Diary of the Vilna Ghetto

This is the diary of one of the "other Anne Franks," teen diarists of the Holocaust who are not nearly as famous as she. Yitskhok Rudashevski was fourteen when he began his diary in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. He was a gifted writer and wrote movingly of how his family and all the other Vilna Jews were confined to a ghetto and the ghetto kept shrinking and shrinking as the Nazis conducted "Aktions" and killed vast numbers of people, usually by machine-gunning them en masse at nearby Ponar. Rudashevski did not survive; he and his family went into hiding, but they were caught and almost all of them were executed. He was fifteen years old when he died. His account of the suffering of the Vilna Jews, and his own show more struggle to remain human amid the disaster, is well worth reading. show less