My Rehovot ( ISSN 1817-101X )

By Zahava Scherz

As the child of Polish Jews who had survived the terrors of World War II, I was always aware of the Holocaust — but at a distance.

Then, when I was 14 years old, I came across a red photo album, hidden in my parents' home outside Tel Aviv. The photographs in the album were from that dark time. They showed my father Yaacov Laskier's family, all of whom had been exterminated in the Holocaust. All I had known previously was that before the war, my father and his four brothers and four sisters belonged to a well-to-do, respected Jewish family.

(Photo - Laskier: Died in a Nazi concentration camp at age 14 / Family picture via Zahava Scherz)

In the album, there was a photo of a girl embracing a little boy. She was about 8 years old, with beautiful black, smooth hair. With a heavy heart, I turned to my father and asked him who those children were, and who was the girl who resembled me. And then, for the first time, my father told me about Rutka and Joachim-Henius, his children with his first wife, Dvorah Hampel. All three of them had perished in Auschwitz. Rutka was 14 when she died, exactly my age when I found out about her existence. Henius was 7 years old.

When I met Rutka

That is how I found out about my father's deceased children, and about his first life in Bedzin, a city in southwestern Poland where Jews had lived for centuries in peace until German troops arrived in September 1939. Four days after they occupied Bedzin, the Germans burned the town's historic synagogue to the ground, after locking some 200 Jews inside.

Six decades later, in 2006, my life was changed by an even more startling revelation, when the world and I learned that my half-sister Rutka had kept a diary during the war that had recently been made public. In these pages, I met Rutka for the first time: a very talented and beautiful girl, who, while being aware that she would not survive, wanted to document those days, in hopes future readers could follow her life and understand her death. When the diary was published, first in Poland and then in Israel, it was hailed for opening an illuminating new window into Jewish life during the Holocaust.

Although her notebook is far shorter, Rutka's prose, like Anne Frank's, transports readers directly into the experience of a persecuted adolescent living under the Nazi's occupation in a world that gets narrower and narrower until the bitter end. Its most gripping scene is Rutka's first-person account of a German Aktion in August 1942, in which the entire Jewish community of Bedzin was summoned to an outdoor stadium, then ruthlessly sorted into groups whose destinies were stark: a chance for life — or a death sentence to the nearby extermination complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most striking was the fact that Rutka clearly knew that Jewish adults, and even children, who were taken to the camp were being killed in the gas chambers.

The next generations

I recently visited an eighth-grade class in Bedzin, where students were studying Rutka's Notebook and conducting interdisciplinary projects "in the footsteps of Rutka Laskier." I listened to the students read paragraphs from my sister's diary and explain with love and compassion why they chose them. I will never forget this experience, which showed how meaningful her words can be for the young generation.

We must commemorate the lives of those lost to racial and political fanaticism — and not just on days like Holocaust Remembrance Day this Friday. We must not be afraid to remember, and more important, we must teach our children about the past. I applaud French President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal to institute a nationwide Holocaust educational program. He is correct that ignorance could cause the repetition of this abominable event — whether it is rooted in anti-Semitism or any other hatred. All nations should follow France's lead and create new ways to remember the past and teach tolerance.

At a time when genocide remains a horrible reality in too many parts of the world, Rutka Laskier, Anne Frank and other Holocaust diarists remind us of the sanctity of each life that is taken in the mass crime that is genocide.

I feel confident that if my sister Rutka could have lived to speak to us today, she would encourage us never to forget the bitter fruits of racial and political fanaticism and to ensure that our children learn the same lesson. But then again, in a sense she still lives, and will always live to tell her story, in the moving pages of her notebook.

Zahava (Laskier) Scherz, Ph.D., is a faculty member of the Department of Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the author of two essays in Rutka's Notebook: A Voice From the Holocaust.

Source: Zahava Scherz. A sister I never knew delivers an eternal Holocaust message. Blogs @USA Today (28 April 2008) [FullText and Comments]

Labels: Rehovot History, Rehovot Holocaust Stories

by Serge Debrebant

Two months ago, Yad Vashem published the diary of Rutka Laskier, a Jewish girl from Poland who, at the age of 14, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Over the course of a few months in 1943, Rutka kept a diary while living in a ghetto in the town of Bedzin, about 20 miles from Auschwitz. She wrote about her first love, but also about the gas chambers. For 60 years, her Christian friend Stanislawa Sapinska preserved the diary. She and Rutka had agreed that Rutka would hide her diary under the stairs of her house and Sapinska would retrieve it after the war. In 2005, Sapinska decided to make it available to the public.

Rutka’s father, Yaacov, was the only family member to survive the Holocaust. He immigrated to Israel, remarried and had another daughter, Zahava Scherz, who works in Rehovot as a director of science and education communication at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She recently sat down with the Forward to discuss the sister she never met.

Rutka Laskier’s diary is compared to Anne Frank’s. In what sense, do you think, the diaries are similar?

I read Anne Frank’s diary some years ago, but I remember it quite well. In a way, Rutka’s diary is a completion to Anne Frank’s. Both of them were born in 1929, and both were Jewish girls who died in concentration camps. Both wrote about their love affairs and their personal lives on the one hand, and the Holocaust on the other. Besides the similarities, their situations were quite different. Rutka was not locked in a flat, but lived in an open ghetto. She knew about Auschwitz and the war between Germany and Russia. She even escaped an attempted deportation. I hate to say it, but there is more action in Rutka’s diary. It’s also much shorter.

I was surprised that a girl her age knew about Auschwitz

Yes, it’s unbelievable. It was a shock to me that she knew about the gas chambers. I thought Jewish people didn’t know about them until they came to Auschwitz. Stanislawa Sapinska, her friend, thinks that she possibly was connected to a secret organization. She was a very political person and a very sharp, strong and mature character.

Did your feelings change after you read the diary?

I knew that my father had a daughter who died in Auschwitz, but he didn’t talk to me about her a lot. I never felt like she was my sister. Then I got to know her through the diary and by meeting her friends, and all of a sudden she became real to me and very close. I discovered how wonderful she was. I became proud of her, and I started to love her. I became her sister, and she became mine. I grew up as an only child, and suddenly I wasn’t anymore. That is very nice.

How did you first learn of Rutka?

When I was a child, my father, Yaacov, never talked with me about his former family. At the age of 14, I found a photo album, which he didn’t keep with the others but between some cloths in a cupboard. I had noticed that my father and my mother took this album out and looked inside from time to time, and I wanted to see what was in there. I found the picture of a girl and asked my father why we looked so alike. He said, “That’s my daughter Rutka.” He told me he had a wife, a daughter and a son and that they were killed in the Holocaust. I was shocked. I cannot even explain how sorry I felt for him. You think your parents are normal people with a normal life, and suddenly you discover how much they have suffered. I couldn’t understand how people could suffer so much.

Did you know that your father had survived the Holocaust?

Yes, I did. He was in Auschwitz and had a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. After Auschwitz, he was transferred to Sachsenhausen and worked in the Bernhard operation. The Jewish prisoners had to print false money for the Germans; the Germans wanted to use it to destabilize the economy of the Allies. It was a top-secret operation. At the end of the war, he was transferred to Austria. They were all doomed to death, but when the Americans came, the Germans escaped and left all the prisoners behind. Then he immigrated to Israel.

How did he talk about Rutka?*

With a lot of love, sorrow and pain, but without giving any details. We only talked a few times about her. He only said that she was very smart and very mature, nothing more. I think he wanted to protect me and also himself. If you decide to continue with your life, you cannot live with your other life. He had to make a cut. I think he is fortunate that he didn’t know about the diary. I cried when I read it, and I didn’t even know her. He had enough bad memories. I fear that my father wouldn’t have been able to continue his life.

You wrote the foreword of the publication. Why did you choose to write it in such a sober, minimalistic style?

I wanted to give facts. I don’t see myself as a writer, and I didn’t want to divert the readers’ attention from Rutka’s diary. It’s her book, not mine.

Source: Serge Debrebant. The Sister She Never Knew. The Jewish Daily Forward (15 August 2007) [FullText]

Labels: Rehovot Holocaust Stories