Dawid Rubinowicz (1927–1942)

Dawid Rubinowicz was born and raised in Krajno, Poland, the son of a poor Jewish diary farmer. He began his diary in March 1940, after the Nazi invasion, and continued until at least June 1942. In September 1942, Dawid and his entire family perished in the Nazi gas chambers at Treblinka. Dawid was only 15 when he died. He left his diary, written in at least five copybooks, with his Polish neighbor and friend, Tadeusz Waciński. Later, the notebooks were passed on to Antoni Waciński, who kept them in his house for 15 years. A family that rented the house in the 1950s found the diary and read it aloud on the local radio. A few years later, journalist Maria Jarochowska arranged for it to be published for the first time. Excerpts from Dawid's diary also appear in several anthologies, including Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, edited by Alexandra Zapruder and We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust, edited by Jacob Boas.