Vilna Ghetto teenager's diary during the Holocaust to be focus in new online exhibit by YIVO

Yitskhok Rudashevski’s diary of the Holocaust, as experienced in the Vilna Ghetto, translated to English, became the focus of a free online exhibit on Wednesday, Jewish News reported. 

The diary was discovered by Rudashevski’s cousin, teenager Sore Voloshin, the sole survivor of the Holocaust of her 50-member family. Voloshin had fled mass Nazi shootings in the Ponar pits, just outside of Vilna, and joined partisans in the surrounding forests. 

After liberation in July 1944 by the Soviet army, Sore, along with her friend Fayge, climbed into the attic of a house in Dysnos Street in Vilna, where her family had been hiding before being rounded up in September 1943. She then found the 200-page diary on the attack floor. Rudashevski had been shot dead in Ponar.

Voloshin compiled family photographs and gave the diary, originally written in English, together with the photos to writer Abraham Sutzkever, who displayed it in a museum of Jewish artifacts before realizing that the displayed materials were not safe in Soviet-ruled Lithuania. The diary and thousands of pieces of material were sent to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

In his diary, Rudashevski wrote about living conditions in the Vilna Ghetto and his thoughts about his family, his school, his friends, and political developments as the Nazis continued to conquer Europe. 

Rudashevski was born on December 10, 1927, when Vilna was still part of Poland. He was an only child to Eliyahu, a typesetter for the Vilner Tog, a Jewish daily paper, and Rosa, a seamstress. The family, including his mother’s mother, lived in a small apartment.

Rudashevski and his family described themselves as cultural Jews, although many in Vilna were religious. 

Rudashevski and his cousin Voloshin walked to school together and discussed their love of Yiddish writers. Rudashevski was described as a “committed young Marxist” in the exhibit and deeply interested in world politics. When he heard what the Nazis were doing, he immediately began worrying for his family and community. 

Rudashevski's diary entries

Rudashevski’s first diary entry was on 14 June 1941, when he was 13. “I observe the empty, sad streets,” he wrote that day. “A Lithuanian with a gun is standing in the street. I begin to grasp the vile treason of the Lithuanians: they shot the Red Army men in the back. They are going along with the Nazi bandits. The Red Army will return, and you will pay dearly, traitor! We will outlive you — that is our answer to the Lithuanian soldier with the Haenel gun. A motorcycle drives through the early-morning street: a gray, angular helmet, glasses, an overcoat, and a gun. Unfortunately, I have spotted the first soldier of the German army of occupation. His helmet flashes evil and cold.”

The day after this diary entry, the Nazis began imposing martial law in Vilna, with the help and collaboration of local Lithuanians and police.

The YIVO curator of the exhibition, Karolina Ziulkoski, says that Rudashevski wrote retrospectively about what happened between June and December 1941. “Then there is a gap, and he began writing again from September 1942 until April 1943.” 

“Weeks go by. I am cut off from the summer, from my surroundings, chained to the house to the courtyard. I don’t see any of my friends. There is no contact at all among the group. Everyone is preoccupied with his own day-to-day worries. Jews are humiliated and exploited. We have to stand in long lines to obtain bread and other foodstuffs. Jews are pushed out of them. Germans come up to the queues and throw the Jews out. Jews receive less food than the Aryans. Our life is a life of helpless fear. Our day is without a future,” Rudashevski wrote. 

New restrictions were imposed by the Nazis on Vilna’s Jews daily.

“It is dawn. I look out the window and see the first Vilna Jews with patches. It pained me to see how people are staring at them. The big pieces of yellow material on their packs burn inside me. For a long time, I couldn’t put on the patches. It felt like a hump, and two frogs were on me. I felt ashamed to appear with them in the street, not because I am a Jew, but because I am ashamed of what has been done to us. I was ashamed of our helplessness… they would hang patches on us from head to toe, and we could do nothing about it. It pained me that I could see no way out,” he wrote.

Vilna’s Jews were put into a ghetto on September 6, 1041.“I locate my parents, and here we are, in our ghetto home. It is evening, very dark and rainy. The little streets Rudnitsker, Shavler, Yatkever, Shpitol [Hospital] Street, and Disner, which make up the ghetto, look like anthills. They teem with people.”

The Rudashevski family was eventually forced to enter a hideout called a “melina,” set up by ghetto inhabitants since the Nazis kept changing rules about valid documentation. 

The family hid itself between two floors of a flat as the ghetto was cleared of residents. Hundreds of people, Rudashevski said, were taken to Ponar. “Ponar — that word is written in blood. Ponar — the huge grave… a slaughterhouse for thousands of Jews. The Ponar area is saturated with Jewish blood. Ponar is the same thing as a nightmare, a nightmare that has accompanied the gray thread of our ghetto-days. Ponar is passive death. The word contains the tragedy of our helplessness. No! We will not go to Ponar,” he wrote.

Rudashevski stopped writing in his diary on April 7, 1943. His cousin Voloshin said that he became quiet and depressed and stopped writing and speaking. 

In September 1943, his family moved to hide in another melina, in the attic of Dysnos Street. After 11 days there, a person left the hideout to find water, was followed by the Nazis, and the melina was discovered. Everyone was sent to prison. Days later, the family was taken to Ponar and shot dead.

YIVO said the diary provides “intimate insights into daily life, cultural resistance, and moral choices faced by those in the ghetto. The exhibition also ties into broader themes of preserving heritage and the importance of youth voices in historical narratives.”