Secret Diary Of Jewish Teen Killed By Nazis To Publish After 70 Years

CNN

For almost 70 years, the secret Holocaust diary of the Polish Jewish teenager Renia Spiegel was sealed away in a New York bank vault.

Shot dead by the Nazis just as she reached adulthood in 1942, Renia’s story was too painful for her surviving sister and mother to read.

Now, Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust is finally to be published by her family. And it is already drawing comparisons to the diary of Anne Frank for its clarity and skillful writing.

Described by its publisher, Penguin Books, as “an extraordinary testament to both the horrors of war, and to the life that can exist even in the darkest times,” the journal will be released on September 19.

The girl lived in Przemysl, south-east Poland, which was under Soviet occupation until the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

The diary, almost 700 pages, begins in January 1939 when Renia was 15 and chronicles her escape from bombing raids in her hometown, the disappearance of other Jewish families and the creation of the ghetto.

Renia and her sister Elizabeth (nee Ariana) got separated from their mother, who was on the German side during the war. Almost every entry of the diary ends with “God and Bulus will save me,” using the girl’s pet name for her mother.

Renia was murdered in July 1942 at the age of 18 when the Nazis discovered her hiding in an attic. She left the diary with her boyfriend, who wrote the chilling, heartbreaking last lines in the journal: “Three shots! Three lives lost! All I can hear are shots, shots.”

Schwarzer shared it with someone else for safekeeping before he was deported to Auschwitz. He survived, moved to the US and in 1950 managed to return the diary to Renia’s sister Elizabeth along with her mother Róża, who were both living in New York.