Now online, diary of teen shot by Nazis tells of desperation, fear, hope in Vilna Ghetto
In its second web-based exhibition, YIVO makes available the lucid observations of Yitskhok Rudashevski, a 15-year-old made wise beyond his years by a life of oppression

NEW YORK — More than a year after the Nazis forced Yitskhok Rudashevski, a 15-year-old Lithuanian Jew, into the Vilna Ghetto, he remained unbowed.
“Today we have shown that even in the three little streets we can maintain our youthful fervor. We have shown that it will not be a broken youth that will emerge from the ghetto. From the ghetto will emerge a strong, hardened and spirited youth,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary in December 1942.
From his first entry in June 1941 to his last entry in June 1943, just before the Nazis shot him near the railway station at Ponary, Rudashevski chronicled the desperation, fear and hope that he and tens of thousands of Jews experienced inside the ghetto. Now that diary is the focus of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s second free online exhibition, “Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto,” which launched on July 17. It’s the first time the diary will be shown solely on its own.
“Yitzhak’s diary is so beautifully written; its subtlety and sophistication captures the poignancy of what is going on inside the ghetto,” said Alexandra Zapruder, the exhibit’s co-curator.
Rudashevski was born in December 1927, in Vilna, Poland — now Vilnius, Lithuania. His father was a typesetter for the Vilner Tog, the Jewish daily paper, and his mother was a seamstress. Though not particularly religious, Rudashevski’s family had a keen sense of Jewish identity. Rudashevski attended a secular Jewish school and wrote, spoke and read Yiddish.
At the end of August 1941, two months after the Germans invaded, thousands of Jews were forced into a ghetto in Vilna’s old Jewish quarter. Rudashevski was first crammed into one room with 10 family members, including his parents, grandmother and cousin.

In September, the authorities divided the Jews into two separate ghettos. About 30,000 were crammed into the larger ghetto, or “Ghetto I,” and 11,000 into “Ghetto II.”
After Yom Kippur, Rudashevski recounted how his family was forced to leave his grandmother behind in the smaller ghetto: “We learn that old people who are written down as parents are not allowed to pass through the gate. Grandma cannot go with us… We quickly say goodbye to Grandma — forever. We leave her standing in the middle of the street and run to save ourselves. I will never forget her two pleading hands and eyes which begged us: ‘Take me with you!’”
Another entry, written on April 5, 1943, captured the horror of hearing about the execution pits near Ponary, also known as Ponar, where some 100,000 individuals were murdered over three years.
“Today we received the terrifying news: 85 railway cars of Jews, about 5,000 people, were not taken to Kovno as they had been promised, but were taken by train to Ponar, where they were shot to death. 5,000 new bloody victims. The ghetto was profoundly shaken, as if struck by a thunderclap. The mood of the massacre has taken hold of the population. It has begun again,” he wrote.

“Rudashevski understood what was at stake,” said Jonathan Brent, CEO of YIVO. “There are many diaries that came out of the war — what makes this one special is his acute awareness of his circumstances. He’s almost nonjudgmental, he just presents it all.”
An intimate portrait
After the war, Rudashevski’s cousin found the diary and gave it to his mentor, Abraham Sutzkever, a member of the Paper Brigade, which saved thousands of documents in the ghetto.
Aside from the diary, of which YIVO recently commissioned a new English translation, the exhibit includes documents that Rudashevski used during his time in the ghetto as well as photographs and images of various artifacts.
“When we think about the Holocaust, we generally think only about the concentration camps. This exhibit is a great opportunity to learn about other things and the different ways people resisted,” said exhibit chief curator Karolina Zulkoski.
Rudashevski’s steely determination to survive and thrive underpins the majority of his entries. He’s determined to let neither the Lithuanians nor Germans dehumanize him and other Jews.
For example, his July 8, 1941, entry describes being forced to wear the yellow star identifying him as Jewish: “The patch sits on our coat, but it has not touched our sense of who we are… Let those who hung them on us feel shame. Let them burn inside every conscious German who tries to ponder the future of his people.”
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, the former Lithuanian minister of culture and a linguistics professor at Vilnius University, has long studied the diary and worked to map out Rudashevski’s life before and during the war.
“It’s a reminder of the potential that the Holocaust destroyed. He thought of himself as a future writer or historian and had a very sharp gaze. He noticed social inequalities; he noticed social hierarchies. He criticized the political leaders of the ghetto,” Kvietkauskas said.
It’s this eye toward detail that Kvietkauskas said he hopes will help build empathy toward the Holocaust’s victims in a country where many celebrate local fascists during World War II as heroes for fighting the Communist occupation. Scores of Lithuanian schools received donated copies of the diary in 2020 and 2021 as part of a government initiative to recognize Lithuania’s role in the Holocaust.
“It’s really important to tell these stories; it reaches people and then the victims are no longer alien, they are no longer anonymous,” Kvietkauskas said, adding that he couldn’t sleep at night after translating Rudashevski’s diary into Lithuanian.

Aside from recording his experiences, Rudashevski also recorded the different ways in which the ghetto inhabitants resisted.
For example, one passage relates how Jewish tailors and seamstresses embroidered curses into the monograms they sewed onto shirts and dresses for the Germans, listing Hebrew letters and the words they secretly stood for: “Giml — a gzeyre [persecution], tsadek — a tsore [affliction], samekh — a sreyfe [conflagration], kof — a kapore [expiatory sacrifice]. All these acts are thumbing your nose covered up. In reality, they live in fear of the Germans. Still, they allow themselves to curse, to play a trick.”

Rudashevski’s writing reveals a bright, energetic, perceptive young teen who enjoyed spending time with his friends and family, and who wished to read and record history and contribute to society. It also shows him to be keenly aware of his own mortality.
“On his 15th birthday he wrote that he wanted to ‘shout to time to linger, not to run,’ said Zapruder. “This is an understanding that time is currency. He’s aware that he’s not getting to spend time as he should, that he might not get to have as much time as he would want to. It’s an eerie sort of wisdom.”
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