The diary of a teenager who was murdered by Nazis in 1942 will be published later this month after spending nearly 70 years in a bank vault.
Growing up in Przemysl, Poland, which was under Soviet occupation until the 1941 Nazi invasion, Renia Spiegel was 18 when Nazis murdered her after finding her hiding in an attic.
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Titled Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, the book will be released Sept. 24. She began her diary in January 1939 when she was 15 years old, and across nearly 700 pages she describes how she and her sister were separated from their mother, as well as how she fell in love with a boy named Zygmunt Schwarzer.
Schwarzer wrote the last entry in the journal, “Three shots! Three lives lost! All I can hear are shots, shots.”
Penguin Books, its publisher in the U.K., describes the book as “an extraordinary testament to both the horrors of war, and to the life that can exist even in the darkest times.” It will be published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press.
Schwarzer gave Spiegel’s diary to someone else before he was sent to Auschwitz. He survived and fled to the U.S. in 1950. He then was able to give the diary to Spiegel’s sister and mother, who were living in the U.S. as well.
The diary remained relatively unread and eventually locked up because they couldn’t bring themselves to read it.
“I was curious about my past, my heritage, this special woman I was named after (middle name is Renata) and I don’t speak Polish (thanks mom!). And she never read it as it was too painful,” Spiegel’s sister’s daughter said.
