What a remarkable find and an incredibly moving story!  My oldest daughter (who is Jewish) is only three years younger than this brave girl was...

 

It certainly underscores how despicable the Holocaust deniers are, most notably the leader of Iran.  It's hard to believe this happened within my parents' lifetime -- and even harder to believe that the world sits idly by while another genocide occurs in Darfur!

"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," the teenager wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die."...

"I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy," she wrote on Feb. 5, 1943.

"The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death."

Reports of the gassing of Jews, which were not common knowledge in the West by then, apparently had filtered into the Bedzin ghetto, which was near Auschwitz, Yad Vashem experts said.

The following day she opened her entry with a heated description of her hatred toward her Nazi tormentors. But then, in an effortless transition, she described her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a first kiss.

"I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone's hands to stroke me," she wrote. "I didn't know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now."

Later that day, she shifted back to her harsh reality, describing how she watched as a Nazi soldier tore a Jewish baby away from his mother and killed him with his bare hands.

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Polish Girl's Holocaust Diary Unveiled

Emotional, Tragic Holocaust Diary of Polish Teenager Unveiled 60 Years Later

By ARON HELLER Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM Jun 4, 2007 (AP)

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3242847

The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.

The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.