My diary contains bitter truth and not a drop of invention. The most vivid imagination can not create the scenario we have experienced. I wrote this diary for myself, to ease my heart. It is the scream of the soul of a teenage girl, who suffered so many unfair and severe blows of fortune...
There is a diary, a notebook. It is very old. To be more precise, it is 65 years old. It is not every day that you can see such an old notebook. This notebook is in front of me in a white envelope which protects it from humidity. I received the envelope from the Catastrophe [i.e. Yad Vashem] museum in Jerusalem so this notebook would survive longer and tell the people what the Nazi did to us. It is a square ruled school notebook, a bit thicker than a normal one, meant for maths. The pages of this notebook have turned yellow, and the cover was torn. In the beginning I wrote with a chemical pencil and the writings are very well preserved. The blue and black ink also survived the time. The first 20 pages of it contain my poems from that time. Further on is the diary which I wrote in 1942–1946. My drawings are there as well. And now it is the moment to open this diary...
*While in the Kaunas Ghetto Tamara Lazersonaitė wrote a diary in Lithuanian. Later poems and memoirs of Tamara Lazerson are in Russian.
Thanks to the writer Sara Neshamit and translator Lea Barak “Tamaros dienoraštis” (“Tamara‘s Diary”) was first time published in Hebrew in 1975 in Tel-Aviv.
In the original – Lithuanian language - Tamara Lazersonaitė‘s diary by the name “Tamara‘s Diary” in 1997 was published by the publishing house “Vaga” in Vilnius.
In 2002 Tamara‘s diary named “Тетрадь из сожженного гетт”о (“Exercise-book from the burnt ghetto”)> was published by the publishing house “Pilies studio” in Tel-Aviv. Tamara Lazersonaitė incorporated also the essays and poems of her brother Viktor Lazerson into this book.
This article uses excerpts from “Tamara‘s Diary” Lithuanian editions and later written but not included into the mentioned book memoirs.
Her memoirs “Мои спасители” (“My saviours”), “Не говорите мне” (“Do not tell me”), poems “Крик” (“Cry”), “Я не из детства – из Шоа” (“I haven‘t come from the childhood – from Shoa”), the authentic exercise-book, written in the Kaunas Ghetto, facsimiles, her personal and the photos of her relatives Tamara Lazersonaitė -Rostovskaja handed over to the Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum from the personal archive in 2005-2006.
