The author of the Vilnius Ghetto Diary, Yitzhak Rudashevsky, was a boy who did not live to see his 16th birthday. Yitzhak described the terrible conditions in which people were forced to live, before whose eyes the ghost of Ponar, the place where the Jews of Vilnius were exterminated, constantly loomed.

Even in the ghetto, children strove to study and improve themselves. In this, they were supported by teachers who were also doomed to death. Studying helped to distract them, at least for a while, from the terrible realities in which they existed.

Yitzhak addresses us: “I believe that absolutely everything should be written down, even the bloodiest events, so that everything can be taken into account later.”

The manuscript of the Vilnius Ghetto Diary by Yitzhak Rudashevsky is kept in the archives of the Yiddish Research Institute (YIVO) in New York.

In 1968, the Diary was published in Hebrew, and in 1973 in English, using all the textual studies that preceded the previous edition. In 2019, the Diary was published in Lithuanian.