Yitskhok rudashevski biography of donald

When the Nazis entered Vilna June he started to write a diary in Yiddish which was continued until 6 April Rudashevski and his family were killed in Ponary in the autumn of The diary was partly published in Yiddish and later fully edited and translated into Hebrew and English. This youthful record is one of the best documents on the struggle for survival and the cultural resistance of the Jews in the Vilna ghetto.

In other projects. Wikidata item. References [ edit ]. Yale University Press. ISBN You have been researching Judaica for many years, you have read many memoirs and translated many works. There are a lot of tragic, authentic scenes told by a child, and they sound very real and unadulterated. You can feel the fear, the despair and the faith in the text.

They were very lucky, they were let through the ghetto gates, but they were stopped by their grandmother, whom he loved very much. The guards did not let her pass, they separated her from the family and they realised that she was going to be taken to Paneriai to be shot. The moment when they are forced to leave her alone is described in an extremely shocking, extremely painful way, and he writes how he cannot sleep, how he sees the eyes of his grandmother being left to die in front of him.

Another scene is when he is hiding in a storeroom during a ghetto manhunt by a group of Lithuanian collaborators. He stands trembling in the storeroom, hiding behind a wooden wall. And he can feel the trappers walking around, shining torches, trying to see where the Jews are hiding. A woman with a baby is also hiding among the people. Suddenly the baby starts crying.

The people are so frightened that they start shouting at the mother to strangle her baby because it will betray them all. When I was reading these scenes, translating them, I really could not sleep sometimes afterwards. He believes in the word, he believes in writing, he believes in the book itself, and it turns out that his premonition that what he writes will make sense, will survive, in spite of everything, comes true.

His faith proved correct. His face, his narrative were supposed to be completely gone, but his story does not end with his death in Paneriai. This is the greatest hope and perhaps the lesson that his diary teaches now, how not to break down, how to survive in extreme situations. A diary that until now has been very little known. The aim of the organisers of the exhibition was to highlight its importance, so that the diary of Rudashevski could be seen as a classical source of history.

There are certainly many more Lithuanian Holocaust sources. Kagan was a prominent journalist in Kaunas between the wars, and he and his wife were hidden by a very ordinary Lithuanian family of farmers. This diary is extremely interesting because it tells the story of the relationship between Jews and their rescuers, and the entire rescue network. Do you see a growing interest in Judaica, Jewish heritage in this country, openness to talk about the Holocaust?

I think that this is the result of an intensive process of discovering and making sense of the Jewish heritage that has been going on for more than a decade. It is very important that not only state institutions be involved, but also many people who volunteer, who read the names of the Holocaust victims in various Lithuanian cities and towns, where they are discovering the local Jewish history.

It is a very varied and intensive process. Jewish memory is becoming part of our own social memory. It is very important for us to realise that the tragedy of the Holocaust is a tragedy of the Lithuanian citizens. He was not religious, however.

Yitskhok rudashevski biography of donald

When the Germans invaded Lithuania on 22 June , Yitskhok was just 13 years old. With ample cooperation from the Lithuanians, the Germans immediately set about the task of persecuting the Jews of Vilna. Within a month of their arrival they had taken 35, men, women, and children some six miles into the Ponary forest and murdered them. Soon Ponary had become one of the most notorious killing sites in eastern Europe.

Sensing the gravity of the historical moment, Yitskhok began keeping a diary when the Germans were advancing toward his native city. The first entry of the diary is dated 21 June , with the last entry dated 7 April When Yitskhok's family was forced into the Vilna ghetto on 6 September , the boy was traumatized by being separated from his maternal grandmother, to whom he had always been close.

She was soon murdered by the Nazis. The Rudashevski family remained in the ghetto until it was liquidated on 23 September Throughout his time Yitskhok secretly continued to attend school, and he participated in various clubs and literary societies. Among his most important activities was the gathering of tales, testimonies, and other materials documenting the history of the Vilna ghetto.

When the ghetto was liquidated and the last of its Jews were sent to be murdered at Ponary, Yitskhok and his parents went into hiding with his Uncle Voloshin, who had a residence on Disne Street where five other people were also hiding. On either 5 or 7 October the Rudashevskis were discovered and sent to the killing field at Ponary. Among those whom the Nazis discovered in the hiding place was Yitskhok's cousin, a young woman named Sore Voloshin.