Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has made public a newly-surfaced diary of a 14-year-old Jewish Polish girl who writes bitterly about the Nazis and poignantly about falling in love.
Rutka Laskier kept the diary while being confined in a Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Bedzin in 1943.
She writes of "going crazy" about not being allowed to leave her house. She said the rope around her was getting tighter and tighter as she described herself as an animal waiting to die.
While she called her life a torment, she wrote about falling in love with a boy and how she looked forward to her first kiss.
Rutka hid the diary under a floor and told a non-Jewish friend, Stanislawa Sapinska, about it shortly before her family was shipped off to the Auschwitz death camp.
Sapinska held on to the diary for more than 60 years before turning it over to Yad Vashem, saying Rutka wanted the world to know how the Jews suffered.
The best-known Holocaust diary and one of the world's most widely-read books on the Nazi era is The Diary of Anne Frank, which describes the life of a 14-year-old Jewish girl in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
