Young Dawid Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in the urban slave labour camp of the Lodz Ghetto during the Nazi occupation during World War II. His notebooks were found stacked on a stove, ready to be burned for heat. The Ghetto was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. Off mountain climbing and studying Southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady desire to experience life, learn languages and read great literature. He returns home as war breaks out. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and 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.