The Other Anne Frank

After 77 years, the diary of a Jewish girl killed by the nazis is set to be published. The week speaks to her kin

- Ancy K. Sunny

January 31, 1939: I’m looking for someone, to whom I could tell my worries and joys of everyday life. From today on, we start a very hearty friendship. Who knows how long it will last?

July 28, 1942: Hear O Israel, save us, help us! You have kept me safe from bullets and bombs, from grenades, help me to survive, help us!

Between the first and last entry in her tattered, blue-lined diary, Polish teenager Renia Spiegel saw life blossom and wither. When 15-year-old Renia sat down to pour out her adolescent struggles into a diary, it is unlikely she anticipated the terror that would flood its pages. The ‘hearty friendship’ lasted a little more than three years. Two days after the entry on July 28, 1942, she was shot to death by Nazis who found her hiding place. She was Jewish.

Nearly 80 years later, the diary, with over 600 pages of prose and poetry, is being hailed as a moving piece of Holocaust literature. Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust will be released by Penguin Random House on September 24 in the United States. In the UK, the book is being published by St Martin’s Press. In 1950, Renia’s diary was delivered to her mother and sister Ariana (who now goes by the name Elizabeth Bellak) in New York by Renia’s boyfriend Zygmunt Schwarzer who survived the war. It still remains a mystery how the diary made its way safely out of Poland.