Renia’s Diary
‘Remarkable’ look at life under Nazis, Soviets
PRZEMYSL, Poland• She was a Jewish teenager in a small trade city in southeastern Poland when she began writing her diary, months before the advent of the Second World War. By the time she was shot in the head by Nazi soldiers, she had chronicled life under two totalitarian regimes: the Soviets who advanced from the east and the Nazis who came from the west.
Her journal, hidden in a safe-deposit box in New York City for decades, has been described as a counterpart to Anne Frank’s diary, a valuable historical document and a poignant coming- ofage story.
Now, the journal of the teenager, Renia Spiegel, all 700 perfectly preserved pages, is to be published in English for the first time. It arrived Tuesday in bookstores in 13 countries, including Canada, Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States.
At a moment when basic agreement over simple truths has become a political battleground and history a weapon, the publication, Renia’s Diary, offers a reminder of the power of bearing witness.
In the first entry, Renia made clear why she was writing:
“I want someone I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys, somebody who will feel what I feel, believe what I say and never reveal my secrets.”
It is Jan. 31, 1939. She does not know that in seven months, war would come to the increasingly ruined town of Przemysl, a place of noisy school grounds, intimate cafés and romantic alleys where first kisses were stolen. By July 30, 1942, less than two months after she turned 18, she would be dead.
The last passage in the diary was written by the man she had loved during those terrible years, Zygmunt Schwarzer, who survived Auschwitz and was supposed to protect the diary after Renia and his parents went into hiding to avoid being deported to concentration camps.
The Nazis found their hideout, in the attic of a house in Przemysl, and dragged them into the street.
After they were shot, he wrote:
“Three shots! Three lives lost! Fate decided to take my dearest ones away from me. My life is over. All I can hear are shots, shots … shots.”
Alexandra Garbarini, a professor and historian at Williams College in Massachusetts who specializes in Holocaust diaries, said that Renia’s story was unique because she experienced both Soviet and Nazi rule, providing rare insight into Stalin’s less-examined occupation.
“This is such a complete text,” Garbarini said. “It shows the life of a teenager before the war, after the war breaks, until she has to move to the ghetto and is executed. It’s absolutely remarkable.”
It is not clear what Schwarzer did with the journal before he was sent to Auschwitz, or how he retrieved it in the 1950s, when he was living in New York.
His son, Mitchell Schwarzer, said he did not remember if his father ever told him who had given him the journal.
“I just remember him telling me one day: ‘ Look, this is my first girl’s journal! We were incredibly close. She was my spiritual soulmate,’” he said.
Schwarzer said his father had become obsessed with the diary. “He made copies of it and read it for hours,” he said. “God knows what my mother made of this.”
The journal is first and foremost an intimate testimony of the challenges of becoming a woman and falling in love during a time of war.
Renia was 15 and staying with her younger sister, Elizabeth, a child actress known as the “Polish Shirley Temple,” at her grandparents’ home in Przemysl when the war broke out.
Renia’s love for Zygmunt, whom she calls “Zygu” and who was one year her senior, is the main topic of her journal, and her writing reveals a typical teenager with adolescent self-consciousness.
Months of painfully shy romantic advances by Zygmunt and skittish expressions of affection by Renia preceded their first kiss, after a walk on the evening of June 20, 1941:
“It was dark; we couldn’t find the way. We got lost, yes, we got doubly lost, or rather — only just found ourselves. It was so sudden and unexpected and sweet and intimidating. I was at a loss for words and terribly mixed up. He said: ‘ Renuska, give me a kiss,’ and before I knew it, it happened.”
This was just two days before the Third Reich declared war on the Soviet Union, ending the non- aggression pact, with the Germans sweeping into eastern Poland.
After Renia and Zygmunt’s parents went into hiding he took over the journal.
Zygmunt later made his way to New York, where Renia’s mother, Roza, and younger sister, Elizabeth Bellak, born as Ariana Spiegel, were also living. Schwarzer eventually passed the diary to them. Bellak, now 88, said that she stashed it for decades in a safe- deposit box because she could not bear to read it.
“Renia was like a mother to me when our own beloved mother was far away,” she said. “Every time I opened her diary, I started crying. It was too emotional.”
It was Bellak’s daughter, Alexandra Renata Bellak, who recognized the journal’s value. In 2014, she contacted Polish film director Tomasz Magierski and asked him to help them find a publisher.
Not only did Magierski help them do so, he also made a documentary, Broken Dreams, based on the journal. It opened in a Polish cinema on Sept. 18.
IT SHOWS THE LIFE OF A TEENAGER BEFORE THE WAR, AFTER THE WAR BREAKS, UNTIL SHE ... IS EXECUTED.