Renia's diary : a Holocaust journal / Renia Spiegel ; preface, afterword, and notes by Elizabeth Bellak with Sarah Durand ; foreword by Deborah E. Lipstadt ; diary translation by Anna Blasiak and Marta Dziurosz.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A New York Times bestseller
A USA Today bestseller

The long-hidden diary of a young Polish woman's life during the Holocaust, translated for the first time into English

Renia Spiegel was born in 1924 to an upper-middle class Jewish family living in southeastern Poland, near what was at that time the border with Romania. At the start of 1939 Renia began a diary. "I just want a friend. I want somebody to talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who would feel what I feel, who would believe me, who would never reveal my secrets. A human being can never be such a friend and that's why I have decided to look for a confidant in the form of a diary." And so begins an extraordinary document of an adolescent girl's hopes and dreams. By the fall of 1939, Renia and her younger sister Elizabeth (née Ariana) were staying with their grandparents in Przemysl, a city in the south, just as the German and Soviet armies invaded Poland. Cut off from their mother, who was in Warsaw, Renia and her family were plunged into war.


Like Anne Frank, Renia's diary became a record of her daily life as the Nazis spread throughout Europe. Renia writes of her mundane school life, her daily drama with best friends, falling in love with her boyfriend Zygmund, as well as the agony of missing her mother, separated by bombs and invading armies. Renia had aspirations to be a writer, and the diary is filled with her poignant and thoughtful poetry. When she was forced into the city's ghetto with the other Jews, Zygmund is able to smuggle her out to hide with his parents, taking Renia out of the ghetto, but not, ultimately to safety. The diary ends in July 1942, completed by Zygmund, after Renia is murdered by the Gestapo.


Renia's Diary has been translated from the original Polish, and includes a preface, afterword, and notes by her surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak. An extraordinary historical document, Renia Spiegel survives through the beauty of her words and the efforts of those who loved her and preserved her legacy.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

This moving diary by Spiegel (1924--1942), who was killed in the Holocaust, chronicles her life in Poland from January 31, 1939, before the German-Soviet occupation, to July 25, 1942, when she went into hiding from the Nazis. Spiegel composed most of the diary while living with her grandparents in the city of Przemysl , while her parents worked elsewhere in Poland. Spiegel comes off as a typical teenager in many of these pages, concerned with friends and parties. Her entries include a mix of poetry and detailed narrative in which she writes of missing her mother and loving her boyfriend Zygmund, whom she calls "my beating heart." (Zygmund, readers later learn, kept her diary safe after the war and, in the 1950s, delivered it to her mother in New York.) As the war advances, Spiegel's anxiety becomes palpable. She writes about wearing an armband with a blue star, fearing deportation, and moving into a ghetto. "Terrible times are coming," she predicts in the diary's final entry. The book concludes with a riveting epilogue and commentary by Spiegel's younger sister, Elizabeth, about the help she and her mother received after Spiegel's death from Catholic Poles who facilitated their escape. This family's epic, layered story of survival serves as an important Holocaust document. (Sept.)

Kirkus Book Review

Personality and hope abound in this diary by a teenage Polish Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942.Presented by her younger sister, Elizabeth (b. 1930), the diary freezes the life of Renia (b. 1924), who began writing in 1939, in a specific moment in time. "In the end," writes Elizabeth, "I know my words are the legacy of the life my sister didn't get to have, while Renia's are the memories of a youth trapped forever in war." Much like the better-known diaries of Anne Frank and Hlne Berr, Renia's entries are filled with day-to-day schoolgirl details, but the war consistently looms in the background. Stuck in a small city in southeastern Poland, Renia and her sister were shunted off to live with their grandparents while her mother was separated from them in German-occupied Warsaw. Bomb raids, sirens, attacks, and rumors about her town; food in short supply; worry about when she will see her mother againthese pepper her entries. "I still live in fear of searches, of violence," she writes in January 1940; by June, when her birthday arrives, she is writing miserably of France's capitulation and how "Hitler's army is flooding Europe. America is refusing to help. Who knows, they might even start a war with Russia." A new boyfriend fills many of her subsequent entries and poems, and her young love often disguises what is really going on, namely the herding of her community into a Jewish ghetto and the subsequent roundups. In an epilogue, Elizabeth explains her attempts to hide and eventual exposure to the Germans. Renowned Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt provides the introduction.A terribly poignant work that conveys the brutal reality of the time through intimate connection with a young person. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.