POLISH JEWISH GIRL'S HOLOCAUST DIARY UNVEILED

Polish Jewish Girl's Holocaust Diary Unveiled - Aron Heller
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. "The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," she wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die." Within a few months Rutka was dead, but last year a Polish friend who had saved the notebook finally came forth to expose the riveting document. (AP/Washington Post)