The Vilna ghetto … through a boy’s diary
YIVO’s online exhibition animates the short life of Yitskhok Rudashevski
It seems fair to start with the obvious, just in case anyone had any hope here.
This is a story whose terrible end we already know. The hero, the young man who actually tells the story, dies, and so do all but one member of his family, and so does much of his world. There is no fairy-tale happily ever after for Yitskhok Rudashevski.
So why would you want to spend time — it could be just a few minutes, it could be hours, depending on how many links you choose to click and explore, how deeply immersed you become in this inherently immersive project — with his story?
Because in YIVO’s new, entirely online exhibition, “Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto,” a 13-year-old boy’s diary describes daily ghetto life with a clear eye and a questing spirit that helps us understand that those victims were real people. And somehow, Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s CEO and executive director, said, the boy finds hope in the undying force of Jewish culture, Jewish civilization, and, in the end, Jewish life.
It’s online, free, at museum.yivo.org. Go there and click on “Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto.”
Karolina Ziulkoski is the chief curator of YIVO’s Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin online museum. According to Dr. Brent, “she is the inventor of something that has never really existed before. The structure of this online museum is different.”
This is Ms. Ziulkoski’s second exhibit for YIVO; like the first one, about Beba Epstein, who did survive the Shoah, “it is not just a PowerPoint with captions,” Dr. Brent said. “The Beba exhibit won four internet design awards, and it is being used in schools in 160 countries throughout the world. It is having an impact. We think that this new exhibit will have as much of an impact, if not even more.”
“Rudashevski was clearly a very precocious, very serious-minded, very talented, highly intellectual 13-year-old when he went into the Vilna ghetto in 1941,” Ms. Ziulkoski said.
(In what might perhaps be a nod to how highly intellectual, powerfully descriptive, and not particularly personal the diary is, when Dr. Brent and Ms. Ziulkoski talk about its author, they call him Rudashevski, not Yitskhok. He was a child chronologically, but not spiritually, and he gives little hint of his emotional age. He seems to have been an old soul.)
“He was part of the group in the Vilna ghetto, under the mentorship of Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski,” Yiddish poets who survived the ghetto and the war and wrote about it. They were leaders of the Paper Brigade, the group of unimaginably brave ghetto-confined Jews who managed to save some of YIVO’s treasures, often at the cost of their own survival.
(YIVO was founded in Vilna in 1925; its mission was to study Jewish life and the Yiddish language. During the war, it moved to Manhattan, where it remains today, its mission largely unchanged but its context highly influenced by history.)
“Rudashevski chronicled day-by-day events, the marketplace, street scenes, the Jewish police, the Lithuanian legionnaires,” Dr. Brent continued. “And he also chronicles his literary club, where Sutzkever brings the material he gets from YIVO.
“This diary recounts the panorama of the tragedy of the Vilna ghetto. If you didn’t know that it was written by a 13-year-old, you would suspect that it was written by a highly trained, mature person. But it also recounts the effects of the conditions he’s living in. Conditions of despair. Of brutalization.
“At one point, he says, ‘I am humiliated. I am ashamed. But I am not ashamed to be a Jew. I am ashamed of what they have done to us. It is humiliating.’ He feels profoundly defeated, and despairing.”
And yet, Dr. Brent said, Rudashevski writes that the materials the Paper Brigade rescued, and that his literary club discussed, “give him the feeling of continuity with the Jewish people that goes far beyond the immediate circumstances. And he realizes that this is not a defeated people.
“He is not humiliated, and he says that there is something strong and enduring about this culture of which he feels part. He even talks in the diary about this” — the literary club and the reading it does — “being their act of resistance against the brutalization they feel.” (And when you think about it, you realize that the idea of a literary club in a Nazi-imposed ghetto is inherently extraordinary.)
“So this little diary, which his cousin found after the war, is a shining example of cultural resistance. It is Amidah” — the central prayer in each service, during which we stand — “where he stands and affirms his Jewishness, the importance of his culture, his society, his community,” Dr. Brent continued. “He says in his diary that the spirit of Jewish youth, of which he felt a part, will survive. He said that they would not go quietly.
“It’s not clear to me if, when he wrote that, he thought that he was going to survive the ghetto, where people were being shot at random, where there were numerous selections,” where the people chosen were taken away and never seen again. “At a certain point, he knows he will not survive.
“But what comes out of this diary is the spirit that he knows will survive, whether he survives physically or not.
“That is what is amazing about this to me. This is a document of inner strength. It is the kind of document that can make you feel proud of your people.”
To be clear, not everything that Rudashevski chronicles is positive. It’s the story of a group of people who are persecuted, hounded, and ultimately destroyed. “He describes people tearing food from others’ mouths, people who are angry, vicious, and selfish, people behaving in the worst possible way,” Dr. Brent said. “People are starving, and their worst animal instincts come out. He describes these things.
“There’s something here that you won’t find in the diary of Anne Frank or many other accounts of the war. It’s because this isn’t just about the absolute horror and the physical suffering of a single person. It’s about the communal experience and the triumphant place of culture.
“That’s what Abraham Sutzkever understood that he was saving. He knew that if he could save these things, something of that spirit could be transmitted.
“We are their fortunate beneficiaries.
“Many people became inert from despair, psychologically incapable of doing anything. But here’s this 13-year-old boy who is filled with the desire to learn. He talks about learning German literature, about learning Latin, about learning mathematics in the school in the ghetto, and he’s just filled with love for this culture that he comes out of.
“It’s really important, I think, today in particular, when people often think that literature and art are soft and fuzzy — they’re not technology or business or economics or politics — but what Rudashevski shows is how absolutely vital they are.
“To me, this means that people need to pay more attention to instilling the value of culture in their children,” Dr. Brand said.
Ms. Ziulkoski talked about how she and the co-curators turned the diary into an exhibition. She and her staff are more or less creating a new art form — a museum exhibition that does not hang on walls, cannot surround a visitor with sounds, cannot offer the occasional object to be touched, but instead works from behind a computer screen.
The form offers all sorts of possibilities.
The exhibition is organized in chapters, and each chapter has a theme, Ms. Ziulkoski said. “The first one is an animation that shows how his cousin found his diary, years after he was killed in their hiding place.” That’s the prologue. The introduction brings us Rudashevski, an only child born to a secular family, curious about the world around him. Then comes the war, and everything narrows.
But it has context; readers can go as deeply or as broadly as they choose into the world of eastern Europe between 1939 to the war’s end, and then past it. There are animations and films showcasing real actors; there are links to documents and artifacts that illustrate the period from YIVO’s holdings; there are historic parallels to such contemporaneous phenomena as the Jim Crow laws in this country, and there are sections posing stark moral dilemmas that none of us ever should have to confront.
“Rudashevski writes about his grandmother,” Ms. Ziulkoski said. “They were being moved from one ghetto to another. His mom had a job, so they had papers, and they would not be taken to Punary to be murdered. But older people were being taken away, and they would be killed. And his grandma was stopped at the gate, and then they had a fraction of a second to say goodbye to her.
“He was standing in the middle of the street and she was pleading with her hands and eyes, and she was begging, please take me with you. He writes about this later. You only have a second to decide what to do, and if you stay, you’re going to be killed. The only chance to survive is if you go, but you can’t take her with you.
“So it’s all about thinking what happened in that moment, and trying to put yourself in that situation.”
Some of the pieces of the exhibition seem so relatable that they’re inherently frightening. One of the live-action films features an actor playing Rudashevski as he tries to figure out what to do about his education. “New students are being accepted in the technical school in the ghetto,” he soliloquizes. “I’m now going through a big struggle, whether to learn a trade or continue to study in the high school, as I have done until now.
“On the one hand, there is war. It is easier at the moment for the person who has some kind of trade or other. I am growing up, and sooner or later, I shall have to work. On the other hand, I imagine that attendance at the technical school means an interruption in one’s studies, for after the four-month vocational course, the goal is to go to work.” Going to work would be no longer going to school.
There is, of course, bitter irony there. That should have been his worst problem; in the end, he got to do neither.
Alexandra Zapruder is one of the exhibit’s co-curators. (The other, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, is in Lithuania.)
Ms. Zapruder’s interest in the diaries goes back about 30 years, she said. She was a founding staff member at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and her first book, “Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust,” makes her path to this YIVO exhibit clear. She’s written books and pursued studies on the Holocaust for adults and children, as well as on other subjects, including the effects of the covid pandemic on teenagers, told in their own voices.
(Her name might sound familiar to readers for another reason. Her Dallas-based grandfather, Abraham Zapruder, took the home movie that by pure chance caught the last less-than-half-a-minute of President John F. Kennedy’s life; Ms. Zapruder wrote a book, “Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film,” about that experience, and how it changed both her family’s life and the nation’s.
“I first came across the diary in the early 1990s,” she said; it had been translated and published but did not make much of an impact. “It was so incredibly powerful, so beautifully written, so insightful and interesting that from the time I read it, I thought that it should be published again, in a new translation.”
She had worked with Dr. Brent, who had been an editor at Yale University Press, for decades, “so when YIVO approached me saying that they wanted an exhibition about the diary, I was thrilled. The diary would get a whole new audience. I had always wanted to include some of the amazing documents in its collection.” An online exhibition would be an effective way of showing them, she thought.
“I have a scholarly interest in teenagers’ diaries,” she said. “I think it is important to hear about the lived experiences of young people. And this diary is more than just one person’s diary. It’s more the story of young people in the ghetto, and of the whole community of the ghetto.”
Repeating the consensus, “he was a gifted writer and reporter,” Ms. Zapruder said. His mentor, Sutzkever, “marshaled their efforts in what we now call cultural or spiritual resistance. The diary is a powerful example of this.” The teenagers who worked under Sutzkever’s leadership “continued to study, to learn, to document their own experiences, to keep a record of their lives, as a way not to have their lives subsumed by the German narrative of who and what they were.
“The idea was that young people didn’t have to wait to grow into who they would be.”
It’s different from social media now, she said, because “social media by definition is performative and outward facing. A diary or journal is more internal. It’s not necessarily intended to be public.”
So did Yitskhok Rudashevski want his diary to be read? “I don’t know,” Ms. Zapruder said. “He never said explicitly. But he did give some clues. In one entry, he said that he believes that everything, even the most gory thing, should be written down, because everything must be taken into account.
“He had a depth and a gravitas, and a lot of compassion. He wrote a lot about the pathos in the ghetto, and the moral dilemmas of daily life.”
How does she devote so much of her life to reading these tragic stories of death and loss and grief? “I have shed plenty of tears, but mostly I am in awe,” Ms. Zapruder said. “There is so much wonder in what he created, and in the person he was. I feel a lot of gratitude because the diary survived. Otherwise we would not have known that he existed.
“We will never know how many people with great gifts, talents, abilities, have vanished. We will never know. But I am grateful that his diary managed to survive.
“So yes, it’s sad, but the dominant word I use to describe his writing is beautiful. We read beautiful literature even when it’s sad; we encounter difficult stories that move us and touch us and make us feel things that are hard to feel, but we are better people for having felt them.
“We sometimes encounter something that deepens us, that makes us feel like we understand humanity better. That is what this does.
“It’s a really special thing. I hope that a lot of people will look at the exhibition, and learn about him, and how special he was. He deserves it.”
The exhibition is online at YIVO’s website, museum.yivo.org. Click on “Yitskhok Rudashevski: A Teenager’s Account of Life and Death in the Vilna Ghetto.”
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