Stark realities of life under Nazi rule
Yitskhok Rudashevski writes about hiding in a cramped space so tight that "there was no air to breathe."
The Caulfield Shule community recently gathered to hear from guest speaker Shelly Freeman, chief of staff at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Founded in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1925, YIVO is the largest resource in the world for the study of East European Jewish life and history. Freeman told the story of Yitskhok Rudashevski’s diary, preserved in the YIVO archives since the 1940s.
Rudashevski was a 13-year-old Jewish boy who documented his life in the Vilna Ghetto from 1941 to 1943.
His diary, written in Yiddish, is astonishing in its depth and insight.
Rudashevski was brilliant, observant, and deeply introspective.
His diary captures the stark realities of life under Nazi rule, the oppressive cruelty of the Jewish Council, and the resilience of a people determined to find dignity amidst horror.
Even as death surrounded him, he found solace in books, poetry, and learning.
Rudashevski, along with his parents, was murdered in 1943 in the killing fields of Ponary.
And yet, his voice endures, his words, smuggled out and miraculously preserved, still speak to us today.
I understood something essential about human endurance.
Without imagination, there is no hope, without hope there is no future.
His diary is not just a record, it is an act of defiance.
Even in the darkest of times, he read, learned, and engaged.
He described attending lectures, reciting poetry, and immersing himself in intellectual life.
He writes about hiding in a cramped space so tight that “there was no air to breathe.”
That simple visceral sentence immediately transported me to October 7, 2023, when people in Israel were forced to cram into storage rooms, gasping for breath, hiding from those who sought to erase them.
When the Nazis murdered Rudashevski, his diary fell silent.
But in a twist of fate, it was found after the war by his cousin, Sore Voloshin, the sole survivor of their family.
The YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum has an English translation and Yiddish version of the diary for free viewing online at museum.yivo.org
It is also featured in the Jewish Quarterly’s November 2024 edition, available for purchase at jewishquarterly.com
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