Means of survival
published June 8, 2007
A few days ago, there was news about the discovery of yet another holocaust diary. The 60-page notebook, on which entries were written between January and April 1943, reportedly belonged to 14-year-old Rutka Laskie from Bedzin, Poland. It was released by the Israel Holocaust Museum after its authenticity had been established.
The diary described Rutka’s hatred towards their Nazi tormentors. She narrated how she witnessed a Nazi soldier tear a baby away from its mother and kill it with his bare hands.
“The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter. I’m turning into an animal waiting to die,” Rutka wrote shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died.
At the same time, Rutka spoke of her crush on a boy named Janek. She was, after all, an adolescent.
Rutka is touted as “The Polish Anne Frank.” Everybody knows Anne Frank, of course. She was a German Jew, born in Frankfurt but who later on moved to the Netherlands when her parents had foreseen Adolf Hitler’s persecution of the Jews immediately after the strongman to power.
Anne’s diary was a birthday gift from her parents when she turned 13. She addressed it as Kitty, like an imaginary girl friend, and in the succeeding weeks wrote about her activities in school and gossip about her friends. Later that year, however, she, along with her family, went into hiding. She took her diary along. Anne wrote: “My happy-go-lucky, carefree school days are gone forever.”
The Frank family shared The Secret Annexe (now a museum) with another family, the Van Pels, and a solitary dentist. The hiding place was behind an office building and was behind a movable bookcase, which swung on its hinges and opened like a door.
Anne described their hiding place and the people she came into contact with every day. She wrote about the tension in their cloistered existence, their hopes of liberation, her frequent clashes with her mother, her experience of first love (with Peter, the son of the Van Pels), and her dreams of becoming a journalist after the war.
Indeed, Anne was serious about being writer that while in hiding, she had started editing her earlier entries, crossing out entire passages and rewriting some descriptions. She had the objective of publishing them after the war. She wanted to have her account of how it was to go in hiding for years.
One day in August 1944, The Secret Annexe was discovered, its occupants forcibly taken (after all, they did not voluntarily turn themselves in and instead went into hiding). Anne and her sister, Margot, were separated from their father, and then from their mother. In March 1945, Anne and Margot both died of typhus in the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Both Rutka’s and Anne’s fathers survived the war. Yaakov Laskier kept his painful past behind, moved to Israel after the war, started a new family, and never spoke about his life in Poland.
This was why when his Israeli daughter, Zahava Sherz who is now 57, read Rutka’s diary, she became acquainted with the older sister she never knew.
On the other hand, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam after the war and immediately searched for information regarding his wife and daughters. Anne’s diary was given to him by one of the helpers in The Secret Annexe, who had found it lying on the floor after the arrest. Upon reading Anne’s words, he felt ashamed at how little he knew about his own daughter. “I was very much surprised about the deep thoughts that Anne had, her seriousness, especially her self-criticism. It was quite a different Anne than whom I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling,” he wrote much later.
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Come to think of it, pouring out one’s thoughts into a journal appears to be some kind of universal survival mechanism. I have only spoken of the Jewish girls, but the merits of journal writing have in fact been cited for both literary and psychological purposes.
(We won’t say diary, of course. That sounds too schoolgirlish and whips up images of locks, keys and scented stationery.) But why do people keep journals?
Primarily, it is for venting. Anne herself said she would suffocate if she didn’t have a means to write all her thoughts and feelings. This is so true for some people, especially those who are less inclined to ring up their close friends at one in the morning or articulate their observations to just about anyone who cared to listen. One feels good after writing, however aimlessly or haphazardly. And anyway, there is never meant to be an audience.
There is, however, a step further than writing just being a form of catharsis. The desire to make sense of it all is a powerful driving force that compels, subconsciously perhaps, some persons to scribble or type away furiously, like a madman.
It is said that one of the ways to conquer the unknown is to give it a name. Faced with an overwhelming emotion, situation or problem, an individual, if he decides not to shut down and cower altogether, will try to pinpoint the very thing that is bothering him. If possible, he will trivialize it and constrict it with words. This enables him to feel he is, despite his desperation, still on top of the situation. At the very least, his problems remain beneath him—they are defined and limited by words. Words he chooses to use and not to use. He still has some measure of control.
Further still, journal writing enables one to step back and read his own writings as though it were someone else’s story. The more deliberate one detects patterns in his own speech and behavior, and from here plans actions (or inaction). He determines how he would respond to future stimuli and steers his life’s course towards a direction he wishes to take.
The literary value is, I think, a mere consequence. The almost-breathing quality comes from the absence of inhibition, the flowing speech from the naked thoughts and natural language. In some cases, there may even be a genuine entertainment value. Read your entries from ten, fifteen years back. Don’t you cringe to remember how stupid you were back then?
Journals are meant to outlive their authors. An author hopes his family will not auction off his writings to the highest bidder, which may well turn out to be a disinterested, outrageously wealthy stranger (think Anna Nicole Smith).
Instead, a writer hopes the writings will inspire some distraught young person facing the similar struggles. That’s a great bonus to aspire for.
Some people go to the gym. Some work themselves to death. Some sing to the high heavens or dance like there were no tomorrow. Some pig out or play computer games till their intestines or their eyes pop out. Some simply keep journals. It’s a way of staying sane in this crazy world.
