Mural depicting Dawid Sierakowiak, a teenager from the Warsaw Uprising whose diary became a testament to the time of war. Work by Piotr Saul and Damian Idzikowski located on a wall at ulica Spacerowa 8.
At Spacerowa 8 in Bałuty, on the wall of a building, a portrait of Dawid Sierakowiak, a young chronicler of the Łódź ghetto, was painted. The mural is part of the cycle "Children of Bałuty – memorials murals", which commemorates the fates of children imprisoned in the ghetto during the Second World War.
Who is behind this project? The murals were painted by Piotr Saul, an assistant at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, and Damian Idzikowski, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, according to a concept by Katarzyna Tośta from the Association "Na co dzień i od święta" [Everyday and on holidays]. The project was co-financed by the Museum of the History of Poland in Warsaw under the "Patriotism of Tomorrow" programme.
How were the likenesses of the children created? The authors based the portraits on archived photographs of children, Polish, Jewish and Romani, who experienced the brutality of war in the Łódź ghetto, and the murals deliberately do not intrusively alter the urban space of the buildings on which they were created. The first works in the cycle were painted in 2012, and a few years later there were already seventeen of them, forming what became known as the Memory Murals Trail in Bałuty.
Why does this portrait stand out within the scope of the entire cycle? Dawid Sierakowiak is one of only four people from the entire series of murals identified by first and surname, alongside Abramka Koplowicz, Salek Berliński and Abramka Cytryn, while the remaining portraits depict children of unidentified identity. An earlier portrait in this location mistakenly depicted a different boy, and the error was corrected in the next version of the mural.
Who was the boy in the mural? Dawid Sierakowiak was born on 25 July 1924 and died on 8 August 1943 in Łódź of pulmonary tuberculosis while imprisoned in the Łódź ghetto with his family. From the period before the outbreak of war until the final months of his life, he kept a diary in which he described the daily life of the ghetto, hunger and forced labour.
What happened to his relatives and his writings? Dawid's father, Majlech Sierakowiak, died on 6 March 1943, and his mother, Sura Ajdla, was deported in September 1942. His sister Natalia most likely perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. The diary was found in 1948 in the family's former home, the first fragments were published in 1958 in the "Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute", and the surviving five notebooks were translated into German, French, Portuguese, Swedish and Italian, among other languages.
Who else do the murals in this area commemorate? As part of the same cycle, a portrait of a Jewish boy was created nearby at Łagiewnickiej, and further into Bałuty you can find murals dedicated to Abramek Koplowicz, Salek Berliński and Abram Cytryn, the other children identified by name in the entire series.
Be the first! Add a comment.
You need to log in to add a comment.
Log in