Hunger – Tisha B’av – Diaries of David Sierakowiak
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“All day long I had nothing to eat but water (soup) in the kitchen. It’s more and more difficult for me to go on starving. In the past I was able to not eat all day and still hold on somehow, but now I’m an empty pot. I was so weakened by the lack of soup at school that I thought I would collapse.”
Saturday, July 19, 1941. Lodz. (p. 112 Dawid Sierakowiak – age 17)
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Today we commemorate Tisha B’av – the Ninth of Av – a day of Jewish mourning. We read Jeremiah’s Lamentations as we mourn the destruction of two Temples, we fast and read poems of remembrance. Mostly, we try our best to sit in the darkness of Jewish history. So many tragedies – destructions, pogroms, crusades, inquisitions and of course our generation’s tragedy – the Holocaust.
I decided that today I must finish the Diaries of Dawid Sierakowiak that I first mentioned in a blog post on June 13, 2019. I wanted to finish reading the Diaries because I feel hungry and tired and a headache is slowly developing from fasting. I want to realize that what I am feeling is nothing compared to what Dawid or my in-laws, Sam and Esther, experienced during the Holocaust.
If there is one theme in Dawid’s many diary entries – it’s starvation in the Lodz ghetto. All he thinks about is food. Every few entries we hear of the rations that were given out.
Friday, March 27, 1942. “A series of rations has finally been issues. 3 kilos of potatoes, beets, sugar, margarine, coffee substitute, saccharine and Fruchstuppe [German fruit soup], and a ration of meat (30 dkg).
Many people are being deported. Only those employed in the workshops are exempted, but their families are deported if they are large. A certain percentage of clerks is also being deported.” (p. 150).
This deportation and so many others sent thousands of Lodz Jews sixty kilometers away to Chełmno. Here they were put in mobile vans with the exhaust pipe connected to the passenger section. The van drove out of town with its own carbon monoxide pumped into the cab. It would slowly asphyxiate the passengers. The dead would be dumped into pits outside of town. By the middle of 1942, approximately 30 such gas vans had been produced by a German car manufacturer for use at Chełmno. (Arad 11). By the date of Dawid’s diary entry – March 27, 1942 – the Chełmno killing vans had been functioning for three and a half months. Dawid’s mother was deported and murdered at Chełmno in September of 1942.
In total, 130,000 Jews were deported from Lodz and were murdered in Chełmno and Auschwitz. (p. 14).
The suffering seems never ending.
Wednesday, April 29, 1942. “It’s really bad a home. There is no fuel, and we are eating our May rations of potatoes in April. No one knows what will happen in May. Nothing good, that’s for sure. Again, I don’t have any will, or rather any strength, for studying. I want to do something, but everything is exceptionally difficult for me, so I just stick to reading most of the time. Time is passing, my youth is passing, my school years, my power and enthusiasm are all passing. Only the Devil knows what I will manage to save from this pogrom. I’m slowly beginning to lose my hope of coming back to life or even of holding onto the one I’m living now.” (p. 160-161)
If this does not break your heart, the entries that tell of Dawid’s father’s hunger and how it turned him into someone to be loathed will surely rip it to shreds. His father would repeatedly steal other family member’s portions of the meager rations they received.
Saturday, May 30, 1942. “The ‘internal situation’ at home is becoming extremely tense again. After two weeks of relative calm, during which Father divided his bread into equal daily portions, he became spoiled again. Last Thursday and again yesterday he devoured his whole loaf of bread, and today on top of it, half of kilo from Mom and Nadzia [sister]. I also don’t know why he hoards all the money. He takes away all of Mom’s and Nadzia’s pay, and doesn’t want to give us money for anything. Today he bought our ration of sausage and ate over 5 dkg of it on the street (Nadzia was with him), so everyone’s share of sausage was short. . . . Father also bought his whole portion of meat today, and having received a liter of whey at the dairy store for a whole family, he cooked it only for himself and lapped it all up. As a result, the rest of us have nothing to cook at home anymore, and are going to bed without supper.” (p. 176-177)
Oy!
This was family of four, who were living lives before the war, going to work, school, summer camp, etc. Now, look what became of them.
There was a happier time – the diaries begin with entries from Dawid at summer camp, just two months before Hitler’s invasion of Germany, when a long train ride was something to look forward to and there was plenty of good food:
Wednesday, June 28, 1939: “We arrived safely today at summer camp. After a fourteen-hour train ride and an hour by bus, dinner was waiting in Kroscienko. The food is excellent, plentiful, and tasty.” (p. 21 – Dawid is 15 years old in 1939)
But this happiness and carefree life ended on September 1, 1939. Over four horrible years Dawid suffered and suffered. He finally died in August of 1943 of “ghetto disease” – TB, starvation and exhaustion. (p. 268) His father preceded him in death – also of ghetto disease on March 6, 1943. (p. 252). We do not hear of Nadzia’s death in the diaries, but it is presumed that she was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 (p. 14).
Hunger takes over one’s mind one’s body and ultimately, if deprived long enough, can kill. The starvation in the Lodz Ghetto took 60,000 lives (p. 14) and was a tragedy that should never have happened. It happened because of hatred and bigotry of Jews.
We are taught that it was such hatred among humans that caused the destruction of the Second Temple. Hatred is unfortunately still alive and well in the world. Whether the hatred presents itself as racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny or any other form, it has the same result – tearing apart our world and sometimes even resulting in murder of other humans. We unfortunately see it right here in the United States of America. I am sickened by it all. I will try to stand up against such hatred and hope that we will see a day when all of us learn to live in peace with one another.
SOURCES:
Adelson, Alan, ed. The Diaries of Dawid Sierakowiak, translated by Kamil Turowsky, New York, Oxford University Press (1996).
Arad, Yitzhak, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,1987.
