Dawid Sierakowiak

From the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Facebook:

“We are not considered humans at all, just cattle for work or slaughter,” wrote 17-year-old Dawid Sierakowiak. “No one knows what happened to the Jews deported from Łódź. No one can be certain of anything now. They are after Jews all over the Reich.”

Dawid was among about 160,000 Łódź Jews imprisoned in the ghetto by spring 1940. He is pictured here with a group of teenage boys. A small ‘x’ written above his head identifies Dawid as fourth from the right.

The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of German-occupied Łódź with barbed-wire fencing. Most of the quarter had neither running water nor a sewer system. Hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation were the dominant features of life.

Dawid recorded the daily tragedies of ghetto life in his diary. In May 1941, he wrote, “A student from the same grade as ours died from hunger and exhaustion yesterday. … He is the third victim in the class.”

German authorities began major deportations of Jews from Łódź to the Chełmno killing center in January 1942. By the end of September 1942, they had deported approximately 70,000 Jews to their deaths.

In summer 1944, the Łódź ghetto was liquidated and most of the remaining Jews were deported to the Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau killing centers. Dawid was not there to write about the ghetto’s liquidation. He died in the ghetto in August 1943, two weeks after his 19th birthday.

In his last diary entry, Dawid wrote, “There is really no way out of this.”