This diary is a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. When Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. In intimate, candid prose, the diary's young author Dawid begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with death and deportation; and working with an underground organization. He would die of tuberculosis.