Product Description

Dawid's diaries are a terrifying record, all the more so because of the observant intelligence that presisted through life in a man-made hell. --The Atlantic Monthly There are books whose reading overshadows and eclipses all other literary materials. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak is one of them. --Joanna Rostropowics-Clark, Nowy Dziennik Takes its place with the great Holocaust diaries--Anne Frank, Emmanuel Ringleblum, Adam Czerniakow --Robert Leiter, Jewish Exponent

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #247429 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 271 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When the Nazis captured Lodz, the great textile center of Poland, they squeezed the Jewish population of 200,000 into a sealed neighborhood and began systematically to work and starve them to death. Sierakowiak began his journals when he was 15, just before the war, and continued with almost daily entries until it abruptly breaks off in 1943. Edited by Adelson, producer of the documentary film, Lodz Ghetto, the diary meticulously records Sierakowiak's own deterioration as well as that of the ghetto. Sierakowiak chronicles the growing hunger and desperation of those residents not connected to Chaim Rumkowski, the ghetto's corrupt and dictatorial leader, and the loss of both parents?his mother to the Nazis and his father to tuberculosis, the disease that would claim Sierakowiak at the end. Although Sierakowiak was a Marxist, his political beliefs didn't lead to action of any sort, unlike many of the young leftists in the European ghettos. Instead, he focused almost entirely on food coupons and where he could find work. His obsession with exams, grades and abstract communist theory make the knowledgeable reader, aware of what is to come, scream with exasperation. Sierakowiak didn't have an artist's observant eye, although he was a dedicated reader of literature, so there are no distinctive individuals here aside from the writer himself, nor are there inspirational statements about the innate goodness of people. What is here is a repetitive and detailed account of a population being methodically ground into dust.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA. Dawid Sierakowiak was a bright, athletic, 15 year old in 1939; he died of tuberculosis just a few months after his last journal entry in April of 1943. The ordeal that he, his family, his friends, and the Jews of Lodz endured are highlighted as the day-to-day struggle to survive emerges in these writings. The young man's desire for learning is constant in spite of the inhuman living conditions. Five of the seven notebook diaries kept by Dawid have been translated from the original Polish into English. Efforts at publishing them have been ongoing for over 30 years; the journals were first discovered following Lodz Ghetto's liberation. For libraries striving to develop an extensive collection of Holocaust materials, this book is highly recommended.?Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In 1940 the Nazis forced the 200,000 Jews of Lodz, a textile center with the second-largest Jewish population in Europe, into a ghetto. In 1941, the Polish Jews were joined by more than 20,000 Jews from Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Luxembourg. Dawid's diary begins on June 28, 1939, a few weeks before his fifteenth birthday, and ends on April 15, 1943. He died on August 18, apparently from tuberculosis. A Polish gentile, returning to his home in the former ghetto after the war, found the notebooks. As Dawid watched his family and neighbors suffer, he described his increasing exasperation over the hierarchy of privilege enjoyed by Chaim Rumkowski, the ghetto's leader, and others. His own physical and emotional pain kept him constantly at the edge of endurance. Yet he studied Latin, Hebrew, English, German, and French, searching out books in which he could engage his mind. But in the end he writes in his last diary entry, "I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." The book is filled with poignant and horrifying photographs taken inside the ghetto. George Cohen

Customer Reviews

Should be considered for a Required Reading in High School
This book is the most powerful and memorable book on the Holocaust I have ever read. Kids in school read Anne Frank, I suppose because it is so popular. It was the first memoir found, not the most telling or interesting. This book is also a great psychology book as it so graphically shows the heirarchy of needs as the situation becomes more desperate. I wish that teachers of senior or junior honors classes would consider this over Brave New World where the main character gives up. Dawid, is a much more positive book of the human spirit in that he continues to deal with the ever worstening cards he is given and works hard to survive. This book hits on so many topics: history, psychology, the power of the human spirit, man's cruelty and literature as Dawid was an exceptional mind for his age.

Verbal and Photographic Insights into the Lodz Ghetto
This review is based on the 1996 Oxford hardback edition. Sierakowiak devotes a considerable number of entries to the 1939 German-Soviet conquest of Poland. On Sept. 14, it rained. Sierakowiak notes that, had this been going on since Sept. 1, the German tanks would've gotten stuck in the mire (p. 38). On Sept. 19, Sierakowiak repudiated Hitler's lies, in which the Fuhrer, in a radio broadcast, had blamed Poland for starting the war and for mistreating the German minority (p. 42).

A radio program from London mentioned the Germans' vain seeking of Prince Janusz Radziwill to form a collaborationist government (Nov. 5, 1939; p. 59). This adds refutation to the claim that there was no Polish Quisling because the Germans never wanted one.

No sooner had the German entered Lodz then they began to persecute both Jews and Poles. On Nov. 17, 1939, the Germans forced Polish priests to destroy the Kosciuszko statue with sledge hammers. This being ineffective, the Germans resorted to dynamite (p. 63).

A common Polonophobic Holocaust theme is the one about Poles habitually delighting in Jewish humiliation and suffering. In contrast, Sierakowiak writes (Nov. 18, 1939; p. 64): "The Poles cast down their eyes at the sight of the Jews with their armbands; friends assure us that `it won't be for long.'" In view of the fact that Sierakowiak otherwise never mentions Polish attitudes, and that negative incidents are more likely to be remembered and recorded in diaries than positive ones, this takes on further significance.

Sierakowiak was irreligious (p. 38). And, not only was he pro-Communist, but in fact he praised Communists and condemned capitalism many times (p. 88, 92, 102, 105, 155, 220, 260, 263, etc.).

As for leader Chaim Rumkowski (Rumkovsky) and his privileged Jews, Sierakowiak elaborates on the inequities between the well-fed, well-clad Jews and the starving, ragged Jews (p. 176, 198, 245). When Rumkowski ordered the timely and obedient fulfillment of the German order to deport Jewish children and the elderly ("useless eaters" for extermination), Sierakowiak noted the many kinds of privileged Jews whose children and elderly relatives had been exempt from this order (pp. 216-217).

The Germans used some Jews to beat other Jews (March 16, 1943; p. 258). During the deportations, one unarmed Jewish policeman each was assigned to supervise the loading of about 100 Jews onto the trains (p. 270). Armed Germans didn't usually get involved until the latter phases of the day's loadings.

Owing to the fact that the Jews in the Lodz ghetto had been exploited for German war production, they were spared for most of the duration of the war. Not until August 1944 did the Germans liquidate the Lodz ghetto.

Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak reflects horror of Lodz Ghetto
"A HOLOCAUST VOICE Writings about the Holocaust take many forms--novels, stories, poems, plays, histories. But, as `The Diary of Anne Frank` showed, none has the effect of actual reports left behind by its victims. `The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto` is quite different from Anne Frank's memoirs because, unlike Anne, who was hidden away from the Nazis for years, Dawid lived openly in the sealed ghetto of this Polish city and was a witness to and victim of the deprivations, humiliations and cruelties inflicted on the Jewish populace. He was 15 years old when he began to keep his notes, and 19 when he died of illness and starvation in 1943. His diary, edited by Alan Adelson and translated by Kamil Turowski, is written with a sardonic humor and growing despair that can still horrify today. It is illustrated by shocking photos of life in the Lodz ghetto, most of them taken surreptitiously."