I have to tell
I have to tell is the autobiography of the Lithuanian writer and Holocaust survivor Mascha Rolnikaitė, written in a diary in Yiddish .
content
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lithuania in 1941 , Mascha was 13 years old. What she has to experience from now on is so terrifying that she decides to write it down in a diary. First, she reports about her life in the Vilnius ghetto and how her entire everyday life and that of her family have changed drastically within a short time due to the oppression of the Germans. Later about her time in the Strasdenhof satellite camp of the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp and in the Stutthof concentration camp . She writes about the forced labor , the sometimes draconian punishments for the smallest offenses, as well as the arbitrariness of the German occupiers to whom she is at the mercy. Fearing that her diary might be discovered, she begins to memorize it in order to be able to write it down again later. Ultimately, the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers.
Emergence
In 1945, Rolnikaite combined the records decimated in the concentration camps with her memorized records and summarized everything in three exercise books in Yiddish. She threw away the remains of her original notes, which she later regretted. At the beginning of the 1960s, she herself translated into Lithuanian and Russian. First, the Lithuanian version appeared in 1963 after a number of censorship measures. The 1965 Russian version, which was also censored, appeared in 18 languages. An autobiographical sequel appeared in excerpts in Russian in 2000 under the title That came after in the Petersburg literary magazine Der Stern .
German editions
The book was first published in German translation in 1966 as The Diary of Maria Rolnikaite by Europa-Verlag (Vienna; Frankfurt; Zurich: Europa-Verlag) as a licensed edition by the Soviet Novosti agency and a year later in the GDR .
It was published as a translation from Yiddish in 2002 by Kindler-Verlag and then by Weltbild Verlag and as a paperback by Rowohlt . The edition has a foreword by Marianna Butenschön, a glossary of street names and a register of people.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Simonetta Dibbern: I have to tell my diary 1941–1945 , on dradio , October 22, 2002