RYWKA’S DIARY

A new exhibit at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center pieces together the story of a Jewish girl who survived the Holocaust and captured her experiences living in the Łódz ghetto in her diary.

BY MITCH HURST THE NORTH SHORE WEEKEND

Rywka Lipszyc’s diary

In 1945, a diary was found in the ashes of a destroyed crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was written by a 14-year-old Jewish girl named Rywka Lipszyc and documented her life in the Łódz Ghetto between October 1943 and April 1944.

The diary is at the center of a new exhibition, “The Girl in the Diary: Searching for Rywka from the Łódz Ghetto,” which opened at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie on May 18.

The exhibit tells the story of Rywka and her diary through historical artifacts and documents, interactive touch screens, documentary videos, and exceptionally rare photographs. It is presented in both Polish and English and runs through September 24.

Portrait of two girls. Photo by Henryk Ross. Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario.

The exhibit was created and is sponsored by the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, Poland, and has appeared in various venues across the country. Arielle Weininger, Chief Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the museum, first encountered the exhibit at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee and knew then she wanted to bring it to Skokie. It was just a matter of scheduling.

“Rywka’s words speak for thousands upon thousands of people, including children, who never had the chance to record their story,” Weininger explains. “While most wartime narratives of German occupation focus on the fate of men, the perspective from Rwyka is the opposite. Her diary is populated by women and its structure is created by relations between them. It is filled with their pain and longing, their daily struggles and courage.”

She says the museum tries to strike a balance with special exhibitions that are about specific Holocaust history or stories and other social justice issues, so she’s always interested to see what quality Holocaust-themed exhibitions are out there.

The exhibit isn’t just about a diary, but the story behind it. The granddaughter of a female Soviet doctor who came in with the Red Army at the Liberation of Auschwitz found the diary outside of Crematoria Number Three and then took it home to Siberia. It stayed with her for nearly 50 years. When she passed away, it moved on to her son, who was living in Moscow, and his daughter, Anastasia, who was living in San Francisco.

“She came back over from to Moscow when her father passed away and that's when she discovered the diary in his in his belongings,” Weininger says. “So, she brought it back to San Francisco, and then approached the Holocaust Center connected to the Jewish Family Services there.”

An archivist took a look at it for the first time and recognized that it was something that needed to be translated. That began a multi-country investigation into what the document was, and it was revealed to be a diary.

Ghetto policeman’s family. Photo by Henryk Ross. Copyright Art Gallery of Ontario.

“Initially a researcher in Warsaw was the one who over a multi-year period translated the diary. Then they got it translated into English,” Weininger says. “They worked with archivists in Germany, Poland, and Israel to piece together who this person was and to figure out who her family members were.”

They learned that Rywka did survive Auschwitz, along with her two cousins, Esther and Mina. They were sent to a slave labor camp and ultimately put on a death march to Bergen Belsen, where they were liberated. Esther and Mina, who were sisters, were transferred to Sweden to get medical care, but Rywka was in too perilous of a state to be moved. That’s where Rywka’s trail ends.

“Through this whole process, they did find her two cousins, Esther and Mina, living outside of Tel Aviv and actually had a chance to bring the diary over and they could see and read this diary written by their cousin,” says Weininger. “All of that is included in the exhibition.”

Star of David with Jude printed in the center, with images from the exhibit.

The exhibit includes very enlarged wallpapers of some of the documents that were found that list her name and a film showing in the gallery that includes interviews with the surviving cousins.

“It’s a historical piecing together of all of this information, but then there's also other elements within the exhibition. There's an interactive touch table that really is this deep dive into the history of the Łódz Ghetto,” Weininger says. “So, there's a lot to learn about the Łódz Ghetto and about the structure of the ghettos through the Jewish Council and its Chairman Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.”

The exhibit also includes information about language that developed specifically inside of the ghetto, and a timeline. But at the center is an illuminated table that includes objects from both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Illinois Holocaust Museum. and segments of the diary itself.

“Excerpts have been selected and are presented to the visitor on the table and then there are iPads next to each one where you can scroll and read commentary about that section that's been highlighted,” Wieninger says.

Another important feature, she says, is the exhibit captures Holocaust history from a feminine point of view. There’s Rywka and her diary, and her female cousins who became responsible for her after her father passed away. Esther was just 22 years of age at the time.

“What we get is this very feminine story of being a woman in the Holocaust or being a young woman in the Holocaust, and she's very reliant on the connectedness of her cousins,” says Weininger. “The commentators are also female—a female rabbi, a female psychologist, and an art therapist. What I actually think is really interesting about that structure is that Rywka is orthodox She gets very upset at one point in time when she is made to go to work on Saturday because the Sabbath was very important to her.”

True scholarship into women in the Holocaust has risen to the forefront only in the last 15 or 20 years, adds Weininger. A year ago, the museum hosted an exhibit called “Spots of Light” that looked into women and the Holocaust.

“This is really only the second show that has this very strong emphasis on a woman's experience during the Holocaust,” she says. “I don't think it is covered as it should be.”

“The Girl in the Diary: Searching for Rywka from the Łódz Ghetto” runs through September 24 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, in cooperation with the Galicia Jewish Museum, Kraków, Poland. Details about the exhibition are available at ilholocaustmuseum.org/exhibitions/ the-girl-in-the-diary-searching-for-rywka-fromthe-lodz-ghetto/