Diary of Polish-Jewish girl murdered in Holocaust published in English

Rina Spiegel’s diary, which has been compared to Anne Frank’s, describes conditions in Nazi-occupied city of Przemysl until her death in 1942

By Cnaan Liphshiz 21 September 2019, 1:04 am

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Cnaan Liphshiz was a Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel

The diarist Renia Spiegel, born in 1924 and murdered by the Nazis in 1942 (Renia Spiegel Foundation)

JTA — Relatives of a Polish-Jewish woman who was murdered in the Holocaust published in Britain an English-language translation of the manuscript she wrote during the war.

Describing the horrors of World War II in Eastern Europe, “Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust” has been compared to the diary that Anne Frank wrote in the Netherlands before she died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Ebury Digital published the diary of Renia Spiegel this week.

Born in Przemysl, in southeast Poland, Spiegel began her book when she was 15. It provides a firsthand account of bombing raids, being forced into hiding and the disappearance of other Jewish families from the Przemysl ghetto set up by the Nazis in 1942, the BBC reported.

“She was very intelligent,” Spiegel’s sister, Elizabeth, told BBC. “She was the head of the literary program in her school. And she was very, very kind and always thoughtful.”

Spiegel, who had aspired to be a poet, described falling in love for the first time with a boy named Zygmunt Schwarzer. They shared their first kiss hours before the Nazis reached her hometown.

At 18, she was shot dead in July 1942 by German soldiers who discovered her hiding in the attic of a house after she had escaped from the ghetto.