Renia's Diary

NEW YORK - 77 years after Polish teenager Renia Spiegel was murdered by the Nazis, her story is finally being told to the world.

"My sister wanted fame, she looked for it, in the book, and now she's become famous," said Elizabeth Bellak, Renia's younger sister.

And the story is emerging at a time when it is relevant as ever.

"People are gonna forget what it was," Bellak said of the Holocaust. "Young people don't have any idea what it was like, and now it's coming back again, this hate that's everywhere, this division.

"Elizabeth, now 88, was born Ariana Spiegel. The sisters lived in the town of Przemyśl, and when the Nazis rose to power, they stayed with their grandparents while their parents went to work in Warsaw. In 1939, Renia began keeping a diary.

"It's her life between 15 and 18, before she gets killed by the Nazis," Bellak explained.

The diary reads much like any teenager's: There are entries about boys and crushes, gossip, and general adolescent angst, but it is clearly written under the shadow of war.

By 1942 the sisters had managed to get out of a ghetto and were living separately in hiding. Renia's boyfriend Zygmunt managed to hide her in a good samaritan's attic.

"[Zygmunt] took his mother, father and my sister into hiding and someone ratted on them and killed them," said Bellak of Renia and the couple, who were taken outside and shot by the Gestapo.

But while Renia didn't survive, the diary did, though the family didn't know it until the 1950s, when Zygmunt, who survived Auschwitz and somehow kept the diary safe throughout the war, brought it to Renia's mother in New York.

It was kept in a safe deposit box for decades, as neither the girls' mother, Roza who'd survived the war thanks to fake papers, nor Elizabeth, could bring themselves to read it.

"I couldn't possibly read it, it's so painful to me," Bellak said.

To this day, she has not read the entire thing.  But around 2014, Elizabeth's daughter, Renya's niece, Alexandra Bellak did want to read it, and had the 600 pages of Polish translated and then published.

"I realized the depth, maturity and literary quality of this diary and felt I couldn't keep it to myself, I had to share it with the world," Alexandra Bellak said.

"Renia's Diary" has now been published in 20 languages, and she is being called the Polish Anne Frank.

"I think they're both poster girls for hope and inspiration when their stories are both quite tragic," Alexandra Bellak said. "[Renia] writes about the goings-on during these dark periods that we need to continue to remember because as Winston Churchill says, 'those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.'"