Renia’s Diary by Renia Spiegel, Ebury Press, £16.99
Renia Spiegel was executed in German-occupied Poland days after her 18th birthday. Her diary, which resurfaced in America, shows a young Jewish woman wrestling with typical adolescent emotions even as horror closed in around her, writes Hilary A White
The phenomenon of the Holocaust memoir was so prevalent after the end of the Second World War that by the 1960s there were thousands in print, to the point that publishers had begun turning them down due to saturation.
In her introduction to this book, noted Holocaust academic Deborah Lipstadt argues that documents such as this — an intimate journal belonging to a teenage girl that survived where its author did not — are special because they offer a compelling emotional immediacy that is not sculpted with the benefit of hindsight. In other words, it was embarked upon without any knowledge of what was to come.
Renia’s Diary certainly fits that bill. Begun in January 1939 by 14-year-old Renia Spiegel, the diary is many things to the young Jewish girl living with her grandparents in the town of Przemysl in south-east Poland.
It was not uncommon for fathers to work in distant locations, but Renia also had to contend without her mother, who was based in Warsaw and managed the career of Reina’s younger sister Ariana, a famed child star considered the Polish Shirley Temple.
In September of that year, the German and Russian armies invaded and divided Poland in half. Przemysl straddled a river on this dividing line. The city was cleaved it in two, cutting Renia’s mother off from her and Ariana, who was back visiting for holidays.
The diary becomes a friend and safe space for this confused girl missing her mother desperately while the world around her blackens.
Although we feel the creeping unrest in Renia’s surroundings — talk of soldiers throughout the streets, late night mass evictions, the introduction of armbands, the confiscation of fur coats, rising panic — it remains on the fringes, a remark here and there.
The four years of entries and poems — rendered into English with brilliance by translators Anna Blasiak and Marta Dziurosz — printed in their entirety 70 years after the fact are concerned only with the confusing business of being a teenage girl managing the first flutters of love.
Even though much of the diary reads like a tumbling and impulsive litany of ‘he loves me, he loves me nots’, there is something remarkably empowering (a hugely misused word these days) in reading about her most intimate feelings.
It is as though the murderous machine of Hitler’s vision and the barbarity being brought upon Reina’s people couldn’t silence the integrity of her voice, that vigorous inner discussion that wanted to get on with pining over things and people, wondering what was what, who fancied her and who she fancied in kind.
There was probably an unwritten aspiration among the butchers of that era that such spirit would be broken en route to extermination.
Although increasingly rocked as things close in on her and her loved ones, Renia’s reason for turning to her diary was not necessarily to tremble in terror at what was happening around her. Rather, she was writing to sort out the confusions and headaches of young love and those formative years where hormones and inbetween-ism can make even a day at school seem like algebra.
At the heart of the document is the human need to write and to relate.
An excellent and determined school pupil, Renia emerges as a poet of real lyricism and emotional heft, which makes her demise all the more tragic.
Writing is where she finds solace, a place that offers her the freedom to be giddy, petulant, melancholic, angry, nostalgic and ebullient.
At a time when so much was at stake and just being who you were carried deadly risks, personal writing, alone with a notebook and pen, meant the construction and the preservation of a world that was all hers.
It was, at least, a little piece of control that she was wresting back from wartime.
In one entry, she tells the diary “how precious you are to me” and how she hugged it to her heart during a missile strike one night.
“Because, my dear diary, what is my life? It’s just a handful of ashes of the past and some shells of the present. I hold them in my hand and I say, ‘What is bad will fly away, what is good will stay’. And I blow. And what? All the shells and specks of ash fly away and all that is left is the whitish dust of temporary contentment, such as sitting in a theatre, getting a good school report, a letter from mum.”
This is a bittersweet refresher course that such first-hand accounts are so necessary because the facts and figures of history are suddenly scattered aside and the real toll of that genocide and all others is illuminated.
And as you read on beyond