Rywka's Diary

August 1, 2015
During the dark days of the Holocaust, a bright 14-year-old girl of the Lodz committed her deepest feelings to a diary. Now that important diary is published.Lipszyc's journal was found at the end of World War II near an Auschwitz crematorium by a Russian army doctor who left it to her daughter, who passed it on to the Jewish social service organization that sponsored its translation and publication. But the author did not perish at Auschwitz. Unlike all her immediate family, she survived the war, her destiny after it unknown. Her adolescent diary begins during the Jewish New Year in the fall of 1943 and ends just after Passover the following spring. The teenager, whose parents had already perished, writes of her beloved mentor, Surcia. Lipszyc and her siblings lived with young cousins in a household headed by a girl a few years older. Her brother and sister were deported by the Nazis in a roundup of Jews deemed useless. Throughout the diary, hope and faith yield to misery and despair. Hours of factory work and attempts at sewing lessons precede inevitable declines in health and spirit. It was a cold winter in the Lodz. Rations were meager, and food was stolen. People slowly starved to death. Awaiting necessary identification cards , missing daily portions of soup, wondering who stole precious marmalade, and counting the latest deaths, Lipszyc wrote her poetry and reflections: "What's going to happen tomorrow, we don't know!... / Oh, God! Help us at last!" The brief diary is supported by contributions of valuable essays. It is well-known that many diaries were written during the Holocaust. Most, like their authors, were lost. Only a few, like Lipszyc's, survived. Her ultimate fate may be unknown, but her journal of torment is a testament to the survival of the human spirit in the face of evil.

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April 15, 2015

In 1945, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria, a Red Army doctor found a diary kept by a girl from the Lodz ghetto and took it back with her to the Soviet Union. When her granddaughter immigrated to America, she gave the diary to the Jewish Family and Children's Services' Holocaust Center in San Francisco, which published the diary last year. This revised edition is supplemented by photographs, news clippings, maps, and commentary from Holocaust scholars and Rywka's surviving relatives.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015

In 1945, a Soviet doctor found the diary of Rywka Lipszyc, a Polish teenage girl, in Auschwitz after its liberation. Hidden for seven decades, this significant historical journal is now being widely released with illustrations, contextual essays, and archival research. The diary doesn't chronicle Rywka's time at Auschwitz; instead, it contains her thoughts and observations between October 1943 and April 1944 while living in the Lodz ghetto. When the diary starts, she had already lost both of her parents to illness and Nazi brutality and her two youngest siblings through deportation to concentration camps. Her narrative gives readers a sense of a girl trying to find normalcy through friendship, worship, work, and school, yet isn't entirely free from the underlying horror of her circumstances. With a strong voice, Rywka recounts an experience of illness, cold, and hunger--always hunger. Remarkably, she still finds joy in hard work, her faith, and her diary. VERDICT An incredible addition to Holocaust literature. The historical essays are informative and absorbing to a general audience. [See Prepub Alert, 3/23/15.]--Heidi Uphoff, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.