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The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz

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Dawid Rubinowicz (born in 1927) lived in Krajno, a rural village near Bodzentyn, in the Kielce district. His diary runs from March 1940 to June 1942. He and his family almost certainly perished at Treblinka.

The content of the diary is rather mundane. For instance, Dawid writes of getting a severe spanking from his father for a sloppily-done job.

In modern Holocaust materials, such things as denunciation and thievery are often pictured as things that Poles did to Jews. In actuality, they were all-around phenomena. In his entry for June 12, 1940 (p. 13), Rubinowicz describes a wealthy peasant who had been denounced by an unknown person. In another entry (April 12, 1942; p. 56), Rubinowicz describes a Jew who stole cows from either or both Poles and Jews.

In the introduction, translator Bowman comments on how the German occupation had brought out the worst in both Poles and Jews: "In a deliberately created atmosphere of terror, of growing famine and fear or reprisals, of despotic punishment and senseless killing everywhere, is it any wonder that Jew as well as Gentile might behave badly? Dawid writes with shame of the way one Jew robs another Jew; he describes a woman betraying menfolk to the [German] militia; he notes how some peasants--old neighbors of his--will not put themselves out when he returns to Krajno on 28th April 1942 to try to get a little milk." (p. xi)

In recent years, Jan T. Gross and his fans have argued that Poles were willing to incur the German-imposed death penalty for the unauthorized slaughter of animals, but much less so for hiding fugitive Jews. The argument is patently disingenuous: It is much easier to conceal a slaughtered animal than a fugitive Jew! In addition, Rubinowicz describes an incident where peasants were caught illegally slaughtering animals (October 7, 1941; pp. 22-23). The Germans confiscated the meat, and told the offenders to report to a local police station. Pointedly, the Germans didn't shoot the offenders on the spot. It is obvious that the Germans were much less eager to impose the death penalty for the illegal slaughter of animals than for hiding Jews, and no doubt the Poles knew it and acted accordingly.