Yitskhok Rudashevski (M / Lithuania, 1927-1943), Holocaust victim
Yitskhok Rudashevski (M / Lithuania, 1927-1943), Holocaust victim.
- KEYWORDS : <Lithuania> <Vilna Ghetto>
- MEMOIRS : The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (1968; ET 1973)
Biography
NOTES : Yitskhok Rudashevski was a young Jewish teenager who lived in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania during the 1940s. He was shot to death in the Ponary massacre on Oct 1, 1943 during the liquidation of September–October 1943.
Book : The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (1968; ET 1973)
- Originally published in Hebrew (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-meuhad, 1968). English ed. The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (Tel Aviv [Israel]: Ghetto Fighters' House, 1973). Also published in French (2016), and Lithuanian/Yiddish (2018).
Yitskhok Rudashevski wrote a diary from June 1941 to April 1943 (age 14-16), when living in the Vilna Ghetto. The diary, which detailed his life and struggles in the ghetto, was discovered by his cousin Sore Voloshin, in 1944. His cousin Voloshin fought the German army and the Soviet Union, later returning to the hideout, and found Yitskhok's diary.
"This is the diary of one of the "other Anne Franks," teen diarists of the Holocaust who are not nearly as famous as she. Yitskhok Rudashevski was fourteen when he began his diary in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. He was a gifted writer and wrote movingly of how his family and all the other Vilna Jews were confined to a ghetto and the ghetto kept shrinking and shrinking as the Nazis conducted "Aktions" and killed vast numbers of people, usually by machine-gunning them en masse at nearby Ponar. Rudashevski did not survive; he and his family went into hiding, but they were caught and almost all of them were executed. He was fifteen years old when he died. His account of the suffering of the Vilna Jews, and his own struggle to remain human amid the disaster, is well worth reading."--Publisher description.
Book : We Are Witnesses (1995), by Jacob Boas
- Jacob Boas, We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1995).
"The five diarists in this book did not survive the war. But their words did. Each diary reveals one voice, one teenager coping with the impossible. We see Dawid Rubinowicz struggling against fear and terror. Yitskhok Rudashevski shows us how Jews clung to culture, to learning, and to hope, until there was no hope at all. Moshe Flinker is the voice of religion, constantly seeking answers from God for relentless tragedy. Éva Heyman demonstrates the unquenchable hunger for life that sustained her until the very last moment. And finally, Anne Frank reveals the largest truth they all left for us: Hitler could kill millions, but he could not destroy the human spirit. These stark accounts of how five young people faced the worst of human evil are a testament, and an inspiration, to the best of the human soul."--Publisher description.