Dawid Sierakowiak quote

David Sierakowiak

“They keep relocating the Jews from small neighboring towns into the ghetto, while the deportations from the ghetto have been stopped. Even that chance for getting out of the ghetto has been taken away. Death is striking left and right. A person becomes thin and pale in the face, then comes the swelling, a few days in bed or in the hospital, and that’s it. The person was living, the person is dead; we live and die like cattle.”

– Dawid Sierakowiak, age 17, May 25, 1942.

Note: Dawid is in the 3rd row, 4th from right in the photograph. This excerpt is taken from his diary, written from the Łódź Ghetto. Dawid died on August 8, 1943.

Photo source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Arie Ben Menachem