The article is based on an analysis of reports left by a very young person — almost a child — who in normal times belonged to the silent majority. The exceptional times of the Holocaust resulted in Dawid Rubinowicz keeping his diary. He did so in order to record the nightmare he was living through and to understand the world around him. Consequently, his “Diary” become a record of the Apocalypse ; he described a disturbed world in which moral standards did not prevail nor did the natural sequence of human fate but where chaos ruled.
Dawid Rubinowicz’s “Diary” is a record of an individual’s fate and a disturbed personality in conditions of traumatising stress. At the same time it shows the fate met by a typical Jewish community in a small town during the Holocaust. As such it is of great cognitive value to a historian. The “Diary” allows one to recognise not just the facts and events but how they were understood and experienced by participants in historic reality.
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