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LEAFING through the yellowed pages of an old diary, Elizabeth Bellak’s heart raced. For years, unable to bring herself to read it, she’d kept the precious book locked in a bank vault near her Manhattan home.

Now, more than half a century after it was written, she forced herself to look at it again.

“I’ve still only read a few parts, and they’ve made me sick or made me cry,” says Elizabeth, 88. “But I know these pages are important. We live in a time when tolerance is sometimes hard to find.”

The diary was written by Elizabeth’s older sister Renia Spiegel during the Second World War, when the two were children living in Poland.

Started when Renia was just 15, in January 1939, the journal detailed the trials and tribulations of life as an ordinary Jewish teenager. It has already been compared to Dutch teenager Anne Frank’s famous journal.

“Today, my dear Diary, is the beginning of our deep friendship,” she wrote. “Who knows how long it will last? It might even continue until the end of our lives.”

But months after Renia started her diary, war broke out, and the sisters’ lives became increasingly bleak.

In July 1942, they were trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Przemysl in south-eastern Poland, where they had been staying with their grandparents. The sisters watched in terror as friends and neighbours were rounded up and taken away, unbeknown to them at the time, to the concentration camps. Renia’s boyfriend Zygmunt Schwazer managed to smuggle the pair out but the girls were separated.

Elizabeth, then 11, was placed with a Christian family, who pretended she was their own daughter, and took her to Warsaw to reunite her with her mother. But Renia was not so lucky.

She hid with Zygmunt’s Jewish parents in the attic of a tenement house where his uncle lived but within weeks, they were found by the Nazis and killed. She was just 18.

Renia’s diary shows her as a talented writer. President of the literary society at her school, sometimes she wrote in prose, and other times she wrote poems.

“It’s raining today. On rainy days, I stand by the window and count the tears trickling down the windowpane,” she recounts in one entry.

Astonishingly, Zygmunt, who knew of his girlfriend’s diary and searched for it while Renia was in hiding, found it and kept it safe until after the war. After Renia’s death, Zygmunt was sent to several concentration camps and was even examined by the famous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who spared his life. Miraculously he survived the war and kept the diary safe. Meanwhile, Elizabeth and her mother had managed to secure forged Catholic identity papers through

aSISTER Elizabeth Bellak friend with connections Archbishop of Poland.

Her mother Roza was renamed Maria, and Elizabeth, who was born Ariana, became Elzbieta.

By the end of the war, virtually all their family and friends were dead. Maria and Elzbieta sought a new life in America, where Elzbieta became Elizabeth.

Maria converted to Catholicism and Elizabeth attended a convent school in Pennsylvania.

Neither woman knew about Renia’s diary until the 1950s when Zygmunt managed to track them down and handed over the precious notebook. But they could not bear to read it.

“I loved my sister, she was like a mum to me for three years and then she dies. It’s just a terrible story,” says Elizabeth.

For decades, the diary languished in a desk drawer until her mother’s death when Elizabeth placed it in a bank vault near her home in Manhattan. Elizabeth was, by then, to the a teacher and married to George Bellak, a Jewish refugee from Austria.

Despite their shared history, Elizabeth kept her Jewish heritage secret from her husband and their children until her youngest daughter Alexandra was 12, and she overheard her making an anti-Semitic remark.

Elizabeth told her daughter the story of her childhood and about the death of her sister, Renia. Alexandra’s middle name is Renata in her honour.

As an adult, Alexandra encouraged her mother to take the diary out of the vault so she could read it.

In 2012, Alexandra finally had it translated into English by a Polish student, a painstaking process which entailed at a time.

“I realised how important it was, not just for me to learn more about my past but also for the world to see how meaningful this diary was,” said Alexandra. “You get a sense of a young woman who’s going through puberty, falling in love with her first boyfriend, having little spats with her sister.” Now the diary has been published in English for the first time – first in the Smithsonian magazine, and now in a book. Alexandra hopes the book will speak to today’s divided society. Critics have hailed it both for its content and beautiful writing and it is set to become a best-seller. “With the rise of anti-Semitism and nationalism, here and sending 20 pages