The five girls were first placed in quarantine in the small city Helsingborg in Sweden. The Red Cross distributed booklets referred to as Journals of Recollections and encouraged the young people to write in them—a naplo in Hungarian or diary in English. 

Ruth was excited about the opportunity. She said, “Good, now I can start writing.” A Red Cross worker from Stockholm, Thea Bank Jensen, helped her. The 27-page diary was written in Hungarian. It was never translated into English until 2018 by Gärtner Szilvia from Budapest, Hungary. 

Manci’s diary is only five pages long. It was translated by Edith’s husband Steve in 1996. She was Manci and Ruthie’s cousin and one of “the five” that survived. Her diary stops quickly right after describing the first evening at Auschwitz. As she said in her memoir, “I just put it away. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”