Marija Rolnikaitė, aged 89, has died.

Born July 21, 1927 in Klaipėda/Memel, some have called her Lithuania’s Anne Frank. When she was 14 she and her family were imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto. After that she survived two concentration camps. What was a adolescent pastime, keeping a diary, became an important testimony of the fate of Lithuanian Jewry.

She wrote a poem in Yiddish about the Strazdamuiža concentration camp in Latvia which became an anthem for the anti-Nazi resistance. After the war she worked on the staff of the Lithuanian National Philharmonic for a time and was graduated from the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow in 1955. She published memoirs about her time in the ghetto and concentration camps in 1963. She moved to Leningrad in 1964 where she wrote more books, articles and reviews and was an active member of the Leningrad Jewish Community.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community will not forget her or the bright trail she blazed and now leaves in her wake.