It was January 31, 1939 when a 15-year-old Jewish girl sat down with a notebook in a cramped apartment in Poland and began writing about her life. She wrote about missing her parents — her mother was in Warsaw and her father was ensconced on the farm where her family once lived — and she missed the home where she had once spent the happiest days of her life.
The girl was Renia Spiegel, and she and her sister, Ariana, were staying with their grandparents that August when the Germans and the Russians divided Poland. Her mom was stuck on the Nazi side, while the daughters were stranded across the border under Soviet control. Their father disappeared a few years later, and was presumed dead.
Renia kept writing. Over the course of 700 pages, while she was 15 to 18, Renia would write about her friends, the natural world, her parents, secrets about her boyfriend and chilling observations of the war. The diary was hidden for 70 years, but was rediscovered in a desk in New York. The diary is now an invaluable contribution to Holocaust literature.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
