Dawid Sierakowiak

Dawid Sierakowiak (July 25, 1924 – August 8, 1943) was a Polish Jew who died in the Holocaust, along with his entire family. He is notable for the diary he kept while in the Łódź Ghetto in the last two years of his life. He died of tuberculosis, starvation and exhaustion in the ghetto at the age of nineteen.^[1]

The diary was found after the war, handwritten in five composition notebooks,^[2] and published in Polish in 1960. The English language version, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, appeared in 1996; it was translated from the original Polish by Kamil Turkowski and edited and introduced by Alan Adelson.^[1][3] It has also been published in Brazil, France, Italy and Sweden.^[4] Sierakowiak’s diary is considered an important source of information on daily life in the Łódź Ghetto. Publishers Weekly called it “a repetitive and detailed account of a population being methodically ground into dust.”^[5] Jacek Leociak, in the European Journal of Life Writing, described the diary as “a relentless observation of one's own dying, a cruel vivisection carried out to the very end” and “grim testimony to the victory of hunger over body and mind”. ^[6]

Dawid Sierakowiak
Born	(1924-07-25)July 25, 1924 Łódź, Poland
Died	August 8, 1943(1943-08-08) (aged 19) Łódź Ghetto, Poland
Known for	Holocaust diary

Early life

Sierakowiak was born in Łódź, Poland on July 25, 1924 to a cabinetmaker, Majłech Sietakowiak, and his wife Sura. He had a younger sister, Natalia (called Nadzia by the family), who was born on August 12, 1927.^[7] The family was of modest means and lived in the Bałuty district.^[8] As a teenager, Sierakowiak attended a private Jewish gymanisum on scholarship and was at the head of his class. He enjoyed reading and learning foreign languages, and read and wrote in Yiddish, English, French, German, Hebrew and Latin.^[7][9][1]

On June 28, 1939, just before his fifteenth birthday, he began keeping a diary.^[7][9] At the time, he was attending a Jewish youth camp in the Tatra Mountains. He returned home to Łódź on July 26 and continued to write in his diary regularly until December 31. His next known diary notebook began on April 6, 1941, by which time Sierakowiak and his family had been forced into the Łódź ghetto.^[7][9]

Łódź Ghetto

The entries in Sierakowiak's diary focused on the war effort, his reading, his involvement in a secret Communist youth organization, his state of health, and the rations being distributed. He was often weak and feverish. He regularly noted exactly what was received in the official rations, in what amounts and how much was charged for it, and also spoke of the shortages of common staples and the poor quality of the food.^[2][7]

The shortages forced the family to try new foods formerly considered unfit for human consumption, including rotten vegetables.^[2] Sierakowiak wrote that his father Majłech was "becoming greedier and more rapacious for every little morsel; he cheats in a stupid, intricate way everywhere he can, which upsets me terribly." He perceived Majłech as a threat to Sura and Nadzia's survival, as Majłech manipulated his wife and daughter into giving him parts of their share of the family's rations. Sierakowiak felt contempt for his father not only for his and theft of food, but also for his uncleanliness and refusal to work.^[2]

By May 1941, three students in Sierakowiak's class at the ghetto gymnasium had died of hunger. Sierakowiak himself noted in August that year, "I got the best grades in the class: all As and Bs. But what good are they when I'm still hungry and keep feeling so terribly exhausted?"^[7] He read composed poetry and read, including books by Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Schopenhauer and Strindberg, in his free time.^[7][10] After he was elected president of his school's student council, he spoke out against the widespread malnutrition among the student body and urged the council to demand better nourishment from the Judenrat. He was not able to complete his education, as the schools closed.^[7] In October 1941, at the age of seventeen, Sierakowiak started a job at a saddlery workshop as an apprentice.^[2]

He held various jobs during his time in the ghetto, and also did private tutoring in different subjects. As his family did not have a table in their ghetto apartment, he had to use the windowsill as a tutoring space.^[7] By December 1942, he noted that it was too cold and too dimly lit to read books at home.^[2] In the European Journal of Life Writing, Jacek Leociak wrote that Sierakowiak's diary was a “slow transformation from a diary of a young intellectual into a diary of a starving man dying.”^[11]

Sierakowiak's mother Sura was deported to her death at the Chełmno extermination camp in September 1942, after she proved too weak to pass a medical examination. Sierakowiak was devastated and described her in his diary as his "tiny emaciated mother who has gone through so many misfortunes in her life, whose entire life was one of sacrifice for others". He said when he asked her if she knew that her sharing food had placed her health at risk, she "‘admitted it with such a bitter smile that I could see she didn’t regret her conduct at all."^[2] In January 1943, Sierakowiak's father Majłech had a bad fall, broke his ankle and took to his bed. On March 6, Majłech died at home. Sierakowiak noted that a doctor had "diagnosed a complete weakening of the heart muscle" in Majłech on the day he died and prescribed injections, "but no pharmacy in the ghetto has had the injections for six months now".^[7][12]

In the aftermath of his father's death, Sierakowiak's own health was getting worse. On March 28, he noted, "I have a contant fever, and I can't get rid of the scabs and the frostbite wound. I look very bad again."^[12] The last of Sierakowiak's surviving diary notebooks breaks off after April 15, 1943. That month he wrote that he had gotten appointed to work in the ghetto bakery, where he would be able to eat as much bread as he wanted.^[7] In his final entry he wrote, "Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There really is no way out of this for us."^[2]

On August 8, 1943, two weeks after his nineteeth birthday, Sierakowiak died of tuberculosis, starvation and exhaustion. He is buried at the Bałuty Jewish Cemetery on Bracka Street.^[9][10] His sister Nadzia, the last surviving member of the family, was sent to Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated in 1944, and is presumed to have met her death there, although nothing specific is known about her fate.^[9]

Discovery of diary

After the end of World War II, a non-Jewish inhabitant of Łódź named Waclaw Szkudlarek returned to his apartment and found five of Sierakowiak's diary notebooks piled on the stove. He reported his find to the Regional Commission for the Examination of Nazi Crimes. There are believed to be at least two notebooks missing from the chronology. The missing notebooks may have been burned for fuel during the winter of 1944-45. Szkudlarek said, "Someone must have been using them to keep their fire running because some of them were torn up. They contained stories, poems and other notes."^[1][2][4]

The journalist Konrad Turowski authenticated the diaries and promoted them. Kamil Turowski transcribed the diaries and translated them from Polish to English. The English translation was first published in 1996.^[4]

Two of Sierakowiak's diary notebooks are in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland and the other three are in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.^[1]

See also

• Mary Berg
• Anne Frank
• Chaim Aron Kaplan
• Rywka Lipsczyc
• Ruth Maier
• Yitskhok Rudashevski
• Chaim Rumkowski
• Renia Spiegel

References