diary of Dawid Rubinowicz

Dawid Rubinowicz was twelve years old when he began his diary in 1940. He was the son of a dairy farmer in rural Poland; the family was quite poor and possessed a single cow. Although he was only a child, he had a sharp intellect and was a keen observer of the world around him. He wrote in detail about the problems of wartime such as food shortages and inflation, and above all the rope tightening around the collective throat of the Polish Jews. Dawid was recruited for forced labor on several occasions and his father was arrested and held by the Gestapo for some time before being released.

The diary ends in the middle of a sentence, in the entry describing Dawid's father's return. Some months later, Dawid and his entire family were killed at Treblinka. He was fourteen years old.