Rutka Laskier

Rutka Laskier's diary has just been handed over to Yad Vashem. Who you might ask?

A Polish woman who for 60 years had been holding onto the diary of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis in 1943, presented the journal to Israel's Holocaust memorial on Monday.

"I have a feeling that I'm writing for the last time. There is a (round-up) in town. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house," 14-year-old Rutka Laskier wrote while living in a Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, Poland on February 20, 1943.

Laskier hid her diary under the floorboards of her house before her family was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp.

It was later found by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Bedzin native, who lived in the house before the German occupation and had befriended Laskier.

"She wanted the journal to survive, even if she didn't, so the world would see how the Jews suffered," said Sapinska, 82, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

The two girls agreed that Laskier would hide the diary beneath a floorboard under the staircase of her house and following the war Sapinska would look after it, Sapinska said.

A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said they believe Laskier was killed immediately after arriving in Auschwitz in August, 1943.

A reminder of a vile and foul moment in history, one that is unfortunately needed. Yet there's one thing that has been done by Yad Vashem, over and above keeping alive said history, which I think is to be celebrated, is uplifting even. This is the extension of the old idea of the Righteous Among the Nations:  that there are those who, despite bearing the handicap of being Gentile, of not being amongst God's Chosen People*, are indeed still righteous.

As has been said about one so declared:

"We brought you here, my young friends, in order that you may know that not only cruelty and ruthlessness reigned in those days. There were others too, noble and wonderful people, who risked their own lives and the lives of their families in order to save. True, their number is small, compared with the millions who cooperated with the Nazis in the annihilation of our people, and with the tens of millions who remained indifferent and, keeping silent, played not a minor role in the carrying out of the Final Solution.

"There were no more than 7,000 in number on the whole, but today, being present at the ceremony of the unveiling of the monument for the 'Righteous among the Nations' who remained unknown, you surely understood that there must have been many others, whose names are not yet known and will apparently remain unknown forever. Thanks to those few thousands, our belief in mankind has been restored. Indeed, not everyone stood against us then, as well as today, when not the whole world is opposing us."

Far too few of course, but that any existed at all is a reminder that not all is lost for humanity.

(* This is looking out from inside Judaism, of course.)