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. 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. It has also been published in Brazil, France, Italy and Sweden. 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.” 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”.

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. The family was of modest means and lived in the Bałuty district. 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. 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.

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."

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." 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. 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."

On August 8, 1943, two weeks after his nineteenth birthday, Sierakowiak died of tuberculosis, starvation and exhaustion. He is buried at the Bałuty Jewish Cemetery on Bracka Street. 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.

Discovery of diary

After the end of World War II, a non-Jewish inhabitant of Łódź 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. The man who found them 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."

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.

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.