12 | NOVEMBER 4 • 2021 

OUR COMMUNITY

ALAN MUSKOVITZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER
JERRY ZOLYNSKY PHOTOGRAPHY
Sophie’s
Sorrow

Holocaust survivor shares 
the agony of doomed girl 
from the Lodz Ghetto.
A 

somber, but reflective Sophie 
Klisman, 92, grasped a tissue 
as she gazed at a large map of 
the city of Lodz, Poland, displayed on a 
wall of the Holocaust Memorial Center in 
Farmington Hills. 
Her clenched tissue stood at the ready 
as tears welled up in her eyes as she focused 
on the area of the map that the Nazis had 
cordoned off and designated as the Lodz (pro-
nounced “Ludge”) Ghetto.
The map is part of a touring exhibit, “The Girl 
in the Diary: Searching for Rywka from the Lodz 
Ghetto,” that runs through Dec. 30. 
Rywka’s diary was unearthed after the liberation of 
the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland 
in June 1945. The writings were found by a Soviet doctor, 
absent of its young author, Rywka (pronounced Rivka) Lipszyc, 
an Orthodox pre-teen who wrote of her ghetto experiences from 
that perspective.
The diary would remain in private hands for 60 years before 
being discovered and an exhibition created by the Galicia 
Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland. Rywka’s Diary has also 
been translated into English and other languages and pub-
lished as a book by Harper Collins in 2015.
Rywka was eventually liberated from Bergen-Belsen 
concentration camp in Germany in April 1945. In 1955, a 
woman who was mentioned in the diary testified that Rywka, 
gravely ill, died at the age of 16 after being hospitalized in 
Germany. A displaced person’s certificate from September 1945 
is the last known official document of her existence.
Rywka’s story is all too familiar to Sophie Klisman for she, 
too, lived the nightmare of the Lodz Ghetto and was imprisoned 
in two of the three same concentration camps as was Rywka. 
Sophie has been sharing her story as a speaker at the Holocaust 
Memorial Center (HMC) for the past seven years. Prior to that, 
for over a half century, Sophie rarely shared her experiences, 
even with her family. 
Sophie and her husband and fellow Holocaust survivor, 
Bernard, of blessed memory, like so many survivors wanted to 
spare their children the details of their painful past. Sophie said, 

Baby Shoes in 
the HMC Exhbit

ALAN MUSKOVITZ

