Lipszyc - Rywkas Diary

Rywka Lipszyc was one of hundreds of thousands of Jewish teenagers living in Nazi-occupied Europe who never had the chance to experience the typical pleasures and pains of adolescence. Like her, every one of them had hopes and dreams, fears and sorrows, joys and loves.

Too few survived, and of those who were killed, only a handful left behind a record of their lives. We dedicate this book to those young men and women whose words are forever lost and to their families.

Anita Friedman,
Editor

Poland after the Nazi conquest, September 1939

JUDY JANEC

I n the spring of 1945, a doctor with the liberating Red Army plucked a diary from the ruins of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The physician, Zinaida Berezovskaya, a fierce Soviet patriot and committed Communist, had left her home to fight the great battle against the invading Nazi army and had accompanied the Soviet troops to Auschwitz.

Zinaida took the diary with her when she returned to her home in Omsk, in southwestern Siberia, where she and the diary remained until her death in 1983. Her effects were sent to her son, Ghen Shangin-Berezovsky, who lived in Moscow. Upon his death in 1992, Ghens belongings went to his wife, Lilavati Ramayya. It was at her mothers house in Moscow that Ghens daughter, Anastasia Shangina-Berezovskaya (granddaughter of Zinaida), first encountered the diary on a visit in 1995. Immediately sensing its value, she brought it back to San Francisco, where she had emigrated in 1991.

Over the ensuing years, Anastasia made several attempts to find an appropriate institution to collaborate withone that could identify the diarys value and perhaps translate and publish it. In June 2008, she contacted Leslie Kane, executive director of what was then the Holocaust Center of Northern California. Leslie passed on her e-mail to me as the centers archivist and librarian, and within days, Anastasia brought the diary to our library.

It was a breathtaking artifactan unknown diary written in the Lodz ghettoand a rare opportunity to add to the historical record. Handwritten in Polish, in a school notebook, the diary was in relatively good condition. The first two pages were detached from the rest; part of the writing was obscured; and there were some water stains and rust. But considering its age and its provenancethe ruins of the crematoria at Auschwitzit was remarkably well preserved.

One hundred twelve pages long, the diary was accompanied by a note (see page 217) and two newspapers from the time. The diarys first entry was dated October 3, 1943, Litzmannstadt [Lodz] ghetto. It concluded in the ghetto on April 12, 1944. Clearly, this was a remarkable document. How remarkable neither Anastasia nor others could determine without assistance. We decided to digitally reproduce a few pages so that we could share them with experts in the field. Carefully, we scanned several pages, and in this way began the process of bringing this diary, which had slumbered in darkness for over sixty years, to light.

On the recommendation of Zachary Baker, the curator of Judaica at Stanford University and a member of the board of directors of the Holocaust Center, with whom we first shared the scans, we approached Professor Robert Moses Shapiro of Brooklyn College, an eminent scholar and expert on the Lodz ghetto and its diaries, as well as a fluent reader and speaker of Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Dr. Shapiro quickly recognized the special value of the diary. After viewing the sampling of pages that we had scanned, he felt sure of its authenticity. Over the course of the next months, several steps were made to ensure that this extraordinary diary would be shared with the world.

The first step was to make a high-resolution digital reproduction of the diary. In this way its intellectual content would be preserved forever. Even if something were to happen to the actual artifact, the words of the diarist would be saved. The scans of the diary were viewed by Marek Web, former archivist at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, who also confirmed its authenticity.

The next step was to have it transcribed. At the recommendation of Dr. Shapiro, we turned to Ewa Wiatr of the Center for Jewish Research at the University of Lodz. She agreed to transcribe and provide annotations to the diary. It was Ewa who discovered the identity of the writer and confirmed it through a check of the Lodz ghetto records. The diarist helped with this identification by naming herself in the diary. Thus we began our acquaintanceship with Rywka Lipszyc.

In December 2010, the Holocaust Center of Northern California was dissolved, and it donated its collection of books and artifacts to Jewish Family and Childrens Services (JFCS) of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin, and Sonoma Counties, headed by Dr. Anita Friedman. JFCS developed a new Holocaust education program and worked in partnership with Lehrhaus Judaica, a nondenominational Bay Area center for adult Jewish education, founded by Fred Rosenbaum, to publish the diary. In a fortunate coincidence, Rosenbaum had just coauthored a book about a young womans experiences in the Lodz ghetto and AuschwitzOut on a Ledge (River Forest, IL: Wicker Park Press Ltd., 2010)with its subject, Eva Libitzky.

We now had to translate the diary into English, including the annotations that Ewa Wiatr had prepared. Working with two translators, Malgorzata Szajbel-Kleck and Malgorzata Markoff, we soon had an English translation available. Alexandra Zapruder, the editor of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers Diaries of the Holocaust and the winner of the 2002 National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust literature, agreed to join our project as editor of the diary and to offer an introduction to and perspective on an adolescents emerging identity in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Historian Fred Rosenbaum provided an essay on the Lodz ghetto, and Hadassa Halamish, the daughter of one of Rywkas cousins, contributed her mother Minas and aunt Esthers recollections of their time with Rywka in the ghetto and in the camps. Esther also provided a postscript.

So, with the assistance of archivists, historians, Holocaust survivors, translators, and editorsas well as the support of philanthropists, agency directors, and so many others around the world committed to Holocaust educationour goal has been achieved. Rywka Lipszyc will not remain a nameless victim of the Holocaust. Her words will survive her.

Papers left in the street after deportation. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Archival Signature 4062/76)

ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER

R ywka Lipszyc began the sole surviving volume of her Lodz ghetto diary shortly after her fourteenth birthday. She filled more than 100 handwritten pages over six months from October 1943 to April 1944, and then suddenly stopped. A year later, a Soviet doctor, accompanying the Red Armys liberating forces, found it near the ruins of the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau. If the diarys journey suggests the path Rywka took toward almost certain death, its pages tell a far deeper story, for in it Rywka struggled to understand and express herself, capturing both the physical hardships of life in the ghetto and the emotional turmoil of coming of age during the Holocaust.