generalspeaking

The Brief Life and Times of Renia Spiegel

"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." 1939
"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." 1941
Renia Spiegel, 15, Przemysl, Poland

"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."
Zygmunt Schwarzer, 17, 1942 -- Auschwitz survivor

"This is such a complete text."
"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."
Alexandra Garbarini, professor, historian, Williams College, Massachusetts

"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 made copies of it [the diary] and read it for hours. God knows what my mother made of this."
Mitchell Schwarzer, son of Zygmunt Schwarzer

"Renia was like a mother to me when our own beloved mother was far away."
"Every time I opened her diary, I started crying. It was too emotional."
Elizabeth Bellak, Holocaust survivor, New York City

Renia Spiegel, left, with her mother and younger sister in Przemysl, Poland, in 1937. (Bellak Family Archive)

Another publication, another Jewish teen's diary surviving to tell her story of a brief life and a sudden death. A testament to life and love. Memorializing love and tragedy. A life not yet half-lived, but eager to try and anxious to love and be loved. Living in a small Polish town just before the outbreak of World War II, it was a time of high anxiety and deprivation for Europe's Jews. Renia Spiegel left behind 700 pages comprising her diary. It came into her sister's possession and the  journal has now seen publication.

Renia Spiegel, right, with her younger sister and her mother in 1935. (Bellak Family Archive)

Her sister Elizabeth, now 88 years of age, mourned her older sister's death every day of her long life. The publication of Renia's memoirs is a dream fulfilled, a gift from the present to the misery of the past. The published book has been sent to 13 countries to be featured in bookstores in Canada, Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States, among others. The world is familiar with Anne Frank's diary, is it prepared for Renia Spiegel's? Two young girls whose lives were cut short, among the hundreds of thousands of other young girls who suffered similar fates.

Renia was 18 years old when she died in 1942. She had met and fallen in love with a boy a year older than she was. Renia and Zygmunt Schwarzer, the boy she loved's parents were in  hiding in the attic of a Przemysl house. The Nazis discovered the hiding place and dragging the three out of their safe haven, shot them to death in the street. Zygmunt had been given Renia's diary for safekeeping. His was the very last entry in the diary, an entry of utter despair at his loss of the three people he loved.

He was sent to Auschwitz and survived. How the diary did is a mystery, but he was able to retrieve it from wherever it had been placed for safekeeping during the war, when he lived in New York. The journal reflects for the most part the young Renia's transition into young womanhood, her desire to love and be loved, and her passion for the-then young man with whom she found that love -- and their first kiss in 1941 after months of quiet courting.

Two days after that first kiss the Third Reich declared war on the Soviet Union and swept into eastern Poland. Renia's mother and younger sister found a new life for themselves in New York after the war. Eventually the  journal kept in the possession of Zygmunt Schwarzer was given to Elizabeth who placed it in a safe-deposit box for decades in New York. She could not bear herself, to read her sister's intimate account of her young life.

Now the world can.

Labels: Diary, Holocaust, Renia Spiegel

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 26, 2019