Yitskhok rudashevski biography of william

Primary Sources

(1) Yitskhok Rudashevski, diary entry (22nd December, 1941)

One must stand in long lines to receive bread and other products. Jews are ousted from them. Germans go to the rows, throw out the Jews. Jews receive less food than the Aryans. Our life is a life of helpless terror. One day has no future. We have one consolation. The Red Army shows a fighting spirit. It has become concentrated. It gives blow for blow, it is offering resistance

(2) Yitskhok Rudashevski, diary entry (8th July, 1942)

The degree was issued that the Vilna Jewish population must put on badges front and back - a yellow circle and inside it the letter J. It is daybreak. I am looking through the window and see before me the first Vilna Jews with badges. It was painful to see how people were staring at them. The large piece of yellow material on their shoulders seemed to be burning me and for a long time I could not put on the badge. I was ashamed to appear on the street not because it would be noticed that I am a Jew but because I was ashamed of what they were doing to us. I was ashamed of our helplessness.

(3) Yitskhok Rudashevski, diary entry (18th October, 1942)

Jewish policemen donned official hats. I walk across the street and here go some of them wearing

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Rudashevski and the Quiet Period

Like many young people living in ghettos during World War II, Yitskhok Rudashevski experienced the confusing juxtaposition of the exhilaration and hopefulness of youth, set against the reality of tragedy and imprisonment. How he dealt with that impossible contrast reveals itself in his ghetto diary. Reading his daily notes written during the “quiet period” of the Vilna Ghetto, we witness the resilience of a teenager intent on not only surviving, but thriving in anticipation of a rich future ahead.

Rudashevski, unlike many of his more socialist-oriented peers, identified politically as a Communist. He looked to the Soviet Union for hope of rescue from the Nazis, and in 1942 he happily celebrated “the great anniversary, 25 years after the great October revolution.” However, he was no cultural assimilationist. He adhered strongly to a Yiddishist cultural ideology—reading, writing, and performing works of art in his Jewish mother-tongue. He carried on his commitment to Yiddish life and culture throughout this “quiet period” of the ghetto, participating in clubs for literature, Jewish history, and theater, while also collecting ghetto-specific folklore in the YIVO model of “zamlen” (Yiddish for ‘to gather’). Other teenage diarists described Yiddis