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JERUSALEM — The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the “Polish Anne Frank” was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto _ at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands….Read the rest of this story here…

Rutka Laskier’s story is extraordinary and extremely horrific; while I am glad that this young girl’s plight has finally come to light, I cannot help but be a little agitated by the press spin. “The Polish Anne Frank” has been the hook for most of the links to this story. Indeed it seems that the only report on this is the AP story. What troubles me is that the AP feels in order to get people interested they have to have a “hook.” My first thought when reading that “hook” was Laskier is NOT the “Polish Anne Frank.” While it is true that she was a 14 year old Jewish girl who kept a journal of her experiences during the early WWII years, the similarities seem to end there. (Although, I cannot say that definitely because there only seems to be one article about this find and it doesn’t mention even if there are plans to publish the 60 page memento to the public.) I do not understand why we must filter Laskier’s story through that of Frank. Is not Laskier (and indeed Frank) her own person. She is not the “Polish Anne Frank.” She is Rutka Laskier, a girl who will perpetually live in the miseries of her all too brief adolescence. It is disrespectful to both girls to compare them in such a way. While there are no doubt similarities, it seems shamefully trite to say they were any more alike than young girls who kept a diary (in Laskier’s case a 60 page notebook) during an era of history that haunts us.

Laskier seems petulantly more pessimistic than Frank, in the small excerpts available to the public online. She also seems, if possible, more stark in her evaluations. She refers to herself as “an animal waiting to die” at one point, putting any doubt to the idea she was unaware of her fate or the fate of those around her. She lived miles from Auschwitz and it was here where her short life ended. Laskier, it seems, held no illusions about where her destiny was leading. She speaks of the atrocities that others had endured in the labor camps, and even calls Auschwitz by name. It seems obvious she had no misapprehension of what was happening there. In this regard, Frank was painfully at a disadvantage. While her diary is no doubt a relevant piece of history, and a psychological study of adolescence (and even into the mind of a budding writer) her optimism is painful at times, knowing what was to later transpire. We want to believe that Frank will be alright in the end, to see her and Peter Van Pels (Van Daan) able to explore the feelings they felt, as were other teens at that age and in that time. Caught up in her feelings, her hopes, we hope she will escape the horror encasing on her. There are no hints of that same hope in Laskier’s diary. She flits between adolescent fantasy and outright rage and shock. She doesn’t even maintain her notebook until the end. What causes her to give up writing is anyone’s guess. Although, her stark observations seem to indicate she gave up all together. We can only hope more comes to light. Frank also had the foresight to edit and recopy her diary herself. We could look upon this as a bit of a filter for our eyes. Laskier’s passion is harsh and unsorted, as raw as Frank’s account is poetic.

While I appreciate and admire Anne Frank, comparing another account to her own, to the point of omitting that girl’s name, seems wrong to me. Anne Frank is Anne Frank and Rutka Laskier is Rutka Laskier. I wish our society could see that individualism didn’t start with the modern age.

UPDATE:

Here is another article out of the UK on Rutka Laskier. Much of the information is the same, but there are some different details.

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