Polish teenager's diary reveals a tragic love story under Soviet and Nazi occupation

Transcript

Polish teenager Renia Spiegel wrote about a lot of things in her diary — living under Soviet and Nazi occupation, being separated from her parents and confined in a Jewish ghetto, hiding from German soldiers during the Holocaust. 

But more than anything else, she wrote about a boy. 

His name was Zygmunt Schwarzer and he was her first — and, tragically, last — great love.

For the first time, Renia's words have been translated in their entirety into English and collected in a book. 

 "It's shown me a completely new side of my father," Mitchell Schwarzer, Zygmunt's son, told As It Happens host Carol Off. 

"He used to talk about how he survived [Nazi scientist] Josef Mengele and Auschwitz, how he survived from typhus in Dachau camps. He would tell me these stories, but I didn't know the extent to which he tried to save other people, the way he was actually working to help not just himself, but others as well. And I really got that from the diary."

Renia's Diary: A Young Girl's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust hits shelves on Sept. 29. 

Who was Renia?

Renia was a born in 1924 to an upper middle class family in southeastern Poland. In 1939, at the age of 15, she began keeping a diary.

She and her little sister Ariana were staying with their grandparents in the southern city of Przemysl when the Germans and Soviets divided Poland, separating the girls from their parents. 

"I just want a friend. I want somebody to talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who would feel what I feel, who would believe me, who would never reveal my secrets," she wrote in her first entry, quoted on Smithsonian.com.

"A human being can never be such a friend and that's why I have decided to look for a confidant in the form of a diary."

She would continue to document her thoughts and feelings for the next three years as she came of age under the rule of two occupying forces, until she was ultimately killed by the Nazis at the age of 18. 

Love and war

Over and over, Renia wrote about her relationship with Zygmunt, a member of the resistance. 

"I think for her, he becomes this conduit to the outside world. She's very inward. She's reflecting on herself and her friends, and she's writing poetry and yet she's not really venturing out much," Schwarzer said.

"And he's the kind of outside world, he's going all around the town and into the environs securing food, making connections, helping people."

As their romance blossomed, the war intensified. They shared their first kiss on June 20, 1941, just two days before the Germans declared war on the Soviet Union and advanced into eastern Poland.

Just over a year later, in July 1942, she was forced into a ghetto.

"Today at 8 o'clock we have been shut away in the ghetto," she wrote. "I live here now; the world is separated from me, and I'm separated from the world."

'Three shots! Three lives lost!'

Zygmunt came to her rescue — or, at least, he tried to. 

"My father knew based on experience from what was going on elsewhere, because he was in contact with people and with the resistance, that once the ghetto was established, that's basically a convenient holding pen so that the German SS can then round up Jews and take them either to a massacre site in the forest or to an extermination camp," Schwarzer said.

With the help of the resistance, he was able to sneak Renia and Ariana out of the ghetto.

Ariana, just 12 at the time, went to live with a friend's father, while Renia went into hiding with Zygmunt's parents in the attic of his uncle's house. She gave her diary to Zygmunt for safe keeping.

But they were ultimately betrayed. On July 30, 1942, German soldiers found and executed all three. 

The diary's final passages were written by Zygmunt. 

"Three shots! Three lives lost!" he wrote. "All I can hear are shots, shots." 

What became of the diary?

Zygmunt survived the Holocaust, became a doctor, and eventually got married and had a family. But he never forgot Renia.

For years, he kept the diary on a desk in his home office in Long Island, N.Y.

"He would just sit and read it and ruminate on it for hours and hours. And this went on for several years," Schwarzer said. "He had put up a picture of Renia by his office"

At the time, Schwarzer says he didn't really grasp the significance of the photo or the Polish words. 

"I didn't understand what was going on and he didn't tell me a great deal because this was an earlier girlfriend and my mother wasn't thrilled about that," he said.

"It took until me reading the diary to realize, oh my God, the diary is a whole window into his life."

In 1950, Zygmunt found Renia's mother and sister, now called Elizabeth Bellak, in New York and returned the diary to them, the BBC reports. 

"It was a shocking experience to see it," Bellak told the BBC. "It was the first time my mum and I saw it. We were the only two survivors."

Bellak kept it tucked it away for decades. It was her daughter Alexandra Bellak who finally had the pages translated to English, and sought out a publisher to share her aunt's story with the world.

Naturally, it's drawn comparisons to Anne Frank, another young girl who wrote a harrowing first-hand account of the Holocaust. 

Schwarzer says the world needs to hear Renia's story, now more than ever. 

"Hopefully, it can do some good to alert people, especially in times that we're living in right now with the rise of nationalism around the world, in the United States and elsewhere, it can alert people to the threat that this could pose."

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview with Mitchell Schwarzer produced by Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.