It was February 20, 1943, in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The world was closing in on 14-year-old Rutka Laskier, as the Germans forced the Jews of Bedzin to move into a ghetto ahead of their extermination that summer.

"I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time. There is an Aktion 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. I try to escape from these thoughts, of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies," she wrote.

A month earlier, Laskier had started a diary, detailing in moving and chilling detail the final months of her life.

The diary - some 60 handwritten pages in a notebook now yellowed by age - was presented to Yad Vashem on Monday by 89-year-old Stanislawa Sapinska, a childhood friend of Laskier who kept the diary for more than six decades, until her nephew convinced her to hand it over to the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority for safekeeping.

Laskier's family was living in an apartment belonging to the Sapinskas when the two girls first met, Sapinska said, at a time when the ghetto was still not closed off to non-Jews.