Rywka Lipszyc

Rywka Lipszyc (pronounced as Rivka Lipshitz; 15 September 1929 – disappeared 10 September 1945) was a Polish-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust survivor. She was deported from the Łódź Ghetto to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, followed by a transfer to Gross-Rosen and forced labor at its subcamp in Christianstadt (Krzystkowice). She was then taken on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, where the record of her life ends.

Her diary, composed of 112 pages, was handwritten in Polish between 3 October 1943 and 12 April 1944. Translated to English by Malgorzata Markoff and annotated by Ewa Wiatr, it was published for the first time in the United States in early 2014, some 70 years after it was written. She was born in September 1929 in Łódź, Poland, and records show that she was still living in Łódź on January 1, 1938. She had a brother, Abram (known as Abramek), born in 1932, and two sisters, Cypora (known as Cipka), born in 1933, and Estera, (known as Tamarcia), born in 1937. The family were observant Orthodox Jews. (called Estusia), got legal custody of Rywka and Cipka, and they lived with Esther's sisters Channah (called Chanusia) and Minia (called Mina) in an apartment at 38 Wolborska Street. The ghetto's Juvenile Protection Committee provided some aid for the orphaned sisters Rywka and Cipka, including an extra food ration

In her free time, Rywka enjoyed visiting friends, going on walks, and reading books, including novels and Jewish religious texts. She and her sister Cipka read Les Misérables together, and Rywka complained that the book had "fallen apart" and that she was unable to read it while Cipka slept. She helped organize a library in the ghetto and donated two volumes of War and Peace to it. Rywka wrote that she sometimes fought with her cousins and didn't feel at home living with them. Once, during an argument with her guardian Estusia over who should bring in a bucket of water, Estusia struck her on the head and threatened to kick her out. Rywka got along very well with her sister Cipka, however, and said she felt "I have to replace her mother for her as much as I can." She advised Cipka to keep a diary of her own. Mina and Esther left for Sweden without her, and both of them assumed she had died. Mina submitted Pages of Testimony about Rywka's presumed death to Yad Vashem twice, once in 1955 and once in 2000. She made repeated attempts to have it translated but could not find anyone who would do it. Berezovskaya died in 1983. The diary was kept by her son along with other war memorabilia. He died in 1992. Researcher Judy Janec, who was the director of the Tauber Holocaust Library and Archives at the JFCS Holocaust Center, and Wojciech Płosa, the head of archive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, both believe it was found and buried by the Sonderkommando, who buried numerous manuscripts in an attempt to leave evidence of the Nazis' crimes behind. Eight of these manuscripts were unearthed after the war.

After Rywka's diary was given to the JFCS Holocaust Center, historians researched her life and determined Rywka did not die right after her cousins left for Sweden, as they had thought she had. On 25 July 1945, she was sent to a hospital in , about eighteen miles north of Lübeck. In 2017, the diary was also published in Polish. The diary was also the subject of a moving exhibit that had appeared in various venues throughout the United States, including at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee in Wisconsin and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, Illinois, as of 2023. Sara Selver-Urbach survived the Holocaust and would move to Israel and would write a memoir, Through the Window of My Home: Recollections from the Lodz Ghetto.