THE DIARY OF DAWID SIERAKOWIAK: FIVE NOTEBOOKS FROM THE LODZ GHETTO (Dziennik)

Diary by Dawid Sierakowiak, 1960

The five notebooks of Dawid Sierakowiak's diary span a period of almost four years in Lodz, Poland, making it one of the longest and most sustained individual accounts of daily life during the Holocaust. He began his diary at age 14 in June 1939, enjoying a hearty outdoor life at a Jewish youth camp in southern Poland. He ended it in April 1943 in the Lodz ghetto, crippled by starvation, illness, and loss. His diary provides a brutal account of his terrible passage from youthful vitality to exhaustion, despair, and imminent death. Originally published in Polish in 1960, the diary appeared in English translation in 1996.

Dawid grew up in Lodz with his parents and younger sister, Nadzia. His first notebook captures a few moments of calm before the war and the explosion of violence that marked its beginning on 1 September 1939. Well informed of world events and curious about history and politics, Dawid reported on the rising tensions in Europe, the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, and the frantic mobilization in Poland as the German attack became imminent. Once war began he vividly described the air raid bombings, the disruption throughout Lodz, and the desperation of the city's inhabitants who struggled to decide whether to flee or to remain in the city.

On Friday, 29 September, Dawid wrote, "The pact has been signed in Moscow. The division of Poland between Germany and Russia has been settled … Well, well, what an insult!" With this Dawid's diary shifts in tone and content from the tension-filled entries written just prior to and during the brief fight between Germany and Poland to the resigned and eerie calm of life under German occupation. Like many diarists of this period, Dawid noted in sharp and careful detail virtually every restriction that he and his community endured. Reports of confiscations, seizures for forced labor, imposition of the Star of David, restricted movement, expulsions, and countless other repressive measures fill the pages of Dawid's notebook, offering glimpses of the ever-shrinking world of Jews under Nazism. Dawid ended his first notebook on 31 December 1939.

Dawid's next notebook does not begin until 6 April 1941, the long gap most likely attributable to volumes lost during or after the war. The beginning of the second surviving notebook finds Dawid and his family in the Lodz ghetto, where they had already been imprisoned for almost a year. The diarist wrote this and the other three remaining notebooks while in the ghetto itself, and despite their gaps, his account offers an astonishingly thorough picture of his life. Dawid not only reported on his own family's suffering—describing the relentless struggle against hunger, starvation, illness, family tensions, lethargy, and despair—but also turned his gaze to the wider misery shared by the collective community in the Lodz ghetto. To cite only two examples of many, Dawid bitterly denounced the corruption and privilege that divided the ghetto inhabitants and at the same time evoked the shared waiting and hoping for liberation that joined them together.

In his diary Dawid returned often to the subject of his desperate fight against his own physical and mental decline. It is a theme often echoed among other young writers' diaries of this period. Dawid's diary reveals his efforts to overcome the lethargy and stagnation caused by exhaustion and hunger and his own painful acknowledgment of the effect of his ill health on his ability to study, read, and learn. But perhaps most striking of all is the image Dawid recorded of the slow decimation of his own family. His mother was deported and murdered in September 1942; his father died of illness in March 1943. Dawid himself succumbed in August 1943, at the age of 19, four months after he wrote his last entry. His sister Nadzia surely perished, though the details of her fate are unknown. The diary he left behind testifies to the daily life of this writer and to the collective story of the doomed community of Lodz.

—Alexandra Zapruder