at the beginning of 1939 began, the then 15-year-old Renia mirror to keep a diary. Renia did not know what horrors will come in the next few years on the unfortunate Poland, and especially to you, the Jew. Also, you don’t realize how fast and brutal their life is.
More than 700 pages, she wrote. She wrote about her longing, wrote Appeals to their parents, and leaving behind funny stories about your friends. The whole cosmos is a young wonderful life. Here Renia’s diary differs from the famous diary of Anne Frank. The was younger and wrote from the nightmarish perspective of your hiding place where the Frank family hoped to survive the Nazi rule.
Cheerful girl
And so the diary of the vital girl from Poland unfolds a sinister Undertow. Because you – like your time didn’t enjoyed – that’s what keeps the story ready for you, the reader, the inevitable disaster is known. This Background gives the life-affirming passages from Renia’s entries, a disturbing undertone.
In January 1939, Renia thought of Hitler in Berlin. She was disappointed, and alone. The mother far away in Warsaw, the father on the beloved farm the girl was raised. Her mother had accompanied the smallest sister, the eight-year-old was an aspiring child star. Renia and her sister Ariana were deported to the grandparents to the sleepy town of Przemysl.
After the Germans invaded in 1939, Poland, and the country had quickly thrown down and found the family in separate zones. In the capital city of Warsaw, the Germans marched in. The small town of Przemysl was occupied by the Red army, because Hitler had promised to Stalin in a secret agreement, large parts of Eastern Poland.
A love that outlasted the Nazis
But the girl had their own view of the world. Renia wrote: “What does it matter that you have divided the countries that they have separated brothers, children far way from their mothers have sent? …. The clouds, the birds and the sun to laugh at these boundaries, about people, about your guns. You walk back and forth, smuggle rain, blades of Grass rays of the sun. And no one can even think to ban you. If you were to try it at all, would break out the sun in front of Laugh and you would have to close your eyes. The clouds, birds and the Wind would follow. So it would make my small human soul and many of my thoughts.”
Fullscreen
The liberation of Kenya did not live to see. The photo shows the Moment when a tank battalion of the US Army on a death train in the vicinity of Magdeburg stopped.
©U.S. Army / George C. Gross
From 1939 to 1941, the diary is a Testament to a teenager’s life. Because Renia fell in love with a boy named Zygmunt Black. 21. September 1940-listed Renia: “today I met a boy by the name of Zygmunt. Nora admitted that she liked him, but because she knew that he was exactly my type, let it be. Nora has the sweet, sweet Natek and Irka has Maciek. And I? I don’t know how it will run and I don’t really trust a lot of yourself.”
The life of a teenager
Renia was not aware that this Boy will soon use his life for you and you will love about the war, the persecution and death until the end of his life. The reader knows that the Nazis were planning at the time to kill all the Jews. At the same time he follows the traces of a Teenage Love Story, so vivid and full of hope, as the whole world Renia would be open.
“When I see Zygmunt, I have this blissful, pleasant feeling, unpleasant. Something paralyzes me. Ah, this Idiot, if only he knew how much I love him.”
The Soviet occupation and the Communist Propaganda observed Renia with interested focused but distant curiosity – your thoughts to your love. Balls, the star in the sky and first kisses.
Then the German invaded the Wehrmacht in the USSR. The Red Tavla army was pushed out of Poland and had to soft in the same year to Moscow. When the Red army re-conquered, finally, on the way to Berlin Przemysl, lived for Renia.
With the German Terror
On 26. June, five days after the beginning of the German Offensive, was Renia full of fear.
“I can’t write. I am weak with fear. Again, war, war between Russia and Germany. The Germans were here, then they withdrew. Terrible days in the basement. Dear God, give me my Mama, save us all. (…) I want to live. I humble myself before you and beg in our name. Tonight it will be terrible. I’m afraid of.”
Soon afterwards, on 1. July 1941, the reign of terror of the Nazis, Renia.”Tomorrow I’m going to have to, along with all the other Jews begin to wear a white bracelet. For you, my diary, I will always remain the same Renia, but for everyone else, I’m going to be someone Inferior: a girl with a white bracelet and a blue star.
(…) I write, for as long as I’m still independent and free. Tomorrow I’ll be someone else – but only from the outside. And maybe, I welcome you one day as someone else. Give me, Lord God, I believe in you.”
In July, she was locked in a closed Ghetto behind barbed wire. “Today, around 8 PM, we were locked up in the Ghetto,” wrote Kenya. “I live here now, the world is separate from me, and I am disconnected from the world.”
Desperate rescue attempt
her young lover was now in the resistance. The situation in the Ghetto is desperate.
On the 25. March 1942, writes Renia:
“you are close to our accommodation, you drive people out of the city. Everywhere there is persecution, unlawful. And there is the spring, kisses, sweet caresses, let me forget about the whole world.”
in the Midst of the Terror of the Nazis Renia experienced your love.
“Now I know the meaning of the word ecstasy. It is indescribable; it is the Best thing that can reach two loving creatures. For the first Time, I felt this longing to be one. To Bite (…) and to Kiss and to squeeze until the blood comes. And Zygmunt talked about how he was going to be the best man for me.”
Zygmunt managed to create the sisters Renia and Ariana out of the Ghetto, shortly before the Germans came for all the Jews to send them to a death camp. He hid Renia and his own parents in the attic of an uncle. The Christian father of a girlfriend concealed her 12-year-old sister.
In the attic, the three were the Germans tracked down. The last entry of the diary is not from Kenya but from the desperate, Zygmunt: “Three shots! Three people lost their lives! All I can hear, shots, shots.”
love to death
Ariana survived the war – her mother, Roza managed to get adventurous on fake papers, to the mother and child Catholics.
Also Zygmunt Black survived the war and imprisonment in a concentration camp. He died in 1992. He kept the diary and the memory. In his house he built a Shrine for Renia. Before his death, he wrote in the diary. “I’ve seen Renia’s sister. This blood connection is all I have. It has been 41 years that I have lost Renia…….. Thanks Renia, I fell in love for the first Time in my life, deeply and sincerely. And I was loved by you on an extraordinary, uncanny, and incredibly passionate way.”
The Smithosonian Magazine made excerpts of the diary for the first time in an English Translation online: “Hear, o Israel, save us.” It is provided with a historical Timeline for orientation. 2016 the journal the original was published in Polish.
The article “How to Astonishing Holocaust Diary Resurfaced in America” describes, in detail, the lives of the Survivors after the war, and explains why the diary remained hidden for so long.
On the side of the “Republic of Kenya, the mirror Foundation” you can find more information about her and the diary in the German language.
