Dawid Rubinowicz

What little Dawid describes may seem incomprehensible and ghostly to some today – but it is a reflection of a reality that millions of Poles and Jews went through in those difficult years. […] Anyone who reads the simple words, the simple sentences of the suffering, so very personable little boy will undoubtedly say: Never again! Never again a time of human contempt, never again an era of incinerators. - From the foreword to the first German-language edition, Berlin and Warsaw 1960

The first book edition appeared in Warsaw in the spring of 1960, and the German translation a little later. Since then, Dawid's diary has been translated into numerous languages.

In August 1957, Dawid's notebooks were found in an attic by Helena and Artemiusz Wołczyk. In October 1957 they began to read the diary on the local radio. In the fall of 1959, they sent Dawid's notes to the Warsaw journalist Maria Jarochowska, who immediately published them. They first appeared in January 1960 in Twórczość.

In March 1942 the Rubinowicz family had to leave Krajno. In Bodzentyn, where around a thousand Jews lived before the war, Jews from all over the area were now crammed together. They lived in unspeakable conditions. Hundreds died of starvation and disease. Every day people were shot or taken to forced labor camps like Dawid's father.

In mid-September 1942, the Jews were herded into the Bodzentyn market square, which was intended as the assembly point. The next day the long procession of the doomed left for Suchedniów. There they were loaded into cattle trucks on 21 September 1942, on Yom Kippur. Dawid's last journey ended, it must be assumed, after the arrival of the "Special Train for Resettlers" Pkr 9228 in the morning of the next day in the Treblinka extermination camp.

After Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939, Rubinowicz was no longer allowed to attend school. His teacher met his mother in secret, gave her assignments and corrected the boy's exercise books. She also advised the boy to keep a diary. Dawid was twelve years old when he started his diary on 21 March 1940. From then on he wrote down in five exercise books what he encountered and what moved him. In the first year briefly and at large intervals, then more and more frequently and in greater detail, the sensitive boy described the measures taken by the Germans and documented the mechanisms of totalitarian arbitrariness and violence with terrifying accuracy.

Dawid Rubinowicz grew up with two younger siblings in Krajno, a village in central Poland near Kielce which counted seven Jewish families before the war. David’s father ran a small dairy farm. In 1933 Dawid started school. He was a good student and the testimony books from those years have been preserved. In May 1937 the only surviving photo was taken with Dawid Rubinowicz, a class photo. There are no other written documents from this period, only the memories of his teacher Florentyna Krogulcowa and his classmate Tadeusz Janicki.

Dawid Rubinowicz (born 27 July 1927 in Krajno, Poland, died 1942 in the Treblinka extermination camp) was a Polish Jew and diarist who was murdered in the Holocaust. His diary was found and published after the end of World War II.