First published 2019
Renia Spiegel fills her diary with poetry and dreams while visiting her grandparents in Przemysl during the summer of 1939. When German forces invade Poland, the seventeen year old finds herself trapped far from home. She watches her comfortable world collapse as Nazi forces round up Jewish families and force them into the ghetto. Renia chronicles her daily struggles for survival while discovering love with her boyfriend Zygmund. When Zygmund smuggles her out of the ghetto to hide with his parents in a secret apartment, Renia continues writing about the terror surrounding her family and community. Her entries capture both teenage concerns about romance and appearance alongside the growing horror of persecution and violence. The diary ends abruptly in 1942 when Zygmund makes the final entry about Renia's fate. Her sister Elizabeth survived the war and preserved these pages for decades before their translation into English.
Genres: holocaust, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Przemysl, Poland
Period: 1939, 1942
336 pages · Hardcover · St. Martin's Press
Content warnings: death, violence