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The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto
"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation―the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Lodz Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children. The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary." He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
About the author
Dawid Sierakowiak
1 bookDawid Sierakowiak was born in Poland in July 1924. He began his diary when he was fourteen, before the German invasion of Poland, and continued it until April 1943. He and his family were confined to the Lodz Ghetto, where Dawid recorded the deportation of his mother, the death of his father, and the starvation and suffering of all. He died of tuberculosis and starvation in the ghetto on August 8, 1943. He was nineteen years old. His younger sister, the last survivor of the family, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and presumably died there.
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June 24, 2012
The Loss of a World Entire
What follows is an old review of mine, a piece I wrote some time ago. For some reason I did not think to add it here, an oversight I’m now making good. This does not come as a distant afterthought. Dawid’s Diary came to mind recently when I was reading The Emperor of Lies, a prizewinning novel by Steve Sem-Sandberg set in the Lodz Ghetto. I hope to add my review of this book in a day or two. I offer my assessment of Dawid’s testimony as a kind of prologue.
I wrote an article on my blog lamenting the death of Miep Gies, the Dutchwoman who supported Anne Frank and her family when they were hiding in Amsterdam and who later rescued Anne’s now world-famous Diary. Subsequent to that another wartime diary of a gifted Jewish teenager was drawn to my attention, that of Dawid Sierakowiak, who died in the Lodz Ghetto in August 1943, aged nineteen.
I had never heard either of Dawid or his account of life in the notorious ghetto, one of the longest-standing in Eastern Europe. My ignorance has now been made good and I offer this brief assessment of his remarkable day-by-day picture, drawn under the most unimaginably difficult circumstances.
To begin with, I should say that I would not make a direct comparison between the accounts of Anne and Dawid. Anne lived in fear of discovery but her Diary is concerned with so many aspects of life, thought and experience that might be shared by any perceptive teenager. I read Anne’s Diary as a kind of dialogue, with me as the other party. She never knew what lay beyond, and when she did she was no longer able to write.
Dawid did know. His account, therefore, is more of a strict record, an insight, lacking in the same degree of intimacy. But what a record it is; one of despair, occasionally punctuated by hope, only to fall back into even deeper levels of despair. He has a brilliant mind, an acute understanding, giving a painful and detailed record of the degradation and dehumanisation that was such an important part of the Holocaust.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Germans hardly feature at all in Dawid’s Diary. They are mostly a distant threat from over the wall for a community that was effectively sealed off from the world. It’s other Jews who do the Nazis’ work for them; bureaucratic elites that presided over the unequal distribution of an already inadequate supply of food; a ghetto police service which selects those to be sent beyond the wall to their ultimate death in the gas vans of Chelmno. It was a hierarchy all presided over by Chaim Rumkowski, one of the most controversial figures in Jewish Holocaust history. Here are Dawid’s own words from an entry in March, 1943;
Lunatics, perverts, and criminals like Rumkowski rule over us and determine our food allocations, work and health. No wonder the Germans don’t want to interfere in ghetto matters: the Jews will kill one another perfectly well, and, in the meantime, they will also squeeze maximum production out of one another.
One of the most heartbreaking episodes of all was Rumkowski’s ‘Give Me your Children’ plea, urging families to sacrifice all children ten years and younger. to be handed over to the Germans. The point is that people did not know how the children –and the elderly – were going to die, but they certainly knew that they were going to die. The ensuing agony is recorded in detail by Dawid, as is the loss of his own elderly mother.
There is a dominant theme to this book – food, and the lack of it. Entry after entry mentions rations, what is available and, more often, what is not. It’s an impossible situation, a race of life against death, the only possibility of avoiding death being an end to the war. News does sometimes seep into the ghetto, snippets of information that make it clear that victory - and life – is hopelessly distant.
Parts of the Diary are missing and it breaks off abruptly in April, 1943. It did not have the same impact on Holocaust literature as Anne’s Diary essentially because the post-war Polish authorities attempted to submerge any document bearing on uniquely Jewish suffering.
I’m so glad I read this, so glad I now know something of the life of Dawid Sierakowiak. It also saddened me, not just his personal tragedy, his death and the death of his mother, his father and his sister. But there is something more; his loss may also have been the world’s loss. I’m thinking here of a passage near the beginning of his record, before the outbreak of the war, written when he was only fifteen;
I read and began to write a work I planned a long time ago about the immanent future of Jewry. The Semite covers a programme of reconciliation and cooperation with the Arabs.
Yes, what possibilities were ended forever in the life of Dawid Sierakowiak? The loss of a single life is the loss of a world entire.
What follows is an old review of mine, a piece I wrote some time ago. For some reason I did not think to add it here, an oversight I’m now making good. This does not come as a distant afterthought. Dawid’s Diary came to mind recently when I was reading The Emperor of Lies, a prizewinning novel by Steve Sem-Sandberg set in the Lodz Ghetto. I hope to add my review of this book in a day or two. I offer my assessment of Dawid’s testimony as a kind of prologue.
I wrote an article on my blog lamenting the death of Miep Gies, the Dutchwoman who supported Anne Frank and her family when they were hiding in Amsterdam and who later rescued Anne’s now world-famous Diary. Subsequent to that another wartime diary of a gifted Jewish teenager was drawn to my attention, that of Dawid Sierakowiak, who died in the Lodz Ghetto in August 1943, aged nineteen.
I had never heard either of Dawid or his account of life in the notorious ghetto, one of the longest-standing in Eastern Europe. My ignorance has now been made good and I offer this brief assessment of his remarkable day-by-day picture, drawn under the most unimaginably difficult circumstances.
To begin with, I should say that I would not make a direct comparison between the accounts of Anne and Dawid. Anne lived in fear of discovery but her Diary is concerned with so many aspects of life, thought and experience that might be shared by any perceptive teenager. I read Anne’s Diary as a kind of dialogue, with me as the other party. She never knew what lay beyond, and when she did she was no longer able to write.
Dawid did know. His account, therefore, is more of a strict record, an insight, lacking in the same degree of intimacy. But what a record it is; one of despair, occasionally punctuated by hope, only to fall back into even deeper levels of despair. He has a brilliant mind, an acute understanding, giving a painful and detailed record of the degradation and dehumanisation that was such an important part of the Holocaust.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Germans hardly feature at all in Dawid’s Diary. They are mostly a distant threat from over the wall for a community that was effectively sealed off from the world. It’s other Jews who do the Nazis’ work for them; bureaucratic elites that presided over the unequal distribution of an already inadequate supply of food; a ghetto police service which selects those to be sent beyond the wall to their ultimate death in the gas vans of Chelmno. It was a hierarchy all presided over by Chaim Rumkowski, one of the most controversial figures in Jewish Holocaust history. Here are Dawid’s own words from an entry in March, 1943;
Lunatics, perverts, and criminals like Rumkowski rule over us and determine our food allocations, work and health. No wonder the Germans don’t want to interfere in ghetto matters: the Jews will kill one another perfectly well, and, in the meantime, they will also squeeze maximum production out of one another.
One of the most heartbreaking episodes of all was Rumkowski’s ‘Give Me your Children’ plea, urging families to sacrifice all children ten years and younger. to be handed over to the Germans. The point is that people did not know how the children –and the elderly – were going to die, but they certainly knew that they were going to die. The ensuing agony is recorded in detail by Dawid, as is the loss of his own elderly mother.
There is a dominant theme to this book – food, and the lack of it. Entry after entry mentions rations, what is available and, more often, what is not. It’s an impossible situation, a race of life against death, the only possibility of avoiding death being an end to the war. News does sometimes seep into the ghetto, snippets of information that make it clear that victory - and life – is hopelessly distant.
Parts of the Diary are missing and it breaks off abruptly in April, 1943. It did not have the same impact on Holocaust literature as Anne’s Diary essentially because the post-war Polish authorities attempted to submerge any document bearing on uniquely Jewish suffering.
I’m so glad I read this, so glad I now know something of the life of Dawid Sierakowiak. It also saddened me, not just his personal tragedy, his death and the death of his mother, his father and his sister. But there is something more; his loss may also have been the world’s loss. I’m thinking here of a passage near the beginning of his record, before the outbreak of the war, written when he was only fifteen;
I read and began to write a work I planned a long time ago about the immanent future of Jewry. The Semite covers a programme of reconciliation and cooperation with the Arabs.
Yes, what possibilities were ended forever in the life of Dawid Sierakowiak? The loss of a single life is the loss of a world entire.
September 11, 2009
You can read The Book Thief all you want. You can cry over it all you want. You can think the character of Death is really incredible all you want.
But it's nothing compared to a young man's authentic journal.
Dawid Sierakowiak's journal begins optimistically. He has high hopes for life, and is eager to learn and read. During the Nazi occupation of Lodz he and his family are confined to a ghetto, abused and humiliated daily, starving and sick, with no chance in sight of ever being allowed to leave the confines of the ghetto.
As the journal progresses we see Dawid's hope faltering. He talks about the experience tearing his family apart, about how his father steals from the rest of the family, an act no one in Dawid's family would have expected to see. He talks about "ghetto sickness", the various scabs one might expect to see, tuberculosis (which is the named cause of death for Dawid a few years later), the true sight, sound and smell of starvation.
What makes this so much more powerful than The Book Thief or other novels could ever be is the fact that, hello, this is a true story. Included throughout were photos taken by other Lodz prisoners who also died in unfortunate ways, but their images still survive. The pictures themselves are also incredibly hard to look at - one of a little boy trying to pull himself up after passing out from hunger; one of Jewish prisoners in a shower, naked and horrifyingly thin; one of a dead or dying child, gaunt in the face and completely covered with bleedy scabs. I tried not to put the book down after looking at these pictures or after reading some of Dawid's entries - they weren't able to turn away from the experiences, so why should I put it down just because I'm disturbed?
Incredibly powerful stuff here.
But it's nothing compared to a young man's authentic journal.
Dawid Sierakowiak's journal begins optimistically. He has high hopes for life, and is eager to learn and read. During the Nazi occupation of Lodz he and his family are confined to a ghetto, abused and humiliated daily, starving and sick, with no chance in sight of ever being allowed to leave the confines of the ghetto.
As the journal progresses we see Dawid's hope faltering. He talks about the experience tearing his family apart, about how his father steals from the rest of the family, an act no one in Dawid's family would have expected to see. He talks about "ghetto sickness", the various scabs one might expect to see, tuberculosis (which is the named cause of death for Dawid a few years later), the true sight, sound and smell of starvation.
What makes this so much more powerful than The Book Thief or other novels could ever be is the fact that, hello, this is a true story. Included throughout were photos taken by other Lodz prisoners who also died in unfortunate ways, but their images still survive. The pictures themselves are also incredibly hard to look at - one of a little boy trying to pull himself up after passing out from hunger; one of Jewish prisoners in a shower, naked and horrifyingly thin; one of a dead or dying child, gaunt in the face and completely covered with bleedy scabs. I tried not to put the book down after looking at these pictures or after reading some of Dawid's entries - they weren't able to turn away from the experiences, so why should I put it down just because I'm disturbed?
Incredibly powerful stuff here.
May 12, 2017
Heartbreaking, unforgettable and laden with tragedy: that is how I would describe this remarkable book based on notebooks kept by Dawid Sierakowiak, a Jewish teenager who was trapped in the Lodz Ghetto during World War II and ultimately died there of starvation and tuberculosis in 1943. Dawid begins his first notebook at age 15, just before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1939. Here we see the last days of normal life. By 1940, the ghetto is established, and Dawid is trapped there along with tens of thousands of other Jews. Slowly they are strangled by extreme food shortages, disease, unsanitary conditions, overwork, extreme cold and abuse by the Nazis. Dawid records this day-to-day suffering with keen and sardonic observations. Schools are closed, and Dawid survives by doing manual work (making belts and other things for the Nazis) as well as tutoring students in exchange for a bowl of soup. Both parents die (his beloved mother, suffering from extreme malnutrition, is deported once it was determined that she is no longer able to work) and Dawid - suffering from scabies, infections, fever - is left to fend for himself and his sister. Not all of his notebooks survived the war (some apparently were burned as fuel) but fortunately some were recovered and preserved.
May 27, 2010
I learned more from this book about what it meant to be a Jew trying to live in occupied Poland than anything I have ever read on this grim subject.
After finishing it I was left numb, wondering how many other lives of such promise were snuffed out by the twin evils of fascism and communism.
And how relentless starvation and fear can actually break a man's spirit, as it did his father's.
Heartbreaking. A very different diary indeed to the one Anne Frank kept.Dawid Sierakowiak
After finishing it I was left numb, wondering how many other lives of such promise were snuffed out by the twin evils of fascism and communism.
And how relentless starvation and fear can actually break a man's spirit, as it did his father's.
Heartbreaking. A very different diary indeed to the one Anne Frank kept.Dawid Sierakowiak
February 19, 2024
“Time is passing, my youth is passing, my school years, my power and enthusiasm are all passing. Only the Devil knows what I will manage to save from this pogrom. I’m slowly beginning to lose my hope of coming back to life or even of holding onto the one I’m living now.”
December 12, 2023
this is a heart wrenching book . I felt joy, sadness, anger and everything in-between.
April 11, 2013
An extraordinary diary of a young man who was fifteen years old when his first diary entry begins, when the world was on the brink of war but he was on the brink of beginning his promising life. Dawid Sierakowiak recorded brief entries every day and through it we get to see how slowly, over the course of three years, he wasted away in the holocaust ghetto and died. He wrote with incredible awareness of his terrible situation but still with a degree of calm and clarity that took my breath away. The diary ends with Dawid’s death certificate dated a few months after the last surviving entry. Cause: tuberculosis.
This an incredible work because it records the nightmarish ongoings in the ghetto from a victim’s point of view as it happened – be it internal developments on an organizational scale, politics of the war as news trickled in, as well as the records of the daily rations of food (watery soup made of radish leaves!) which starved the Jews to death. But what gripped me even more was that the author was clearly a young man of exceptional talent; an intellectual who loved to learn and excelled at it (earned highest grades in gymnasium in the ghetto!), a child of incredible strength of mind and character. Dawid was a mere teenager, yet he wrote with the intellectual maturity and level-headedness few can hope to ever develop. His writing, while providing exact measurements of all foods rationed which may not be relevant to most readers, is still always interesting. He does not whine or envy or allow himself to get bitter or hysterical. His writing is concise, his rage is rational, his observations, while grim, are often correct. His struggle to keep his hopes alive (not always successfully) and his mind clear (often successfully) is a beautiful testament to human capacity.
In the foreword by Lawrence Langer, Langer writes “if his diary has any hero, it is food, not the human spirit”. How could Langer be so blind, I wonder? What has food done in this diary that is heroic? Been absent? Been allocated to the “haves”? Been obsessively dreamed of but torturously unreachable? What? Dawid is a hero in so many ways. He may not have been a blind optimist with a spirit only a fool can have in such conditions, he may not have been suicidal enough to fight a pointless fight against the much more powerful Nazi beast, but he fought. He fought every day to survive, to keep living so he could get to the end. He fought to retain his human dignity and his intellectual growth. To be a good man in conditions that made animals of others. To share his portions fairly with his family and to forgive his father’s stealing of his. Dawid was not passive. He believed strongly that the war will end sooner or later. It was this view that shaped his behavior. He believed it despite the constant German gains, the mass hysteria, the surreal world situation, the death of all of his friends and family. Over and over again he wrote it was only a matter of time until the end of the war, so he fought to stay alive to that end. If only he could have enough food, medicine for his scabies or frostbite or tooth abscess, clothing, heat -- health. Sadly, he didn’t win his fight. The human body can take only so much.
Rarely did Dawid allow himself to break down amid his stubborn fight for survival, but when his mother was examined and taken to be deported, he fell apart. He wrote “I’ve lost mother… Dear Mother, my tiny, emaciated mother who has gone through so many misfortunes in her life, whose entire life was one of sacrifices for other… They say that mom is unrecognizable [at the hospital], which makes her slender chances even less. At times such shudders and heart palpitations come over me that it seems to me I’m going insane or delirious. The hour of her deportation is coming closer, and there’s no help from anywhere… Nothing will fill up the eternal emptiness in the soul, brain, mind and heart that is created by the loss of one’s beloved person…” How could we not sob, reading a young man’s raw love for his mother, so simply expressed?
Heartbreaking. They all perished, but his diary survived. His fight wasn’t all for naught.
This an incredible work because it records the nightmarish ongoings in the ghetto from a victim’s point of view as it happened – be it internal developments on an organizational scale, politics of the war as news trickled in, as well as the records of the daily rations of food (watery soup made of radish leaves!) which starved the Jews to death. But what gripped me even more was that the author was clearly a young man of exceptional talent; an intellectual who loved to learn and excelled at it (earned highest grades in gymnasium in the ghetto!), a child of incredible strength of mind and character. Dawid was a mere teenager, yet he wrote with the intellectual maturity and level-headedness few can hope to ever develop. His writing, while providing exact measurements of all foods rationed which may not be relevant to most readers, is still always interesting. He does not whine or envy or allow himself to get bitter or hysterical. His writing is concise, his rage is rational, his observations, while grim, are often correct. His struggle to keep his hopes alive (not always successfully) and his mind clear (often successfully) is a beautiful testament to human capacity.
In the foreword by Lawrence Langer, Langer writes “if his diary has any hero, it is food, not the human spirit”. How could Langer be so blind, I wonder? What has food done in this diary that is heroic? Been absent? Been allocated to the “haves”? Been obsessively dreamed of but torturously unreachable? What? Dawid is a hero in so many ways. He may not have been a blind optimist with a spirit only a fool can have in such conditions, he may not have been suicidal enough to fight a pointless fight against the much more powerful Nazi beast, but he fought. He fought every day to survive, to keep living so he could get to the end. He fought to retain his human dignity and his intellectual growth. To be a good man in conditions that made animals of others. To share his portions fairly with his family and to forgive his father’s stealing of his. Dawid was not passive. He believed strongly that the war will end sooner or later. It was this view that shaped his behavior. He believed it despite the constant German gains, the mass hysteria, the surreal world situation, the death of all of his friends and family. Over and over again he wrote it was only a matter of time until the end of the war, so he fought to stay alive to that end. If only he could have enough food, medicine for his scabies or frostbite or tooth abscess, clothing, heat -- health. Sadly, he didn’t win his fight. The human body can take only so much.
Rarely did Dawid allow himself to break down amid his stubborn fight for survival, but when his mother was examined and taken to be deported, he fell apart. He wrote “I’ve lost mother… Dear Mother, my tiny, emaciated mother who has gone through so many misfortunes in her life, whose entire life was one of sacrifices for other… They say that mom is unrecognizable [at the hospital], which makes her slender chances even less. At times such shudders and heart palpitations come over me that it seems to me I’m going insane or delirious. The hour of her deportation is coming closer, and there’s no help from anywhere… Nothing will fill up the eternal emptiness in the soul, brain, mind and heart that is created by the loss of one’s beloved person…” How could we not sob, reading a young man’s raw love for his mother, so simply expressed?
Heartbreaking. They all perished, but his diary survived. His fight wasn’t all for naught.
April 1, 2023
I found this book sad and enjoyable at the same time. It's sad what Dawid (David) went through, but it's also VERY realistic. I found this book to be even more realistic than the Diary of Anne Frank, both written during the same time. Anne was protected by the reality of the Holocaust for the most part while Dawid wasn't. Dawid writes about the frustration he has with the war and how he wants an end to the war. Hunger is also a permeating theme in his Diary Entries. He also writes about how the richer people enjoyed more rights to everything while the poor didn't. This still holds true today, all over the world.
August 14, 2015
Anne Frank wrote about life in hiding during the Holocaust; Dawid Sierakowiak wrote about "life" in the Lodz Ghetto, if one could call it life. Through daily diary entries, Dawid brings the reader with him on a macabre journey as he becomes a prisoner - to the Ghetto, to hunger, to fear, to desperation. He and his diary bear witness to the systemic annihilation of a portion of the Jews of Europe. He is young and intelligent and minces no words; he knows what is going on, as do so many others, but all are helpless to do anything about it. Not just because they do not have weapons - because they are sick, starving and exhausted, worked as slave laborers on starvation rations meant to kill. Conditions are so bad that many people want to be deported anywhere outside of this Ghetto. He bares the truth about Rumkowski, the infamous collaborator and profiteer "leader" of the Ghetto, who starves the poor and feeds himself and the wealthy. It is my humble opinion that this diary should be required reading, right next to The Diary of Anne Frank.
August 1, 2019
This book tells the true story of a boy named Dawid Sierakowiak, who was only 15 when World War II broke out. In it is his account of the Lodz ghetto. Reading it, I felt like this boy was wise beyond his age. He was extremely intelligent, and it gave me a feeling of sadness/disbelief that such a wise boy was forced to live in such conditions. To think this boy could have done such brilliant things with his life. This boy, only a teenager, already had a realistic view of the world and political views. The conditions of the Lodz ghetto were terrible to say the least. His diary mentions feelings of hopelessness, hunger, despair, a need for vengeance, a want to live through this, and the falling apart of a family thrown into all of this. All I can say is that, if you read any book about the Holocaust, pick this up. It shows an aspect of the Holocaust that people tend to only glance at, life in the ghettos.
Read
June 3, 2013This is another Holocaust diary published without the keeper's knowledge. Dawid didn't survive the horrors of the Shoa but somehow a good deal of his words did - and what a gift they are! No stars for this since this wasn't something Dawid had intended to release.
This diary is fragmented, some parts are missing (they were lost or used for other things) and is abruptly ended due to Dawid's death, but what we're left with is a shocking look into not only the Lodz Ghetto, but the teenager's life and mind who bravely tried to live through it.
Be warned: THIS IS A HAUNTING BOOK. It will stick with you, it may shock you. It is depressing, it may outrage you - but it's a miracle we have this diary as intact as it is and translated.
Read this diary if...
* You're interested in holocaust history
* You're interested in WWII (Europe) history
* You're interested in Jewish Ghetto life
* You're interested in Lodz Ghetto
This diary is fragmented, some parts are missing (they were lost or used for other things) and is abruptly ended due to Dawid's death, but what we're left with is a shocking look into not only the Lodz Ghetto, but the teenager's life and mind who bravely tried to live through it.
Be warned: THIS IS A HAUNTING BOOK. It will stick with you, it may shock you. It is depressing, it may outrage you - but it's a miracle we have this diary as intact as it is and translated.
Read this diary if...
* You're interested in holocaust history
* You're interested in WWII (Europe) history
* You're interested in Jewish Ghetto life
* You're interested in Lodz Ghetto
September 24, 2021
Podczas wizyty na cmentarzu żydowskim w Łodzi zauważyłam grób Dawida, a na nim dopisek, że jest autorem „Dziennika”. W przeciwnym razie pewnie nigdy nie dowiedziałabym się o tych zapiskach.
Nie jest to po prostu literatura – nie ma wybitnej wartości artystycznej, ale potrafi wpłynąć na człowieka. Nie uniknie się porównania do „Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem” czy „I była miłość w getcie” Marta Edelmana, choć to całkiem inny rodzaj tekstu. Edelman wspomina wydarzenia z okresu wojny, a więc może mylić fakty, nie pamiętać dokładnie nazwisk, miejsc, dat. Odnosi się też wrażenie, że ważniejsze jest powstanie w getcie, niż życie codzienne przed. Brakuje tam chociażby informacji o żywności, czarnorynkowych cenach różnych produktów. Z „Dziennikiem” Sierakowiaka jest inaczej. Dawid zaczął go prowadzić w wakacje 1939 roku podczas wycieczki w Pieniny. Konsekwentnie notował niemal codziennie do 1943 roku. To nie literatura faktu, ale źródło historyczne – opisane są dokładnie wszystkie zmiany w dostępie do żywności, jej ceny, rodzaje wykonywanej pracy, kolejne wywózki, choroby i nieliczne wieści z frontu. To sprawia, że charakter tekstu jest inny. Nie są to informacje widowiskowe, bardzo emocjonalne (choć ten wątek jeszcze rozwinę), ale dokładna relacja z łódzkiego getta. Podczas czytania czułam momentami znużenie, ponieważ co drugi wpis dotyczył zmian ceny chleba, zup i warzyw. Wtedy jednak dochodziłam do wniosku, że nie mam prawa tak czuć. Mając dostęp do tak osobistej i dokładnej kroniki wypadków, można choć spróbować wyobrazić sobie, co czuli Żydzi zamknięci w Łodzi. Katharsis i poczucie bycia człowiekiem.
Chciałabym poruszyć jeszcze wątek emocjonalności tego tekstu. Dawid notuje niczym kronikarz i czasami trudno jest wychwycić w „Dzienniku” jego samego. Fascynujące jest w tym kontekście śledzenie jego reakcji na śmierć różnych osób, zwłaszcza najbliższych, kiedy można zobaczyć jego skrywane uczucia. Tak samo ciekawe są momenty, gdy krytykuje klasy społeczne w getcie i wyraża nadzieje związane z komunizmem. Gdyby jednak dożył wywózkę do obozu po likwidacji getta, a potem przyszło mu żyć w Polsce Ludowej, spotkałby się z państwem, które w dalszym ciągu nie jest w stanie zaakceptować jego narodowości. I to jest tym bardziej tragiczne.
Ocena wystawiona tylko dlatego, że uważam „Dziennik” za jedną z najważniejszych pozycji przeczytanych przeze mnie w tym roku.
Nie jest to po prostu literatura – nie ma wybitnej wartości artystycznej, ale potrafi wpłynąć na człowieka. Nie uniknie się porównania do „Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem” czy „I była miłość w getcie” Marta Edelmana, choć to całkiem inny rodzaj tekstu. Edelman wspomina wydarzenia z okresu wojny, a więc może mylić fakty, nie pamiętać dokładnie nazwisk, miejsc, dat. Odnosi się też wrażenie, że ważniejsze jest powstanie w getcie, niż życie codzienne przed. Brakuje tam chociażby informacji o żywności, czarnorynkowych cenach różnych produktów. Z „Dziennikiem” Sierakowiaka jest inaczej. Dawid zaczął go prowadzić w wakacje 1939 roku podczas wycieczki w Pieniny. Konsekwentnie notował niemal codziennie do 1943 roku. To nie literatura faktu, ale źródło historyczne – opisane są dokładnie wszystkie zmiany w dostępie do żywności, jej ceny, rodzaje wykonywanej pracy, kolejne wywózki, choroby i nieliczne wieści z frontu. To sprawia, że charakter tekstu jest inny. Nie są to informacje widowiskowe, bardzo emocjonalne (choć ten wątek jeszcze rozwinę), ale dokładna relacja z łódzkiego getta. Podczas czytania czułam momentami znużenie, ponieważ co drugi wpis dotyczył zmian ceny chleba, zup i warzyw. Wtedy jednak dochodziłam do wniosku, że nie mam prawa tak czuć. Mając dostęp do tak osobistej i dokładnej kroniki wypadków, można choć spróbować wyobrazić sobie, co czuli Żydzi zamknięci w Łodzi. Katharsis i poczucie bycia człowiekiem.
Chciałabym poruszyć jeszcze wątek emocjonalności tego tekstu. Dawid notuje niczym kronikarz i czasami trudno jest wychwycić w „Dzienniku” jego samego. Fascynujące jest w tym kontekście śledzenie jego reakcji na śmierć różnych osób, zwłaszcza najbliższych, kiedy można zobaczyć jego skrywane uczucia. Tak samo ciekawe są momenty, gdy krytykuje klasy społeczne w getcie i wyraża nadzieje związane z komunizmem. Gdyby jednak dożył wywózkę do obozu po likwidacji getta, a potem przyszło mu żyć w Polsce Ludowej, spotkałby się z państwem, które w dalszym ciągu nie jest w stanie zaakceptować jego narodowości. I to jest tym bardziej tragiczne.
Ocena wystawiona tylko dlatego, że uważam „Dziennik” za jedną z najważniejszych pozycji przeczytanych przeze mnie w tym roku.
May 22, 2023
From the darkness of the Holocaust, there were many works that had been lost from victims. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak is a rare find, that was finally published in 1996, more than 40 years after it was written. Dawid was an just a teen when the takeover of Poland occurred, and he and his family were placed in the Lodz Ghettos. He describes the conditions, the regulations, and the fear that runs the area. Dawid tries his best to be helpful, but everyone begins to feel the impact of the physical and mental trauma that were becoming of the ghetto. His family attempts to survive but, unfortunately as many others, they succumbed to death at the Nazis. Although he may have written more, only 5 of his notebooks were recovered to give us a glimpse of his imprisonment.
While the most famous Holocaust diary would be Anne Frank's, Dawid's entries show the dark realities of those living in the ghettos. And because of what he witnessed, his writing is much more direct, bitter, and frightful. He wrote down whatever info he could speak about from war rumors to handling work to corruptions in the ghetto ranks and turmoil in his family. The entries range from short to lengthy, but also from optimism to pessimism rather quickly. The small ounces of pleasure he could find, as his body gradually dies out, were through literary works and language learning. It is unfortunate that Dawid did not live to see the end of the war, as he is another in the large count of lives cut short. Unfiltered and rather detailed, this diary presents another insight into a dark period in human history. Who knows what Dawid could've been had he survived the Holocaust, only leaving his own journals as a legacy and reminder of a period that should never be repeated or be forgotten ever again.
While the most famous Holocaust diary would be Anne Frank's, Dawid's entries show the dark realities of those living in the ghettos. And because of what he witnessed, his writing is much more direct, bitter, and frightful. He wrote down whatever info he could speak about from war rumors to handling work to corruptions in the ghetto ranks and turmoil in his family. The entries range from short to lengthy, but also from optimism to pessimism rather quickly. The small ounces of pleasure he could find, as his body gradually dies out, were through literary works and language learning. It is unfortunate that Dawid did not live to see the end of the war, as he is another in the large count of lives cut short. Unfiltered and rather detailed, this diary presents another insight into a dark period in human history. Who knows what Dawid could've been had he survived the Holocaust, only leaving his own journals as a legacy and reminder of a period that should never be repeated or be forgotten ever again.
October 7, 2017
"Martedì, 11 agosto [1942]. Lodz
I giorni trascorrono uno dopo l'altro. Uno compera le razioni, consuma il poco cibo che ne deriva, muore di fame mentre le mangia, e dopo continua ad aspettare ostinatamente, ininterrottamente, senza demordere fino alla fine della maledetta, dannata guerra. Laboratorio, casa, pasti, letture, la notte con le cimici e gli scarafaggi e di nuovo tutto senza fine, le forze che si perdono costantemente, l'efficienza del corpo e della mente che diminuisce. Continuiamo a sognare, aspettando e facendo calcoli, sempre con i soliti risultati negativi che superano tutte le previsioni e le supposizioni possibili. Stiamo combattendo per sopravvivere fino alla liberazione, un obiettivo tanto inafferrabile quanto fantasmatico." (pp. 230, 231)
I giorni trascorrono uno dopo l'altro. Uno compera le razioni, consuma il poco cibo che ne deriva, muore di fame mentre le mangia, e dopo continua ad aspettare ostinatamente, ininterrottamente, senza demordere fino alla fine della maledetta, dannata guerra. Laboratorio, casa, pasti, letture, la notte con le cimici e gli scarafaggi e di nuovo tutto senza fine, le forze che si perdono costantemente, l'efficienza del corpo e della mente che diminuisce. Continuiamo a sognare, aspettando e facendo calcoli, sempre con i soliti risultati negativi che superano tutte le previsioni e le supposizioni possibili. Stiamo combattendo per sopravvivere fino alla liberazione, un obiettivo tanto inafferrabile quanto fantasmatico." (pp. 230, 231)
December 2, 2022
A brutal but immensely important history for a time when Kanye West and Donald Trump flirt with antisemitism. We should promote works like these to highlight the atrocious conditions Jews would face in ghettos and concentration camps. Dawid died, of hunger most likely, in the Lodz ghetto. His letters were found at random; what a loss it would have been for civilization if they were lost for good.
Dawid Sierakowiak, I wish you were born at a different time under different circumstances. Your ambition and passion for life were striking at such a young age. The world has lost so much. We will never forget.
Dawid Sierakowiak, I wish you were born at a different time under different circumstances. Your ambition and passion for life were striking at such a young age. The world has lost so much. We will never forget.
September 8, 2022
A tragic diary, beautifully written by an intelligent and cultured teenager. His diary almost makes us feel his atrocious hunger, leaves us perplexed and wondering how he can resist hunger, disease and hopelessness for the liberation of the ghetto and still continue to write so well, including philosophical quotes in his notes. From the beginning of reading, we already know that the ending is tragic, however, like many of the Jews from Lødz Ghetto, we still have that irrational hope that we will read a happy ending.
April 30, 2024
I had to read this for a history class and I actually found it really interesting! Of course, the plot is sad to follow since the notebooks are written during the Holocaust and in the Łódź ghetto, but overall, it was interesting to see things from a perspective of someone actually living there. I learned just how terrible the food situation was and the disease that spread like wildfire throughout these ghettos. Although there was a sad ending and it was slow in the beginning, I enjoyed reading it.
November 14, 2022
Tragic. Gripping. Horrific. What strength from this boy!
One thing that sticks with me from the book 7 years after reading it was his statement about 40 grams--when he was responsible for helping feed the family- that was the limit per person for a day of food for "rations" -primarily "soup" or potato peel. Occasionally the luxury of old bread. Look up how little 40 g is. I think there are 250 g in a cup. To give you an idea of how these poor people were treated by the savage Nazis.❤️🙏✡️
One thing that sticks with me from the book 7 years after reading it was his statement about 40 grams--when he was responsible for helping feed the family- that was the limit per person for a day of food for "rations" -primarily "soup" or potato peel. Occasionally the luxury of old bread. Look up how little 40 g is. I think there are 250 g in a cup. To give you an idea of how these poor people were treated by the savage Nazis.❤️🙏✡️
February 10, 2024
"If they don't beat us with a stick, they'll beat us with a club." This is a haunting account of everyday life within the Lodz Ghetto during Nazi occupation of Poland from the perspective of a young boy not even 16 when ghetto life began. Dawid was one of tens of thousands who died in the ghetto from tuberculosis before liberation and his daily diary entries speak to the horror and hardship of everyday life.
March 29, 2021
A gruesome and heartbreaking looking at ghetto life in Nazi Poland. It’s a book that I never want to read again but I think everyone should read. It isn’t easy to get through but it is incredibly powerful.
August 29, 2021
Moving diary of a teenage Jewish young man and his thoughts concerning his time in the Lodz ghetto. Whereas Anne Frank was in hiding, and younger, David wasnt in hiding and saw atrocities and persecution from an older adolescents point of view.
January 3, 2022
An absolutely stellar and devastating book. I don’t think my heart could handle reading it another time in this life, but I think it is a must-read for humanity. It’s wonderful and heartbreaking and brilliant and terrible. A tremendous book that deserves to be read.
January 14, 2022
I've read this diary a few times and it is heartbreaking following the events that Dawid describes. I do wish that his other diaries had survived but what did provides a powerful insight into the daily struggle of those trapped in the ghetto.
January 30, 2023
A wonderful historic document. We meet this adolescent, so different from Anne Frank, but with the same yearning to live. Both witnesses of the Holocaust felt cast out of history. “Colossal changes are taking place all around the world, while we are rotting here in the ghetto” (p 203)
February 1, 2020
Amazing that someone so young would face this situation with so much maturity, forsight, and honesty.
October 24, 2020
Thankful he left these words for us.
January 12, 2023
First person account of Łódź ghetto. Dawid’s journals
December 29, 2023
Heartbreaking.
October 28, 2015
This book was somewhat hard to read - not because it didn't hold my interest, but it was such a disturbing subject. You are reading the boy's actual diaries, knowing how it would come out for him, and knowing that this wasn't written by someone else as fiction. Living with a boy at home about that same age, it was surreal to compare the focuses of the two (and our boy is very mature for his age!) However, I recommend it when you are ready for something besides a light read.
One thing that was hard with reading this on the Kindle is that there were LOTS of footnotes referenced throughout the book. With a "real" book, I usually flip back and read the footnotes; but not with a Kindle because it's too much trouble. When I got to the end of the book and saw how copious the footnotes were, I wish I had referenced them. I tried to read through them at the end, but they would have made so much more sense had I read them at that point in the book.
One thing that was hard with reading this on the Kindle is that there were LOTS of footnotes referenced throughout the book. With a "real" book, I usually flip back and read the footnotes; but not with a Kindle because it's too much trouble. When I got to the end of the book and saw how copious the footnotes were, I wish I had referenced them. I tried to read through them at the end, but they would have made so much more sense had I read them at that point in the book.
December 6, 2015
David's diaries are sad yet captivating personal accounts written by himself during World War 2. Dawid had written almost daily about the political and personal events, his arrival at Lodz Ghetto, and his struggles trying to survive along with his family, who would perish during the war. David was a smart, loving, and talented individual, but he didn't survive the atrocities done to him, and his diary is important when understanding the hardships and injustices in the world, and the reasons why they happen.
Because of the graphic depiction of dehumanizing living and emotional conditions, these diaries may not be suited for all audiences. However, it is definitely worth it as additional material to teach historical content. Dawid's diaries are tragic, but his way of looking at it made it touching.
Because of the graphic depiction of dehumanizing living and emotional conditions, these diaries may not be suited for all audiences. However, it is definitely worth it as additional material to teach historical content. Dawid's diaries are tragic, but his way of looking at it made it touching.
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