Renia’s Diary, Renia Spiegel and Deborah Lipstadt, authors
I have been reading this book for quite some time. It was hard to read more than a few pages at a time because the content made me think about the richness of her short life that never made it to its natural end. Overwhelmed by the awful reality, most often I would put the book down to read the next day or the next.
Renia, was only a teenager when Hitler began his rise to power. Her diary reveals how her ordinary teenage feelings, her friendships, little spats, school relationships and her dreams for her future occupied her mind and daily life. Using poems, she filled her diary with her thoughts. After all these years, her sister has compiled them into this memoir dedicated to her memory.
The world was robbed of a genuinely brilliant young poet from what I have read. Her emotions are raw, on the page, and because we know she dies, it is really hard to get one’s arms around her thoughts without feeling overwhelmed. What a life she dreamt for herself? How naïve she was, and how ordinary, except for being Jewish, a condition that Hitler and those that followed him could not tolerate. Keep tissues handy or keep a stiff upper lip because she was robbed of her future, her life, unjustly.