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The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak : Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto - Dawid Sierakowiak

The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak

Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto

By: Dawid Sierakowiak, Kamil Turnowski (Translator)

Paperback | 1 February 1998 | Edition Number 1

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Young Dawid Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in the urban slave labour camp of the Lodz Ghetto during the Nazi occupation during World War II. His notebooks were found stacked on a stove, ready to be burned for heat. The Ghetto was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe.;The diary comprises a legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. Off mountain climbing and studying Southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady desire to experience life, learn languages and read great literature. He returns home as war breaks out. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world.
Industry Reviews
The diary of a bright teenage boy who endured four years in the Nazis' largest urban slave camp, the Lodz Ghetto, in Poland, before succumbing. Dawid's bleak record of his life (edited by Adelson, who compiled the definitive history of the Lodz ghetto and produced a documentary film on the subject) almost didn't survive: Two of the seven notebooks that compose the diary were burned for fuel in the winter of 1945, and the Polish government nearly destroyed the remaining volumes in their 1960s campaign to eradicate all vestiges of the Holocaust. Dawid was a dedicated memoirist, setting down facts, dates, rumors, and moods, and his record of the destruction of his community and his own sad struggle to survive make this an invaluable portrait of the progressive exploitation and extermination of Polish Jewry. The diary, which begins in 1939, reveals Dawid to be at first a high-spirited young man, mocking Hitler, flirting in the bomb shelters. But once the Nazis seize Poland, life turns grim. Food, until the war "such an insignificant thing," dominates his thoughts and overshadows his once lively intellectual life. We not only feel the diarist's mind and spirit waning under intense suffering, we experience with Dawid how his parents die, his mother despite her stoicism and his father despite his greed and corruption. The young Marxist is bitterly aware of the ghetto's class system ("the big shots eat"). Despite a job in the ghetto bakery that affords him more life-saving calories, he is too emaciated and exhausted to continue diary entries after April 15, 1943. He succumbs to "ghetto disease" (starvation and tuberculosis) on Aug. 8. The death certificate is the last of the book's 40 striking photos. In its determined recording of the everyday experience of oppression, Dawid's diary offers a low-key but nonetheless powerful and authentic portrait of ghetto life and death during the Holocaust. (Kirkus Reviews)

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