Читать книгу We Were Young and at War: The first-hand story of young lives lived and lost in World War Two - Sarah Wallis - Страница 78

Yugoslavia has been defeated and the Germans are at the gates of Athens. What can I say? I have never lost hope, my only hope is in England. England isn’t Yugoslavia or Greece; it’s not possible that such magnificent people could be defeated, and leave us enslaved under the barbarian’s yoke.

I haven’t seen Walter again but he caused me quite a lot of trouble. Monique, Yvette, Nicole and Mummy accuse me of falling in love with him. Me, love a Bosche! What a terrible thought! He is very nice but he is and always will be a Bosche. I told Mummy that I should never have spoken about Walter to anyone. She told me I should never have spoken to Walter, full stop.

And she’s right. Since I was a child, I have always considered the Bosche to be cruel barbarians. They’re the enemy: I have been brought up to hate them, and I did, without knowing any of them personally, because of their past crimes. And now that my country is under the boot of the oppressor, I realize I should never have spoken to a Bosche, out of respect for the past…The worst thing was when Denise said to me: ‘When the English are here, you love the English, and when the Bosches are here, if you can use them, then you use them’ (she never forgave me for that German homework).

What can I say?

Then Monique said to me that she thought there was nothing dishonourable about liking a Bosche and that she wouldn’t stop being my friend because of it. So I will just carry on as before.

After almost a year incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto, Dawid’s diary entries focused less on the Germans and more on the authority figure he could see—the ‘Jewish Chairman’, Chaim Rumkowski, who had been nominated by the Nazis to run the ghetto from within and who had decided to cooperate in the hope that he could save some of his community. Dawid’s notebooks covering 1940 and early 1941 were lost later in the war; his existing diary resumes in April.