The Rudashevski Diary

Overview

'Today I turned fifteen and live very much for tomorrow. I do not feel two ways about it. I see before me sun and sun and sun . . . '

Yitskhok Rudashevski was transferred to the Vilna Ghetto when he was thirteen. For nearly two years he used a small notebook to chronicle his hope, his despair and his experience of daily ghetto life. His diary was later discovered in an attic that was the final hiding place for him and his parents. This remarkable translation from Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld reveals a teenager whose love of culture, history and knowledge defied the cruelty that surrounded him.
Displaying empathy and intellect far beyond his years, Yitskhok confronts the terrible moral choices required for survival in the ghetto. 

His diary, expertly introduced by Professor Samuel D. Kassow, is both a crucial historical document and a deeply poignant portrait of one lost soul among millions.

Author Biography

Samuel D. Kassow is an American professor of history at Trinity College in Connecticut with a focus on Jewish History.

Yitskhok Rudashevski (10 December 1927 – 1 October 1943) was a Jewish teenager who lived in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania from 1941. He was shot to death in the Ponary massacre in 1943, aged 15. His diary was discovered in an attic in which he and his parents had hidden.