About the Author

RENIA SPIEGEL was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1924. She began her diary at the start of 1939, right before the invasion of Poland by the German and Soviet armies. In 1942, she was forced to move to a ghetto, but was smuggled out by her boyfriend and went into hiding with his parents. She was discovered by the Gestapo and murdered on July 30, 1942.

ELIZABETH BELLAK (née Ariana Spiegel), born in 1930, was a child actress once called "the Polish Shirley Temple." In 1942 she and her mother fled to Warsaw, and then to Austria, finally arriving in New York City, where she lives today.

Reviews

"[A] touching, poetic chronicle" --Los Angeles Times "The publication of Renia's Diary offers a reminder of the power of bearing witness." --The New York Times "A must-read." --Addison Independent "A terribly poignant work that conveys the brutal reality of the time through intimate connection with a young person."--Kirkus Review "Moving [and] riveting... this epic, layered story of survival serves as an important Holocaust document."--Publishers Weekly

"The diary is a lens into a life cut tragically short, and because the experience of her youth was all she had, her teenage angst takes on a poignancy it otherwise wouldn't have." --Jewish Book Council "Renia Spiegel, a young girl so filled with a zest for life and possessed of an ability to describe in prose and in poetry the beauty of the world around her, was denied with one bullet what she so wanted: a future...Those who saved the diary and those who worked to bring it to print, have "rescued" her. They could not save her from a cruel fate. Nor could they give her that future she so desired. But they have rescued her from the added pain of having been forgotten."--from the Introduction by Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Holocaust History at Emory University and the author of Antisemitism: Here and Now "Readers will naturally contrast Renia's diary with Anne Frank's. Renia was a little older and more sophisticated, writing frequently in poetry as well as in prose...Reading such different firsthand accounts reminds us that each of the Holocaust's millions of victims had a unique and dramatic experience."--Robin Shulman, Smithsonian magazine