A world that vanished in the horror of the Holocaust, the Jewish community of Vilnius, resurfaced at the Frankfurt Book Fair with the publication of the diary of the ”Lithuanian Anne Frank”.
Masha Rolnikaite’s ”I Must Tell — My Diary 1941-1945,” just released in German for the first time in its entirety by the Berlin publishing house Kindler, tells the story of a young girl struggling to escape the sweep of genocide through her hometown.
Unlike Frank, Rolnikaite survived to tell the tale and breathes life into the city known as ”the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” once a cradle of eastern European Jewish culture. The journal, written in Yiddish, begins on July 22, 1941 with the bombardment of Vilnius by the Nazi air force and ends in early March 1945 with her liberation by Russian soldiers.
In 1930, Jews represented one third of Vilnius’ 200 000 inhabitants and shtetls, Jewish communities, had spread through vast regions of Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Belarus and northern Ukraine.
Vilnius, the worldwide capital of Yiddish, the shared language of eastern European Jewry, was home to a number of prominent Jewish intellectuals.
The writer Moishe Kulbak, the poet Avrom Sutzkever who testified at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the historian Simon Dubnov, author of a comprehensive account of the Jewish people, and the violinist Jasha Heifetz all found refuge in the ”Jerusalem of Lithuania”.
It was in Vilnius that Jewish socialism was born with the foundation in 1897 of Bund, a formidable troop of militants who would in World War II become Jewish partisan battalions and later help form the Israeli Labour Party.
Rolnikaite, who lives in St. Petersburg today, was assigned in September 1941 at the age of 14 to the newly created Vilnius ghetto, where she lived with her mother who was later murdered. Two years later, the SS forced the remaining Jews to abandon the ghetto and rounded them up for transports to the concentration camp of Stutthof, near Gdansk in Poland, or for death marches before the advancing Red Army.
Masha Rolnikaite could only salvage some of her writings but her mother’s insistence that she learn the texts by heart helped her to later restore what was destroyed or lost. Persistent anti-Semitism in the eastern bloc after the war meant that Rolnikaite’s diary was only published in a censored form in 1963.
Today, the reader can hear the cries of disbelief rise from the page. ”The Germans do not regard us as human beings and mark us like sheep with the yellow star,” Rolnikaite said and asked the question that still remains unanswered: ”Where does this wild hatred come from?”
Nowhere else were the Nazis more systematic in their campaign of death than in Lithuania. SS Colonel Karl Jaeger drew up the chilling balance in a December 1941 report stating that ”137 346 Jews” in Lithuania had already been killed and by the end of the war, 94% of the 200 000 Jews in the country were murdered, a percentage unseen in any other occupied country.
Lithuania is the country of focus at the 54th annual Frankfurt Book Fair, the publishing industry’s largest annual gathering. – Sapa-AFP