A diary recorded by Yitskhok Rudashevski, a teenager in Vilnius during the Nazi Era, offers a different picture of daily life from that of diarist Anne Frank, according to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan. The institute will focus on this diary in the next installment of its “online museum” of Jewish history.

This diary provides a wider lens on life under Nazi persecution than Anne Frank’s journal because, unlike Anne, he was not isolated and hidden. Yitskhok, at age 13, began chronicling daily life. He recorded the German Army’s takeover of the city from its Soviet occupiers, depicting the confinement of Vilnius’s 55,000 Jews into two ghettos and documenting the first reports of systematic massacres at Ponary, as forested suburb where ultimately 70,000 Jews, 8,000 Soviet war prisoners and 2,000 Polish intelligentsia were shot or machine-gunned to death by Nazi killing squads and Lithuanian volunteers.

According to the diary, in spite of the malnutrition and poor sanitation that inhabitants suffered, they set up schools and youth clubs, published a newspaper, arranged an exhibition on a popular poet, and celebrated the 100,000th book borrowed from the ghetto library.

Yitskhok was murdered at Ponary in October 1943. His cousin located the diary written in Yiddish, in an attic hideaway and gave it to the poet Abraham Sutzkever. Alexandra Zapruder, a co-curator of the online exhibition, said the diary was notable for its “…level of literary ability, command of language, and spirit of observation.”