A Lighted Candle

The lighted candle in the window is an Old Irish custom to show that Joseph and Mary, who found no room at the Inn in Bethlehem, would be welcome in the house. The large white Christmas Candle, known as "Coinneal na Nollaig" which is decorated with Holly and lit by the youngest child in the family at six o’clock on Christmas Eve.

The Haunting Diary of Rutka Laskier

The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto — at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.

The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.

"The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," the teenager wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die."

Within a few months Rutka was dead and, it seemed, her diary lost. But last year, a Polish friend who had saved the notebook finally came forth, exposing a riveting historical document.

Rutka's Notebook . The 60-page memoir includes innocent adolescent banter, concerns and first loves — combined with a cold analysis of the fate of European Jewry.

"I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy," she wrote on Feb. 5, 1943.

"The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death."

Reports of the gassing of Jews, which were not common knowledge in the West by then, apparently had filtered into the Bedzin ghetto, which was near Auschwitz, Yad Vashem experts said.

The following day she opened her entry with a heated description of her hatred toward her Nazi tormentors. But then, in an effortless transition, she described her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a first kiss.

"I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone's hands to stroke me," she wrote. "I didn't know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now."

Later that day, she shifted back to her harsh reality, describing how she watched as a Nazi soldier tore a Jewish baby away from his mother and killed him with his bare hands.

The diary chronicles Rutka's life from January to April 1943. She shared it with her friend Stanislawa Sapinska, who she met after Rutka's family moved into a home owned by Sapinska's family, which had been confiscated by the Nazis to be included in the Bedzin ghetto. Sapinska came to inspect the house and the girls — one Jewish, one Christian — formed a deep bond.

When Rutka feared she would not survive, she told her friend about the diary. Sapinska offered to hide it in the basement under the floorboards. After the war, she returned to reclaim it.

"She wanted me to save the diary," Sapinska, now in her 80s, recalled Monday. "She said 'I don't know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live on, so that everyone will know what happened to the Jews.'"

In 1943, Rutka was the same age as Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager whose Holocaust diary has become one of the most widely read books in the world. Yad Vashem said Rutka's newly discovered diary was authenticated by experts and Holocaust survivors.

Rutka's father, Yaakov, was the family's only survivor. He died in 1986. But unlike Anne Frank's father, he kept his painful past inside. After the war, he moved to Israel, where he started a new family. His Israeli daughter, Zahava Sherz, said her father never spoke of his other children, and the diary introduced her to the long-lost family she never knew.

"I was struck by this deep connection to Rutka," said Sherz, 57. "I was an only child, and now I suddenly have an older sister. This black hole was suddenly filled, and I immediately fell in love with her."

"I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time,There is an Aktion [a Nazi arrest operation] in town. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house. For a few days, something's in the air. The town is breathlessly waiting in anticipation, and this anticipation is the worst of all. I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell." Rutka wrote on Feb. 20, 1943, as Nazi soldiers began gathering Jews outside her home for deportation.

"I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell. I try to escape from these thoughts of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it's over, you only die once ... but I can't, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day.That means waiting for Auschwitz or labour camp. I must not think about this so now I'll start writing about private matters."However, Rutka would write again. Her last entry was dated April 24, 1943, and her last written words were: "I'm very bored. The entire day I'm walking around the room. I have nothing to do."

In August, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, where she is believed to have been killed upon arrival.

Idols Or God?

I think I can say with a degree of accuracy that many of us long fora deeper relationship, even a yearning to love and grasp that which is beyond our `knowing', and that is God.

We fight and struggle so much too come close to the God whom we love, but I wonder if we are fighting the `wrong' fight and using the wrong tools, and more often than not we are left in deep frustration, and a sense of failure.

Perhaps things would be clearer if we could understand that which we battle, for the war was and always will be within ourselves. To seek to love God with all our heart, mind and soul, without recognising the need to let go of the `false idols' that distract us and draw us away from our ultimate goal. Do we recognise these idols?

There are many `idols' which seek to divert or even seduce us away from that which we seek with all our hearts. What are these idols? Only the individual can answer that, these idols can be so subtle that we may fail to even acknowledge let alone perceive them for what they are. So we settle for the lesser gods rather than continue on the arduous journey of discovering `self' and then letting ` the self' go.

We settle for the comfortable, the ordinary and to be asone with everyone. When we do this we fail to realise by becoming as everyone we lose ourselves and substitute a god for God. This will not only lead us away from God, but into dysfunction and disordered love, where we place our security on the opinions of others, and make the impossible demand to be loved exclusively, we then become a burden to ourselves and to others. By placing this 'god' above God, we easily become disappointed , discontented and enslaved, in a failure to identify the false `idol' of becoming as everyone.

There are also times in our journey where we face antagonism from others, and focus our attention on self, and allow our feelings to rule, instead of being in control of our feelings, they become a 'god', and we feed this god by embarking on a journey of `proving'ourselves to whom?

Another `idol' is to believe we have already arrived, and we `know' God and have received all we need, we then become seekers no more, but settle for ones limited intellect, the self has become 'god'.

These `idols' are in everything where we have placed THE greatest importance, within our own merit, albiet: knowledge, material comfort, popularity, achievements, self EGO, power, prestige, dominance and the most seductive the need to control.

Even our prayers can be a god, when the need to be 'seen' as `holy' substitutes for the reality of one's need of God's Grace which is needed so as to become Holy. In order to allow God to penetrate into our souls we must first recognise our own sins and acknowledge that we too have failed God. God cannot fill a vessel that is 'perceived' as full by the soul that relies on it's own distorted 'intuition'.

Religiosity can also become a 'god', when we rely on rituals and thelaw of the Church rather than seeking a relationship with God. All these false gods encourage a false self and a person becomes that which it loves.

In recognising these substitute gods, we then begin the journey of reorientation we are then liberated from these attatchments. It isnot the world that is the problem, but in how we relate to the world, it is a shift in perspectives.

Jesus did not sequester Himself away during His Mission, He was in the world but not of the world, our Lord kept His heart focussed on God the Father. So as in Jesus we are not being called to `cast' aside the world nor abandon the world, God created us to live in the world but not be of the world. In order to be fulfilled in our yearning of God who is Love, we need to identify what is motivating us? Do we seek a 'god', or do we seek God?

The God who transforms, heals, liberates and enlivens us. Or do we wish to remain `comfortable'? Are we seeking what we want or do we ask ourselves, what does God want?