We Were Young and at War: The first-hand story of young lives lived and lost in World War Two

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 successive nights and I am going to bed early tonight.

We are in the news. Last Saturday night when Liverpool was having its biggest ‘Blitz’ one of our ‘Defiant’ night fighters chased a Junkers 88 from Liverpool and shot it down over Lostock Gralam. The plane was dashing about out of control. I heard it coming. I was in the house, I shouted ‘Look out Mother!’ as I heard the plane roaring towards the house, it roared past and Dad and I rushed out. People who were outside said it was marvellous that it hadn’t crashed into the row of five houses of which ours is one.

We jumped into the car and followed it until it crashed and burst into flames. We were amongst the first to arrive there and we helped put the flames out. What a Godsend it had crashed in a field of oats. We found no bodies in the machine. So we began to search then news came through that two had escaped by parachute, one had been captured by soldiers and the other by members of our Home Guard platoon. That left two to find. We spread out and Dad found another parachute, open, and the harness undone. So he called me and three others to search. We were going to turn past a stream when someone shined his torch in the water, and there was a body lying face upward in the water. He was dead. I’ve never felt like being sick in all my days as at that moment. I turned away and someone said to me: ‘I shouldn’t be sorry for him if I were you, he’s killed lots of women and children tonight.’ I said ‘true’. And my heart hardened and I turned towards him. He had been badly shot, and how he found the effort to crawl from the parachute to the water nobody knows. He was an NCO about twenty-three years of age and very broad and well built. The other man, the pilot, was found by a dog, his parachute had failed to open. These two are to be buried with full military honours tomorrow, by the men of the squadron that shot him down.

Well things have not gone too grand in Greece and we realize our heavy lack of equipment. Mere courage is no good alone. We are relying on America to send us tackle. And I think it should be conveyed by you. We can’t fight Hitler with all the resources of Europe in his hands, alone. I don’t see now why your men can’t participate in the war. Enough of this war. Lets talk about ‘somat’ else.

Talking about carrots, I like raw ones over grated, but have not the slightest idea what pea-nut butter is. What is it? Did you know our night-fighter pilots eat carrots to give them keen eyesight?

Well must get some shut-eye before Jerry arrives tonight. You and yours keep well………

Lots of love!!!!

Brian

In Łódź, Dawid would have come across the dead and the dying regularly. In May 1941 alone almost 1,000 ghetto inhabitants died from starvation and disease. Over the following two months, Chairman Rumkowski clamped down on any signs of dissent, which threatened the smooth running of the ghetto, targeting strike leaders in the workshops and Communists. Dawid had been a committed Communist since prewar days.

16 May 1941

I was examined by a doctor today and she was terrified at how thin I was. She’s sending me for some X-rays. Maybe I could get double soup at school. Five portions wouldn’t hurt but two would still be good. One isn’t enough, for sure. But the check-up left me frightened and worried. Lung disease is the latest craze in the ghetto. It wipes people out, just like dysentery or typhus. And the food situation is getting worse. There haven’t been any potatoes for a week and there won’t be any for a long time.

Today Niutek Radzyner came to me with an unusual proposal. He and some of the best members of our organization have formed a closeknit group, a commune almost, to study theory together (they have Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s works) and work for the organization in general. Niutek asked me to join them, which would mean personal contact of the kind I’m not used to. I agreed, but I wonder what will come of it. Anyway, it’s an interesting initiative and I’m sure I’ll gain a lot from it.

24 May 1941

I’ve been catching up with schoolwork all day today. I am hungry as hell, not a crumb left of the bread which was meant to last till Tuesday. I console myself that I am not the only one. It is hard to control myself, I feel so weak that I just have to eat and so the bread disappears. Then I suffer even more. But there’s nothing to be done. And so we dig our own graves.

25 May 1941

At last it feels like May, and although emaciated and famished people (like me, for example) still can’t wear summer clothes yet, the winter coats have been put away. It’s dry everywhere, and the smell in Marysin reminds me of life before the war and makes my heart pang. If these were normal times we’d be three weeks away from our exams [after four years of secondary school] and looking forward to the summer holidays. Some school outing, then youth camp or a trip to the countryside. It makes me want to cry, just thinking about it. To hell with everything!

26 May 1941

At school everything seems normal. No tests so far but we’re working our way through the course. We’re doing Cicero’s famous speech against Cataline; in maths we’re on quadratic equations. We’re behind in most other subjects, except German. School soups are quite good, and my extra-curricular soup is much appreciated. But five portions wouldn’t be too much.

A school gazette is being set up. I contributed some caricatures and they might include one of my Jewish articles. All the ones I’ve written so far turned out to be unpublishable—even the ghetto has its bourgeois ideology, clearly formulated and defined.

Things are not too good at home, but Mum has a job now. She leaves at seven in the morning and comes home at nine in the evening. Father goes out to day shift from eight to eight. All the housework is on [my sister] Nadzia’s shoulders, she does all the queuing, cleaning and so on—all this on just one soup a day with 300g of bread (she and Mum each give Father 100g of bread, but he is very ungrateful and treats them as badly as he does me—it just shows how selfish he is). As she works in the kitchen, Mum gets one extra portion of good soup—the same as every worker in the ghetto. We don’t cook at home any more—there’s nothing to cook. It’s getting harder and harder to find food. There are no potatoes or barley, bread has 8 per cent chestnut flour added and its daily ration won’t increase. There is a real food crisis. And it’s only the second year of war!

27 May 1941

Everyone is impatient to hear Roosevelt’s speech, which is supposed to be today. People are pointing out it was the 27th May 1917 that the United States declared war on Germany, and they hope they will do so again on the same day. I have no textbook to check the date but, even if it’s correct, I don’t think that America will enter the war today. I hope I’m proved wrong. Everyone is teasing me for my pessimism. But, sadly, they usually have to admit that I was right. And that kills me…