12 April 1941
My Birthday!
I am fifteen years old! Age matters a lot in life. I am no longer a little girl now and I had my first date with a Bosche!
He came, but also today I made a new friend, Janine. (I don’t know her last name.) We became good friends in just one day. She was at the pool and is really very charming. It’s incredible what we two dared to say to the Bosche. At first he wanted to throw Janine in the water, but then he let her go. He asked if I smoked; I can’t bear smoking, but I said, I only smoke English cigarettes, German cigarettes stink. But I said it in such a way that he couldn’t get angry. He offered us sweets, oranges and biscuits. We didn’t like the biscuits, so he suggested we take them home for Darak (we told Daddy I found them in my cubicle). Then Janine went to get changed and I explained to Walter I couldn’t go out with him ‘because French people won’t like it’. He understood and said sadly, ‘Enemy.’
The oranges were exquisite.
15 April 1941
Met Walter and Janine at the pool again. Walter is a musician and he skipped his concert today, pretending he had a dentist’s appointment, so he could come and join us. I got him to correct my Bosche homework. I hope I get a good mark. He found twenty mistakes.
27 April 1941
Yugoslavia has been defeated and the Germans are at the gates of Athens. What can I say? I have never lost hope, my only hope is in England. England isn’t Yugoslavia or Greece; it’s not possible that such magnificent people could be defeated, and leave us enslaved under the barbarian’s yoke.
I haven’t seen Walter again but he caused me quite a lot of trouble. Monique, Yvette, Nicole and Mummy accuse me of falling in love with him. Me, love a Bosche! What a terrible thought! He is very nice but he is and always will be a Bosche. I told Mummy that I should never have spoken about Walter to anyone. She told me I should never have spoken to Walter, full stop.
And she’s right. Since I was a child, I have always considered the Bosche to be cruel barbarians. They’re the enemy: I have been brought up to hate them, and I did, without knowing any of them personally, because of their past crimes. And now that my country is under the boot of the oppressor, I realize I should never have spoken to a Bosche, out of respect for the past…The worst thing was when Denise said to me: ‘When the English are here, you love the English, and when the Bosches are here, if you can use them, then you use them’ (she never forgave me for that German homework).
What can I say?
Then Monique said to me that she thought there was nothing dishonourable about liking a Bosche and that she wouldn’t stop being my friend because of it. So I will just carry on as before.
After almost a year incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto, Dawid’s diary entries focused less on the Germans and more on the authority figure he could see—the ‘Jewish Chairman’, Chaim Rumkowski, who had been nominated by the Nazis to run the ghetto from within and who had decided to cooperate in the hope that he could save some of his community. Dawid’s notebooks covering 1940 and early 1941 were lost later in the war; his existing diary resumes in April.
22 April 1941
Rumkowski has had a great idea about how to prevent workers at the bread cooperatives from eating all the bread. As of tomorrow each person will be issued with a two-kilogram loaf of bread every five days, so doing away with the weighing, cutting and eating of bread in cooperatives. Commissars in bakeries will be responsible for weighing the bread. What’s more, the private sale of wood stolen from fences, privies—any timber structures in the ghetto, in fact, that have not yet been torn down—is now prohibited. No one knows what’s going to happen, there’s been no coal ration for months, and the last time Rumkowski issued wood was at the beginning of February. So we have to make do with soup once a day, from the community kitchen we’re registered with, and even though there are extra potato rations, there is no way to cook them. There is more than one way to skin a cat! Starving to death is becoming a real possibility.
I registered at the school on Dworska Street today. There’s supposed to be some food at school, we won’t know exactly what until Friday. So I will be going to school again—if I don’t have a job, of course. I’d almost given up on it anyway. This will put an end to my aimlessness and also, I hope, to the philosophizing and depression which go with it.
I didn’t have any work today, but I ran to the shop every hour to see if the swedes had come.
24 April 1941
The swedes have finally arrived. Worked all day today, but we still haven’t finished distributing them. I got my coupon at last, so I could take my portion before they were all gone.
25 April 1941
At last we’ve finished with the swedes, but this also means that my job has ended. Now they tell us that we’re not getting paid per number of days worked but for the total amount of swedes issued. So I can’t count on more than ten to twelve Reichsmark for more than two weeks of running around. And we won’t be getting it until next week.
27 April 1941
First day of school today. Marysin is quite a long way away, and what’s worse, it’s very muddy because of the non-stop rain. The shoes I got at school are starting to wear out and there’s no way to repair them. We’ll be walking to school barefoot before long. The school is in a small building, there is hardly enough space for benches. There is no other school equipment (not even a blackboard). We sit in the classroom in our coats because there is no cloakroom.
We had six lessons today. During the last lesson we had a visit from Rumkowski and other ghetto ‘dignitaries’. Rumkowski inspected the kitchen, tasted the soup (maybe that’s why it was so good) and spoke to us. He talked about the problems with opening the school and said he’ll try to get more for us. He told us to be diligent, clean and well behaved. So now to study, study and study some more.
28 April 1941
German victories come one after another. In Yugoslavia and Greece, the fighting is almost over. The English are losing in Africa. There is talk of tension in German-Soviet relations and these rumours are some kind of consolation. But we’ve been cursed too much for anything good to happen any time soon. We’re sure to have to suffer some more.
Somehow Dawid and his friends managed to get hold of the local German newspaper, which, though full of propaganda, still gave them some idea of the war’s progress.
In Britain over the following week, the Luftwaffe bombed Liverpool’s docks for seven nights in a row, part of a general increase in the campaign against Britain. Brian, who had yet to encounter a German in the flesh, wrote to Trudie later than usual, missing his virtually sacred letter-writing date by two days.
7 May 1941
Dear Trudie,
Your letter of March 23rd arrived today. It’s taken over six weeks, what a time! It certainly is a very short one and you haven’t asked me one question. Tut, tut! I have had no proper sleep for six