The Diary Of Dawid Sierakowiak

SKU:86015

Original: $12.99 Add to Cart

Product Description

SIGNED COPY �In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there�s absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself begin- fling to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us.� This is Dawid Sierakowiak�s final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tubercu- losis, exhaustion, and starvation�the Holo- caust syndrome known as �ghetto disease.� After the liberation of the Lod~ Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cook- stove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and study- ing in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city�s 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary�s young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make rea- son out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid�s family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children. The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid�sremarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with disconcerting intimacy you begin to experi- ence the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihi- lated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: �Deportation into scrap metal,� he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an under- ground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto�s school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a �professional revolutionary.� He owes his strength and life to the care of his family �A neighbor, Grodzenski, is sitting there with his crying wife, telling us to leave. Where? Go where? Why? Nobody knows. To flee, flee farther and farther, trek, wade, cry, forget.. .just run away as far as possible from the danger.... Father loses his head; he doesn�t know what to do. Other Jewish neighbors come for a meet- ing.... Father rushes to my uncle, and my uncle back to Father, but each time the decision is the same: not to flee, to stay put.� �From the diary entry of Wednesday, September 6, 1939.

�In the evening I had to prepare food and
cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In
politics there�s absolutely nothing new.

Author:Alan Adelson
Publication Status:Long Out of print, Very Hard to Find!
Type:Hardcover

Write Review

The Diary Of Dawid Sierakowiak

Product Description

CATEGORIES

MY ACCOUNT

SIGN UP OUR NEWSLETTER