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Renia Spiegel (born June 18, 1924 in Uhryńkowce, Tarnopol Voivodeship , Poland (today Uhrynkiwzi, Ternopil Oblast , Ukraine ); † July 30, 1942 in Przemyśl , Generalgouvernement ) was a Polish-Jewish girl. In her diary, which she kept between 1939 and 1942, she described her experiences during the Soviet and later the German occupation of Poland. She was murdered in the summer of 1942.

Life

Renia Spiegel was born as the daughter of Róża († 1969) and Bernard Spiegel in Uhryńkowce in the powiat Zaleszczyki in what was then the extreme south of Poland. Her father owned land there. Renia's mother and her six years younger sister Ariana lived separately from the family in Warsaw, where Ariana was a child star in several films. At the beginning of 1939 Renia also left her hometown, a village with almost 700 inhabitants, and moved to Przemyśl with her grandparents. There she attended the Maria Konopnicka girls' high school.

In the summer of 1939, Róża Spiegel also brought Ariana to live with her grandparents. She herself spoke good German and obtained forged papers and lived as a Catholic Maria Leszczyńska undisturbed in Warsaw. There she worked at the Hotel Europejski , which the German occupation had made their headquarters. She visited her daughters in Przemyśl several times. When the Second World War broke out , the city was bombed. Renia and Ariana fled with their grandfather, but were soon able to return. Przemyśl was divided by the Hitler-Stalin Pact . Renia's family lived in the Soviet district and was initially safe from the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. Renia now attended a co-educational school , fell in love with Zygmunt Schwarzer (1922–1992) and wrote poems that were also published in the school newspaper.

After the attack by the German Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Renia Spiegel witnessed the gradual disenfranchisement, persecution and extermination of the Jewish population. A year later, in June 1942, the family was interned in the Przemyśl ghetto . Renia's friend Zygmunt Schwarzer took an active part in the resistance. When task forces of the security police and the SD carried out pogroms in cooperation with Ukrainian militias and there were more and more arbitrary shootings, Renia's friend managed to smuggle the sisters out of the ghetto. Ariana was taken in by the father of a Polish friend, who passed her off as his daughter and brought her to her mother, who had been living in Warsaw under a false identity since 1939. Renia and Zygmunt's parents hid in the attic of Zygmunt's uncle Samuel Goliger's house, who was allowed to live outside the ghetto as a member of the Judenrat . However, the hiding place was betrayed only a few days later and Renia Spiegel was shot on the street by German soldiers on July 30, 1942, shortly after her 18th birthday.

Zygmunt Schwarzer was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps . After his liberation, he studied medicine in Heidelberg and moved to New York in the 1950s , where he started a family and worked as a pediatrician. Renia's mother also provided Ariana with forged papers as Elżbieta Leszczyńska, with the help of which she survived. After the war they emigrated to the USA. In the United States, her mother kept her assumed Catholic identity until the end of her life and did not even reveal to her second husband that she was Jewish. Ariana, who now called herself Elizabeth, married a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust, but also kept her Jewish identity from him and her children until her mother's death in 1969.

diary

Renia Spiegel's diary consists of seven exercise books sewn together. She started running it on January 31, 1939 shortly after moving to Przemyśl. The notes of the girl growing into a young adult were compared with the diary of the somewhat younger Anne Frank , which was made around the same time. In it Renia Spiegel reports on the longing for her mother, who had stayed in Warsaw, of everyday life in Poland, under the Soviets and in the ghetto, and of her first love affair. From the first entry on, she addressed the diary as a friend. With the attack by the Germans in 1941, the entries are increasingly marked by fears and gloomy premonitions. A few days before she was murdered, she noted:

“My dear diary, my good, dearest friend! We have had the most terrible times together, and now is the worst moment. I might be scared, but the greatest who hasn't left us yet will protect us today too. … God protect us all and Zygmunt and my grandparents and Ariana. God, I am handing my life over to you. "

After he had brought Renia to the hiding place, Zygmunt Schwarzer took the 700-page diary and continued it. The last entry is also from him:

“Three shots! Lost three lives! It happened at 10:30 a.m. last night. Fate has decided to take my loved ones from me. My life is over. All I hear are shots, shots, shots ... My dearest Renusia, the last chapter of your diary is now closed. "

When Schwarzer himself was deported to the concentration camp, a friend kept the book for him. This friend gave the book to Schwarzer on a visit to the United States in the 1950s. Schwarzer found the survivors from Spiegel's family in the United States and gave the diary to Renia's mother. He made a copy for himself, which he read regularly. However, Renia's mother and sister left the records unopened for decades. Ariana's daughter Alexandra Bellak found the book and had parts of it translated from Polish into English. In 2014 the family presented the diary to the Polish filmmaker Tomasz Magierski. He recognized the contemporary historical and literary potential of the work and founded the Renia Spiegel Foundation together with Ariana Bellak (née Spiegel) in 2015 . The foundation published Renia Spiegel's diary in 2016 in Polish. It was published in English in September 2019. The German edition is to be published by Schöffling Verlag (Frankfurt / M.) In 2021 with the support of the Christian CD Ludwig Foundation. Further editions are in preparation in French and Italian.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A Polish Girl's Diary Written During The Holocaust Lay Unread For 70 Years .
  2. ^ A b c d Robin Shulman: How an Astonishing Holocaust Diary Resurfaced in America
  3. ↑ a b c d e Alex Ulam: Why Renia Spiegel Is Being Called 'The Polish Anne Frank'
  4. ^ Nazi terror and first love - the Holocaust diary of a young girl (stern.de, November 3, 2018, accessed November 15, 2018)
  5. ↑ God, let's live! In MDR Zeitreise from May 3, 2016
  6. ^ Renia Spiegel, Ariana Elżbieta Bellak: Dziennik 1939-1942 . 2016, ISBN 978-1-5323-0449-1 .
  7. ^ Alison Flood: Terrible times are coming: the Holocaust diary that lay unread for 70 years . In The Guardian on November 9, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Spiegel, Renia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-Jewish girl, diary author, victim of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Uhryńkowce, Powiat Zaleszczyki , Tarnopol Voivodeship , Poland
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1942
Place of death Przemyśl , General Government