Renia’s Diary

1st January 1939
Why did I decide to start a diary today? Has something important happened? … No! I just want a friend. Somebody I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who will feel what I feel, believe what I say and never reveal my secrets.

When Renia begins writing her diary, like most teenagers, her days are filled with schoolwork, friendships and flirtations. But Renia is Jewish, she lives in Poland, and the year is 1939. With the outbreak of war, her world begins to fragment. Separated from her mother, her life takes on a new urgency as she flees the city to escape night bombing raids, observes the disappearances of other Jewish families and, finally, witnesses the creation of the ghetto.

But alongside the terror of war, there is also beauty, as she falls in love for the first time. She and the boy she falls in love with, Zygmunt, share their first kiss a few hours before the Nazi invasion. And it is Zygmunt who writes the final, heart-breaking entry in Renia’s diary.

Rediscovered after being locked in a safe for seventy years, Renia’s Diary is already being described as a classic of Holocaust literature. Written with a clarity and skill that is reminiscent of Anne Frank, it is an extraordinary testament to both the horrors of war, and to the life that can exist even in the darkest times.