Lena Jedwab Rozenberg was born in 1924 to a Jewish family in Bialystok, Poland. In 1941, when she was 16, war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union and the summer camp where she was working was evacuated. Lena ended up in a children's home in western Russia, isolated from friends and family, until 1943 when she began her studies in Moscow. She kept a diary, in Yiddish, from 1941 to 1945, where she reflected on the fate of her family (years after the war she learned that they were murdered at Treblinka) and her own future. Lena's diary was originally published in Yiddish in 1999 and has since been translated into other languages. She died in 2005.