Secret Holocaust diary of Polish Jewish teenager to be resurrected after 70 years
Renia Spiegel’s Holocaust journal rediscovered in bank vault in New York.
The secret Holocaust diary of the Polish Jewish teenager Renia Spiegel is to be published after lying unread for nearly 70 years.
The diary is going to be published by Penguin Books in the UK on September 19.
It was discovered in a New York bank volt.
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Three years before her execution by Nazi soldiers in a Jewish ghetto in Poland, 14 year-old Renia began to keep a secret diary.
She was murdered in July 1942 at the age of 18 when the Nazis discovered her hiding in an attic.
She left the diary with her boyfriend Zygmunt Schwarzer, who wrote the chilling, heartbreaking last lines in the journal: "Three shots! Three lives lost! All I can hear are shots, shots."
In 1950, he found Renia's sister Elizabeth Bellak and mother Róża had survived the war and were living in New York.
There he gave them the diary.
Finding it too distressing to read, the family kept it locked away for 70 years before it was resurrected by Elizabeth.
Renia wrote about falling in love with Zygmunt and how they kissed for the first time just hours before the Nazis reached her hometown.
The diary of almost 700 pages was a chronicle of her escape from bombing raids, the disappearance of other Jewish families and the creation of the ghetto.
It is already drawing a comparison to the diary of Anne Frank for its clarity and skilful writing.
