Anthony Rudolf (ed), Trans: Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Shearsman Books, £10.95
Jerzyk Urman was the British author Anthony Rudolf's second cousin once removed. Mark Rothstein was his second cousin, too. Both died during the Second World War at the age of 11, Jerzyk by his own hand in Poland in 1943, Mark was one of 134 people (120 of them Jewish) killed when a V-2 flying bomb demolished a block of flats in Stepney only six weeks before Germany surrendered.
Thanks to Rudolf's tireless investigations, we now know quite a lot about young Jerzyk, but still not very much about Mark, and indeed there's not that much to know: he was an ordinary East End Jewish kid. The one thing that unites them, apart from their relationship to Rudolf, is that they were two of the hundreds of thousands of Hitler's child victims.
We know a lot about Jerzyk because for the last two months of his life he kept a diary. It was saved by his family, typed up by his Uncle Emil after the war and first published by Rudolf, an admitted obsessive about his story, in 1991.
Since then, more information has come to light, notably the original copy of the boy's diary, discovered among the papers of his mother, Sophie, in Tel Aviv; a diary kept by Sophie herself after her son's death until the arrival of the Red Army to liberate Drohobycz, where the family was hiding; and a postwar interview in Israel with his father, Dr Izydor Urman. All this material is brought together in a new volume, with fresh introductions and copious footnotes, rounded off by an account of the short life and tragic death of Mark Rothstein.
His diary was saved by his family and typed up
Jerzyk swallowed a cyanide capsule when a group of Kripo militiamen burst into the house where the Urmans were being sheltered by a Polish family. He had already decided he would not be taken alive to be despatched to the death camps; his diary shows him to have been extraordinarily mature and self-aware for an 11-year-old, partly through terrible events, such as dead bodies hanging in the town square, that no child should ever have to witness.
Sophie's diary is a heartbreaking document, the entries often addressed to the boy she and Izydor had to bury in the back garden on the night of his death. But she also tracks the progress of the war: in June 1944 she notes a new German weapon, "rocket bombs of colossal explosive force … bombarding London and southern England", one of which was to kill Mark Rothstein.
She and Izydor ended up in Israel after the war and had the consolation of a daughter, Irit. But their accounts of the loss of their beloved son show that the wound never healed. Anthony Rudolf has performed a great service in Jerzyk's - and Mark's - memory.
