Masha Rolnikaitė

Mascha Rolnikaitė ( Yiddish מאַשע ראָלניק Mascha Rolnik ; Russian Мария Григорьевна Рольникайте , Marija Grigorjewna Rolnikaite ; *  July 21, 1927 in Klaipėda (German Memel), Memelland ; †  April 7, 2016 in Saint Petersburg ) was a Lithuanian book author and Holocaust survivor. Her diary I must tell appeared in different languages.

Life

Mascha Rolnikaitė was born as the daughter of a lawyer in Memelland and grew up in Plungė, Lithuania . The father had done his doctorate in Leipzig on the constitutional law of the Baltic States and had hired a German nanny for his four children. When Vilnius became Lithuanian in late 1939, the family moved there. On June 15, 1940, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union , which in turn was invaded by the German Reich in 1941. Lithuania was now placed under German administration by the Reichskommissariat Ostland and the Jews were disenfranchised, persecuted, ghettoized in the Vilnius ghetto and murdered in mass killings by the German task forces and their Lithuanian helpers .

Rolnikaitė's diary story begins with the outbreak of war on June 22, 1941 . Writing was so dangerous that she memorized her diary for a while . Her father was a lawyer and had previously defended communists several times , which, in addition to the family's Jewish origins, posed an additional threat. Rolnikaitė survived the ghetto as well as the Strasdenhof branch of the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp and the Stutthof concentration camp . Her father Hirsch Rolnik, who fled the Wehrmacht in good time , and her older sister Mira also survived. Her mother Taiba and two younger siblings, Rajele and Ruwele, and 45 other relatives died in the concentration camp.

In 1945 she 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, and in 1967 the first German translation took place in the GDR. An autobiographical sequel appeared in excerpts in Russian in 2000 under the title That came after in the Petersburg literary magazine Der Stern . Your diary was translated into German again in 2002, this time unabridged, under the title I must tell .

Rolnikaitė studied distance learning at Moscow's Maxim Gorky Literature Institute until 1955 , received her writing diploma from Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov and has since written in Russian. She was married to a Russian, lived and worked in Saint Petersburg . She was a member of the Democratic Writers' Union.

Works (selection)

• I have to tell. My diary 1941–1945 . From the Yiddish by Dorothea Greve. Foreword by Marianna Butenschön . Kindler Verlag, 2002 and 2004 as Rowohlt paperback, 287 pages, ISBN 3-499-23555-2 . (Original title: Ja dolzna rasskazat '. First German language. Edition under the title Das Tagebuch der Maria Rolnikaite published by Europa-Verlag, Vienna [among others] 1966)
• Get used to the light: Roman . From d. Soot. by Lieselotte Remané . Berlin: Verlag Volk u. World, 1977
• ID control! : Roman . From d. Soot. by Hans-Joachim Grimm, Berlin: Book Club 65, 1976

See also

• The report by Helene Holzman from the ghetto and concentration camp in Kaunas

Web links

• Literature by and about Mascha Rolnikaitė in the catalog of the German National Library
• Book review at Deutschlandradio
• Rolnikaite, Masja at worldcat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ушла из жизни писательница Мария Рольникайте. In: jewish.ru. April 7, 2016, Retrieved April 7, 2016 (Russian).