Publishers Weekly
06/24/2019
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.)
From the Publisher
"[T]ouching, poetic chronicle" —The Los Angelous Times
"[T]he publication of Renia's Diary offers a reminder of the power of bearing witness." —The New York Times
"A must-read." —Addison Independent
“A terribly poignant work that conveys the brutal reality of the time through intimate connection with a young person.”—Kirkus Review
“Moving [and] riveting... this epic, layered story of survival serves as an important Holocaust document.”—Publishers Weekly
“Renia Spiegel, a young girl so filled with a zest for life and possessed of an ability to describe in prose and in poetry the beauty of the world around her, was denied with one bullet what she so wanted: a future...Those who saved the diary and those who worked to bring it to print, have “rescued” her. They could not save her from a cruel fate. Nor could they give her that future she so desired. But they have rescued her from the added pain of having been forgotten.”—from the Introduction by Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Holocaust History at Emory University and the author of Antisemitism: Here and Now
“Readers will naturally contrast Renia’s diary with Anne Frank’s. Renia was a little older and more sophisticated, writing frequently in poetry as well as in prose...Reading such different firsthand accounts reminds us that each of the Holocaust’s millions of victims had a unique and dramatic experience.”—Robin Shulman, Smithsonian magazine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-06-30
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 Hélène 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 again—these 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.
