Dawid Sierakowiak, a Polish-Jewish teenager, was 15 when the Germans stormed Poland on September 1, 1939. He was born and grew up in Łódź. A promising young intellectual, he received a scholarship to enter that September the newly built Third Middle School for Men, funded by the Society of Jewish Secondary Schools. Instead, under the German occupation the Jews in Łódź were imprisoned in a ghetto, where Dawid died in 1943 at the age of 19. Almost until the very end, he kept writing his diary, making a record of German cruelty and destruction directed against the Jews.
Only five of Dawid's notebooks have survived WW II. The others—of which there were at least two—went up in smoke, used for heating and cooking in Poland right after the war. The extant manuscript delivers one of the biggest stories of the Shoah—a deeply moving, detailed report about the fate of more than 200,000 Jews imprisoned in the ghetto in Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis).
The international success of the Diary has been primarily enabled by journalist Konrad Turowski. He saved three of the five notebooks from disintegration, uncovered the details of their post-war survival in Łódź, and had their authenticity verified. Over decades, he kept tracking down the facts concerning the Sierakowiaks, interviewed their former neighbors, found supporting documents, followed all possible leads. Against the Soviet-imposed communist censorship in Poland, Turowski kept promoting Dawid’s testimony. He made a series of attempts to co-publish the complete Diary with historian Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki, and finally spearheaded a breakthrough in its global popularization by providing the contents of the three notebooks to Alan Adelson, the director of the Łódź Ghetto movie.
Kamil Turowski transcribed Dawid's handwritten notes and translated them from Polish to English. Edited by Alan Adelson, with a foreword by Professor Lawrence L. Langer, Kamil's translation was first published in the United States in 1996. International releases followed in Brazil, France, Italy, Dawid's native Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom.
For details about Dawid, his family, as well as the Jews imprisoned and murdered in the Łódź getto, please consult the pioneering editions of the complete text of his memoir:
American Edition
French edition
polish edition
British edition
Italian edition
Swedish edition
Brazilian edition
✡︎