What seems like a divine series of events has culminated in the publication of the Holocaust diary of a 14 year old girl.
Here’s what we know:
-When Rywka Lipszyc began her diary, she had lived in the Lodz ghetto for more than three years and had already lost both of her parents.
-her diary cover six months in the Lodz ghetto starting in 1943.
-Zinaida Berezovskaya, A Soviet Red Army doctor found the diary beside a crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945.
– Berezovskaya kept the diary hidden in a closet in her home in Omsk (in southwestern Siberia) until her death in 1983.
-Her son kept it another 12 years until his death in Moscow in 1995.
-His daughter “found the diary wrapped with an explanatory cover note and an accompanying Russian newspaper article, with a photo from February 1945 showing the exact spot where the diary was found,” and took it back to San Francisco where she had immigrated to.
-She then wrote to the S.F.-based Holocaust Center of Northern California
-then the pros went to work. The diary “was exhaustively researched, authenticated and annotated. It took a team of historians, archivists and translators years to finalize the newly published book.”
Rywka’s Registration Card from the Lodz Ghetto
The Diary of Rywka Lipszyc will be available for purchase on March 31, 2014. To pre-order or inquire about an advanced copy, contact books@jfcs.org.
The website for the diary wher you can view the diary page by page, along with English translation
The diary of another young girl: Holocaust journal comes to light in San Francisco – J weekly