A dairy from a burnt ghetto

The diary of Anne Frank is well-known to the world. It is widely read, and has become a basis for a number of plays and films. Yet, there are other diaries that were written by teenage victims of Nazism and saved throughout the years to this day. 

There is nothing more appalling, more truthful, and more sincere than the image of war as seen through the eyes of a young person, actually a kid…

Day after day, page after page, we see the ghetto world through the eyes of a teenage girl. The ghetto world with all its horrors, incessant fear, pain for lost friends, and even small joys…

Our heroine Tamara Rostovskaja began writing her diary at the age of twelve, and finished it when she was fourteen. This makes two years of ghetto life. Even today, one feels terror when reading these yellowed-page copybooks, which she keeps with utmost care. The reader can witness an amazingly quick transformation of a teenage girl into a little woman who feels responsibility for her family and her entire nation – a woman who has come to God; a woman with a universe-embracing soul …Today, Tamara Rostovskaja is eighty. She lives in Israel and has four grandchildren.

Our film is an unknown document; a real story, the aim of which is to denounce fascism and to warn the viewer of the consequences that wars bring to the world …

This screenplay version is fully based on Tamara Rostovskaja’s diaries and interviews. Besides, there are interviews with other former ghetto prisoners who miraculously survived and are now living in Israel.

Their stories complement that of our heroine and make one feel the immensity of the terrible Holocaust.

The visual imagery of the film includes the following: real library footage from Russian and Lithuanian archives; photographs; sketches made by ghetto prisoners; staged scenes and special sketches that are intended to “fuse together” the film materials in terms of style and dramaic concept.