Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Diaries of Two Young Girls

Today would have been Anne Frank’s 78th birthday. In interesting related news, Yad Vashem, the Israeli holocaust museum, released the diary of Rutka Laskier, who the media has dubbed “the Polish Anne Frank.” Laskier was fourteen in 1943 when she wrote the diary, depicting the horrors of the Nazi regime while juxtaposing the world’s reality with the growing desires and concerns of a young woman. Laskier was the same age as Frank and is believed to have perished at Auschwitz.

The diary was hidden away by Stanislawa Sapinska, a friend of Laskier’s, under the floorboards of Sapinska’s basement during the war. Sapinska retrieved the diary after the end of WWII, keeping it in her home library. Feeling that the diary was too private a memoir, Sapinska held the diary back until her nephew asked her to share it.

The book is available for purchase at the Yad Vashem website.


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Interesting historical tidbits:

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated on this date in 1939 in Cooperstown, NY, one hundred years after the invention of the game… Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963… President Ronald Reagan publicly challenged Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbechev to tear down the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today in 1987… Thirteen years ago today, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered outside her home in Los Angeles… And in Harry Potter history, on this date four years ago outside of London, a trailer containing copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was stolen; the empty trailer was found two days later.

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