Before Petr was deported to the camp, he kept a diary about his life. It was first published by his sister Eva as Diary of My Brother. The English translation was published in 2007 as “ The Diary of Petr Ginz 1941–1942.” Miriam Wattenberg (Mary Berg) The diary of Mary Berg was one of the first children's journals to be published which revealed to a wider public the horrors of the Holocaust. The Secret Diary Of The Holocaust (WW2 Documentary) | History Documentary". Reel Truth History . Retrieved 26 January 2022. She knew how to describe things. She was very gifted in writing, and the story about her everyday life, such banal things get a special impact when you know she was living under the German rule with the danger. Every day people were missing," Gutterman says. "This is something. You feel like she was talking to you." a b c d e " 'Polish Anne Frank' diary revealed. 14-year-old's memoirs given to Yad Vashem by victim's friend after 64 years - Jerusalem Post | HighBeam Research". 2016-05-05. Archived from the original on 2016-05-05 . Retrieved 2023-07-25.

Miriam was born in Poland in 1924 but her mother was an American, which gave her family a privilege, because Jews with American citizenship could be exchanged for German prisoners of war. While hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to their deaths, Miriam and her family were held at an internment camp in France, waiting for the transfer that would eventually bring them to the US. Like many teenage girls, 14-year-old Rutka Laskier kept a diary of her hopes, her dreams and her disappointments. She wrote a lot about boys — the ones she liked and the ones she didn't — and her friends. She wrote in pencil in a spiral notebook, offering a glimpse of life in the Polish town of Bedzin during three months in 1943, under the growing oppression of the Holocaust. The Germans came to Norway in 1940. Two years later, Ruth was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. On arrival she was led straight to the gas chambers. Philip was moved from camp to camp until he was sent to Sobibor extermination camp in 1943, and was killed by gas chamber.The diary begins on 19 January with the entry "I cannot grasp that it is already 1943, four years since this hell began."[1] One of the final entries says "If only I could say, it's over, you die only once... But I can't, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day."[1] Rutka Laskier was born in Kraków [1] to Dwojra Hampel, daughter of Abram Chil Hampel, and Jakub Laskier, who worked as a bank officer. [2] [3] Her family was well off. Her grandfather served as co-owner of Laskier-Kleinberg & Co, a milling company that owned and operated a grist mill. [4] As the Nazis tightened their grip on Poland, Rutka asked her non-Jewish neighbor, Stanislava Shapinska, where she should hide the diary if she had to leave home suddenly. They agreed she should leave it hidden beneath some stairs in Rutka's house. According to her diary, she used to believe in God, but became a atheist when the Nazis began persecuting the Jews in Poland.

Her diary was recovered by her sister Nina, who had survived, unknown to Tanya and her family, when she returned to Leningrad after the war ended. Her short diary was presented as evidence of Nazi atrocities during the Nuremberg Trials. Tanya’s diary is now displayed at the Museum of Leningrad History. Hélène BerrEpstein, Catherine (2010). Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford University Press. p.103. ISBN 978-0-19-954641-1. By December 1941, deportations from Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto had begun, and the Ginz family was gradually broken up. Petr was transferred to a concentration camp in October 1942, once he attained 14. Two years later, he was deported to Auschwitz and was murdered in the gas chambers. As horrifying as these events were, Rutka had not yet felt compelled to take up her pen. Why did she wait so long to begin recording a response to Nazi persecution? Perhaps a clue can be found in her entry for January 30th.