The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, Chil Rajchman’s The Last Jew of Treblinka, and Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz are the accounts of three Jewish people who experienced the German’s answer to the Jewish problem from their particular time and place of the “Final Solution”. Sierakowiak’s diary was written while he was living in the Lodz Labor Ghetto with his family and died before he was deported. Rajchman’s and Lengyel’s books are a survivor’s account of their experience at the Treblinka death camp and Auschwitz-Birkenau labor/death camp, respectively. This paper is to compare the experiences between these three people as they suffered much of the same deprivations, yet their experiences ended in different outcomes.
Sierakowiak’s diary starts on June 28, 1939, a few months before the Germans invade Poland. He was living a comfortable life with his family in the slum Baluty Ghetto of Lodz, Poland. Sierakowiak was going to school while his father and mother were both working to pay the bills. After the invasion, the …show more content…
In all three experiences, the German’s deception as to the true nature of the rounding up of all the Jews and their subsequent deportations made the Jews complacent in following orders that would lead them to their death. It is only after they are too weak from hunger to fight back do they realize what the true intentions of the Germans are. Rumkowski, as part of the Council of Elders in the Lodz Ghetto, was the only Jew mentioned by Sierakowiak who may have been complicit in persecuting the Jews when he sent the people too young or old to work to be deported to the death camps while knowing what would become of them. His reason for doing this was to sacrifice some of the weaker people to save others that might have a chance to survive the conditions in the
Sierakowiak’s diary starts on June 28, 1939, a few months before the Germans invade Poland. He was living a comfortable life with his family in the slum Baluty Ghetto of Lodz, Poland. Sierakowiak was going to school while his father and mother were both working to pay the bills. After the invasion, the …show more content…
In all three experiences, the German’s deception as to the true nature of the rounding up of all the Jews and their subsequent deportations made the Jews complacent in following orders that would lead them to their death. It is only after they are too weak from hunger to fight back do they realize what the true intentions of the Germans are. Rumkowski, as part of the Council of Elders in the Lodz Ghetto, was the only Jew mentioned by Sierakowiak who may have been complicit in persecuting the Jews when he sent the people too young or old to work to be deported to the death camps while knowing what would become of them. His reason for doing this was to sacrifice some of the weaker people to save others that might have a chance to survive the conditions in the