We Dared to Write:
animating a diary that outlived its writer
The film
We Dared to Write is a 60-minute Project Witness documentary that premiered July 23, 2025, built from the words of five teenagers who kept diaries during the Holocaust: Moshe Flinker, Ruthka Lieblich, Rywka Lipszyc, Yitskhok Rudashevski, and Anita Budding Meyer. Each of their stories is told through animation.
Anita Budding Meyer survived, and appears on camera giving her testimony — as does Peter Feigl, another teenage diarist of those years. Historians including Dr. Michael Berenbaum appear throughout, framing each account without speaking over it. The film has since toured museums, schools, synagogues, and universities across North America.
Jeff Choi served as animation director for the full film. ELAION's own in-house production is the segment on Yitskhok Rudashevski, released as a standalone excerpt: The Little Giant of Vilna, available on Project Witness's site.
The story
Yitskhok Rudashevski was thirteen when the Vilna Ghetto was sealed in September 1941. What survived him wasn't a photograph or a reel of film — it was his diary, written in secret through nineteen months of ghetto life, and it's the only record of most of what it describes.
The diary isn't only an account of hunger and fear, though it holds plenty of both. It's the record of a ghetto that built a secret intellectual life inside its walls: a library that celebrated lending its 100,000th book, a theater staging Yiddish poetry and a mock trial of a Roman king, study groups in science and history and Latin held in a converted classroom. Yitskhok and a friend even ran their own research project, going door to door on a single street to record what each family had lost — writing the numbers down "dryly, factually," in his own words, because it was the only way to bear them.
His last entry is dated April 7, 1943. When the ghetto was liquidated that September, he and his family hid in an attic. They were discovered, and in early October 1943 he was murdered at Ponar, two months before his sixteenth birthday. His cousin, Sore Voloshin, was the only member of the household to survive — and it was Sore who later recovered the diary, hidden where he'd left it. The poet Avrom Sutzkever, who had once guided Yitskhok's own writing in the ghetto, helped ensure it survived as one of the primary written records of life inside Vilna's walls.
Why animation
There is no film of the ghetto library, the mock trial, or the attic. What survives is a diary. Animation is what makes the film possible at all — the only way to turn what Yitskhok wrote into something an audience can see.
It's also what let us handle Ponar with the care the subject demands. The massacre is present in the film because it has to be — it's what Yitskhok himself lived in fear of, and what eventually killed him — but it's held at a distance: suggestion and sound design carry the moment, not literal depiction. The goal throughout was to animate what Yitskhok chose to write down, not to invent what the camera never could have shown.
Our approach
The film is built from Yitskhok's own words. His diary entries carry the narration, so the animation follows what he actually recorded rather than a dramatized version of events.
Finding the right voice for that narration was its own task. ELAION handled casting and direction for the voiceover, looking for a tone that could carry a teenager's own words without over-dramatizing them.
Where a scene called for it, we researched further to match period detail and place to the historical record of Vilna under occupation. Storyboards and depiction choices, especially around the ghetto's violence, were developed and reviewed with Project Witness throughout production.
Watch it
The full film, We Dared to Write, and the standalone Little Giant of Vilna excerpt are both available on Project Witness's site.
Work with us
If you're producing a documentary that needs animation — a sequence, a segment, or a fully animated film — tell us what you're planning.