TEHRAN – A Persian translation of “The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz” by Iranian German literature researcher Mahmud Hosseinizad has recently been published.

Dawid Rubinowicz was a 13-year-old Jewish boy in German-occupied Poland. He kept a diary during the hard days of captivity in the Nazi concentration camps in the country.

Speaking to the Persian service Honaronline on Wednesday, Hosseinizad said that he had translated the book from the German language 40 years ago.

“I had the chance to publish it at that time, but I reached an agreement with the Saless publishing house to publish the book,” he added.

“Dawid wrote the diary until when he was 14… and he disappeared; he probably died in the death camps. After the end of WWII, the diary was discovered in a pile of old junk in a Rubinowicz family house in a village and a Polish company published it,” Hosseinizad said.    

Dawid was born on July 27, 1927 in the Polish city of Kielce. The oldest of three children, Dawid and his family were very poor. The Rubinowicz family was one of only a very few Jewish families in his village, but was surrounded by a large extended family that included aunts, uncles, cousins and a grandmother.

When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Dawid, like all Jews, was forced to do hard labor. His father was arrested, taken from the home and forced to do hard labor, but was eventually released.

From September 15 to 21, 1942, all the Jews who, like Dawid’s family, had been forced to resettle in the Bodzentyn ghetto were forced to march on foot to the nearby town of Suchedniow, where they were loaded onto cattle cars and transported to the death camp of Treblinka. Although nothing specific is known about the fate of Dawid and his family, they were almost certainly murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian version of “The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz”.

MMS/YAW