humane and historical testimony of Rutka’s life and death, but also represent that of tens of thousands of adolescent boys and girls during the Holocaust.