The Diary of Renia

A secret diary kept by a young Polish girl was discovered recently after 70 years, and is being printed soon. Renia Spiegel was killed by the Nazis in 1942. Her diary had been kept in a secret bank and when published will be entitled: “The Diary of Renia: the life of a girl under the shadow of the holocaust.” Her younger sister Elizabeth could not stop crying as she was reading the diary. Renia was like a mother to her and describes her as “very intelligent, always first in class, kind-hearted and always wanted to become a poet.” In her diary, besides describing the atrocities she endured under the Nazis, she also speaks of a love story that had developed between her and a young man, Zygmunt Schwarzer, and even describes her first kiss, just before Hitler’s soldiers arrived in their town and their lives changed forever. Renia was shot in July 1942, at the age of 18, after she was caught hiding in an abandoned house. Zygmunt survived from the Auschwitz camp, being released by American soldiers, and he discovered the diary after the war was over. He eventually became a doctor, and when he went to America, he passed the diary to Elizabeth and their mother, whom he found in New York. They then placed the diary in a secret bank and never read it. Elizabeth’s daughter, Alexandra wanted to know more about her aunt and translated the diary into English in 2012. So now after the Diary of Anne Frank, who was killed in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, a new diary has surfaced which will give us more insight into what took place in a Polish concentration camp during World War II.