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2010-08-30

The world has its Anne Frank and we have our Dawid Rubinowicz

Bodzentyn

A diary written by Dawid Rubinowicz, a witness and a victim of the Holocaust, will be read by all pupils from junior high schools in Świętokrzyskie (one of the provinces in Poland). “We want to show our students what intolerance can lead to”, Elżbieta Biskup, a director of the junior high school in Bodzentyn, says.

Dawid Rubinowicz was born in 1927. At the day of the outbreak of the war, he was to start his seventh year at school. But Germans closed schools. Dawid started to learn by himself. He described in his school notebooks what was going on in Bodzentyn. The first day of his diary is March, 21 in 1940 and the last June, 1 in 1942. That was the day of his father’s arrival from the camp. And here is the end of the diary.

Rubinowicz’s diary is a unique proof on how the Jews from Świętokrzyskie suffered. Approximately 3 800 residents lived in Bodzentyn just before the war. During the occupation, Germans established here a ghetto for Jews from neighboring towns. Almost 3 700 people were gathered in this ghetto. They lived in terrible conditions. They died of diseases and hunger. Dawid and his family lived at Kielecka Street 17. In the second half of September 1942 they were assigned to a group of 700 Jews who were hurried to the railway station in Suchedniów, kept in cattle-tracks and sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. They all were gassed, among them Dawid Rubinowicz…

Before Dawid left Bodzentyn, he had given his diaries (five notebooks, 117 pages) to a neighbor, Tadeusz Waciński. He kept them in the attic for more than a decade. They were published and translated into a dozen or so languages in 1960. Dawid Rubinowicz Association in Bodzentyn (Towarzystwo Dawida Rubinowicza) strived for the next edition. Owing to the support of the self-government of the province, the book was published in circa 50 000 issues. Gołda Tencer, the director of the Shalom Fundation, wrote in the preface, ”I was brought up reading that book. The world had its Anne Frank and we had our own Dawid Rubinowicz. It was our boy, he lived in the countryside, he spoke our language… But it is a great pity that we have forgotten him. Dawid does not have his own museum like Anne. I am dreaming at least of a house devoted to him.”

Source: Gazeta Wyborcza, Forum Żydów Polskich

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The world has its Anne Frank and we have our Dawid Rubinowicz

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