Rutka's Laskier – BBC documentary film
Among others appearing in the film are Rutka's sister Zahawa Scherc-Laskier and Menahem Lyor-Lior, a holocaust survivor born in Będzin. They both live in Israel.
It was screened on BBC channel, England on in September 2008.In March 2008, a B.B.C. team went to Będzin, Poland to take a picture of her life the way she detailed it in the diary she wrote for a few months in 1943, at the age of 14.
Among others appearing in the film are Rutka's sister Zahawa Scherc-Laskier and Menahem Lyor-Lior, a holocaust survivor born in Będzin. They both live in Israel.
It was screened on B.B.C. channel, England on in September 2008
The loud and clear voice of a 14 year old girl
Rutka's Laskier's diary pages:
5 February 1943-.....This summer will be unbearable, to sit in some locked grey cage and see no fields or flowers. I went to fields last year and always had many flowers, which reminded me that there was time when I could walk out on Malachowska Street to go to the movies without risking being transported. I am so 'saturated' with the cruelty of war that even the harshest news do not make an impression on me. I just do not believe there will ever be a time when I can go out of the house without the yellow-star-of-David. Or that there will be an end to the war..." wrote a 14 year old girl in her diary. Rutka, in the innocence of an adolescent, unveiled her emotional world, her first love and her disappointment in the shadow of death and horror the Nazi military occupation had spread in Będzin, Poland.
The Germans conquered Będzin in September 1939 and in May 1942 the first deportation to the death camps took place. 1 August 1943 saw the beginning of the annihilation of the Będzin ghetto and the deportation of its inhabitants to Auschwitz- Birkenau, among them Rutka, her mother and her young brother Henjusz who were taken straight to the gas chambers.
She was 14 years old when she died.
Rutka Laskier was born in 1929 to Jacob and Dwora (Dorka) to the house of Hampel. She had a younger brother, Yoachim-Henjusz. The family lived in Będzin. Jacob was a Halutz-pioneer who came to Eretz-Yisrael as a young man in 1917 as one of the 'Będzin-quintet' who were messengers of the Third Aliya- a wave of immigration to Eretz-Yisrael at the end of the First World War in 1919 – 1924 when the economical crisis ended. Most of them came from Europe for Zionistic reasons. He became ill with typhoid a few years later and was, thus, forced to return to Poland where he married Dorka. Both planned to return to Eretz-Yisrael.
Rutka was a beautiful and gifted girl who drew the attention of all around her. Her mother, Dorka, had family in Eretz-Yisrael, her parents and her brother Mordechai. She used to send her family photos of her two children, which is how their picture at an earlier age survived.
Rutka and her entire family was deported to Auschwitz in August 1943, where she, her mother and her brother were taken straight to the gas chambers. Her father was taken to an Auschwitz labor camp where he survived for a few month until, on the verge of death, he was taken to KZ Sachsenhausen, where the Germans gathered forced labor workers to forge foreign currency in order to destroy US and British economy, which is how he survived the war.
Her father came to Israel after the war, married Chana Winer and had a new family. They had a girl, Zehawa, who did not know of her father's earlier family until she was 14. When she saw a picture of Rutka on her father's desk she asked him who this girl, who looked so much like her, was. He wouldn't answer at first. But, after her pleading for some time he told her about his first family and her sister, Rutka, who had been murdered in Auschwitz.
Zehawa was affected very deeply by that story and when she married Awigdor Scherc and they had a daughter she called her Ruth after the sister she had never known.
The diary: "Rutka's pages – January – April 1943"
Adam Szydłowski, one of the 'Yona' organization leaders in Będzin found the diary of a Jewish girl, Rutka Lasker, in 2005. It had been hidden with a gentile Polish woman, Stanislawa Spinska, for more than 60 years. 82 year old Stanislawa, had kept the diary, which she got from Rutka, as a souvenir from her best friend who perished in the camp. Spinska's nephew persuaded her to reveal the existence of the diary in her possession, and that's how it found its way to Adam Szydłowski. In Poland, and especially in the Zaglembie area, the discovery of the diary caught headlines quickly in the media and:" Ana Frank from Będzin".
The municipality of Będzin published Rutka's diary in Polish.
Yad Vashem published the book a year later in Hebrew and English and in June that year, in an impressive ceremony, the original diary was handed over to Yad Vashem for safekeeping by Stanislawa Sapinska, who came from Poland especially and by Rutka's sister, Zehawa Scherc.
