Renia Spiegel, Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the
Shadow of the Holocaust, trans. Anna Blasiak and Marta Dziurosz. London:
Ebury Press, 2019. 453 pp.
Reviewed by
Norman Simms
Deborah E. Lipstadt’s introduction to
tells us almost all we have to know about how to read an adolescent girl’s
diary written during the Holocaust: as a nearly day by day account of how an
unsophisticated child confronted the increasingly menacing events of the Nazi
invasion—and the Soviet invasion, as well—of Poland and, eventually, the actual
murderous acts of the Holocaust, Renia Spiegel does not see the big picture,
both because of her limited perspective as a child, and because the larger
encompassing nature of the genocide was not visible to anyone until much later
and usually only in retrospect. Until she is overwhelmed by the force of the
Nazi killing-machine, she experiences her own growing up as a Jewish school
girl, her early infatuation with boys, her rivalry with other girls, her naïve
ambitions, her real longing for the mother who is separated from her by
circumstances, and her confusions in the face of a complicated adult world.
In some ways, she is like Anne Frank, in
others, not. The most striking difference between the two clever girls is that
Renia often expresses herself in poetry, and by attending to the increasing
skills and insight evidenced by these verses we can better judge her prosaic
grappling with what is for any sensitive human being caught up in the Shoah
unimaginable, inconceivable and inexpressible. At the best of times, it is
difficult for a young girl to navigate the troubled waters of growing into a
woman; in times of historical crisis, it seems impossible. If at times the diary entries seem to be
tedious and repetitious, they nevertheless stand as a defiant normalcy in the
midst of crisis: young Renia has every right to be a teenage girl testing out
her emotions and weaving a life that sometimes barely can distinguish between
dreams, waking infatuations, poetic exaggerations and real loneliness, anxiety
and eventually outright fear—and strange mixture that comes to an end in her
eighteenth year when she is shot dead, and that right to childhood and its
innocence is taken away in the most awful way.
Day by day, month after month, from 1939
through 1942 the sixteen—and soon to be seventeen-—year-old girl tells her
diary about her feelings for a boy a couple of years older than herself, her
first love, Zygmond known as Zygu. In one sense, the tediously repetitious
recounting of her puppy love, partly an attempt to put into words strange new
emotions and sensations in her body, partly dreams of what she wishes would
happen—to kiss, to hold hands, to do “this and that,”; and whether to go to a party
with him or without her fellow, how to treat her girl-friends and boys who may
or may not also be in love with her.
Occasionally, she reads “dirty” poems, hears rumours of what she has
supposedly already experienced with Zygu, and imagines sexual encounters,
though expressed obliquely in the way she loves the way he puts a bite of bagel
in her mouth.
In the background to this adolescent rambling,
interspersed with her own poems—if the translations from Polish are accurate,
they are very pretentious, overblown and naïve imitations of well-known German
and Polish poets—she prepares for examinations, hears vaguely about the war
that has already started, she living in Russian occupied territory, attends
Soviet-style school and youth groups, while her mother is caught in German
conquered Warsaw and only able to send an occasional word. And every entry in
the diary ends with a prayer that her mother would be there to give her advice
and that God will look after her family and keep her out of trouble.
In the sometimes comically pseudo-pompous
language of her innocence, in both prose and poetry, Renia sees her life as
tragic, full of epic suffering, world-destroying confusions and unbearable loneliness,
things are always described in the superlative as terrible and horrible or
beautiful and lovely, her emotions seem to her overwhelming, and as one expects
of a teenager, she can hardly gain any perspective on the realities around her.
Yet, at the same time, she passes her tests with flying colours, has the
respect of fellow pupils and teachers, and, so, in the normal course of events,
we would expect her to pass through these little crises and achieve maturity in
intellectual and emotional life. But the normal course of events has already
been broken into, the war impinges, she and other Jews are forced to wear white
ribbons (not yellow stars) to mark them out, her actions are curtailed, and she
finds herself locked into a ghetto. At first, even when the city is bombed and
her own house suffers damage, she cannot change the tone of her complaints and
the same words she used to describe her broken heart, her uncontrollable
feelings and her doubts about whether Zygu really loves her appear in terms of
people dying, being arrested and acts of betrayal and cruelty when the Nazis
arrive.
But the diary is for so long childish,
even when the situation is painful to endure, as neither Renia nor Zygu can
relate to one another in an adult way. She will say on day, “I was squiring in
the sort of pain every loving and every jealous girl suffers” (p. 216) and then
the next day, “Many more, many things I am unable to write about because I do
not know how…” (p. 217). Zygu, working in a clinic dealing with those wounded
in the bombardments, is as naïve as “his wife,” and neither of them can see
beyond their own immediate and inchoate emotions. They speak of the future, as
though there were no war, no round ups, no murders—no future. Then on 28 July
1941, she writes:
Yesterday I saw Jews being beaten. Some
monstrous Ukrainian in a German uniform hit every one he met. He hit and kicked
them, and we were helpless, so weak, so incapable…We had to take it all in
silence. (p. 219)
From now on, the veil of innocence
starts to lift somewhat, and the language and tone begin to change a little, but
not consistently or coherently. She sees wounded Germans walk by, and “I’m
sorry for them,” as though it is still a sentimental world and everyone suffers
in the same way, as though her faith in God will protect her and bring her
mother home, and keep Zygu safe and in love with her.
If, as she says, “Moods and thoughts,
and words all change,” it is not because events hit home and tear away
illusions. She is still a child in love, a lonely adolescent, and at most “I’m
sad when I hear that they are to send us that there’s to be a ghetto.” She
doesn’t have the imagination to picture what lies ahead. She wants and then she
is angry at Zygu, is jealous of her girl friends making passes at him,
but all my worries are consoled with one
thought—Mum! You will help me, Buluś [pet name for her mother] and God. Mama,
Mama will come??? When… (p. 221)
As much as she cannot see or admit to
herself the desire for physical love that would confirm her feelings about Zygu’s
love for her, so much she cannot come to grips with the already changed world
around her, the reality of Nazi occupation and the beginnings of the Shoah.
By 16 August 1941, Renia, she asks
herself searching questions, the answers to which lie very close to the
surface:
Why is Mum not writing, why is there no
sign from her? What happened to her? Why do we live in fear of searches and
arrests? Why can’t we go for a walk, because “children” throw stones? (p. 225)
This is both outright denial, a refusal
to accept the ugly and brutal reality, and at the same time a clinging to
dreams of lost innocence. She is after all only seventeen.
And why, why, why? I’m overcome by some
infectious fear, no, I feel no foreboding, but still—I am so afraid, so very
afraid. Miraculous God, keep and save my one and only mum. (p. 225)
In her poetry, and in her dreams, what
she desires starts to surface, at least in metaphoric language and in
implication through code words like “kiss” and “lips”: she wants to consummate
her love with Zygmu, but her inhibitions are strong and the situation
inauspicious. Renia wants God to keep her mother safe and bring her home, and
also to keep “all of us from everything that is evil and protect my Zygu from
the evil that can happen to him.” (p. 226) Yet she resists what is offered
because she is still more an immature child than a grown woman:
Good, darling Zygu! I am not worthy of
you even in part. You wanted to substitute my mother with those caresses and
console me, that’s what you said. Zyguś, my mama will give me those maternal
caresses, and these ones, they console me very much,. You will help me, Beluś
and God. God protect Mama and us all. God and my entreaties will help you,
Mama. (p. 227)
The language is simpler now but the
conceptual frame through which she sees the world is still very much the same,
the sentimentality, the naïve trust in goodness and love: yet the façade of poetic
pretentiousness is almost all gone. The adolescent girl needs her mother and
believes her mother needs her, at least through the prayers she makes to God,
while Zygus cannot offer more than simple emotions, tender as they are. She
cannot think of herself as a Jew and find consolation or meaning in her
Jewishness, yet this is what she is, why she and her mother suffer, why they
are hated, why no one comes to help them. Her lament has a little bit of
self-awareness, but not very much, not yet: “I’m dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.
All that’s left are dreams, hope and what…” (p. 227)
On Thursday, 28 August 1941 she writes,
showing that some of her idealism has been scraped away:
It’s no use moaning. “Don’t cry, don’t
cry, it won’t do.” It’s what must be, it’s necessary for us to walk with our
heads lowered now, to run along streets, to shiver. For the meanest
streetwalker to provoke and insult me in Zygu’s presence and he can’t help me,
or I him. Trifles, really, but it’s very very hard. (p. 227)
These insults are, however, hardly
trifles; they are signs of worse things to come. They indicate the changed reality in which
worse can happen. Far worse than she could ever imagine.
Nevertheless, child that she is,
confused by the enormity of the things happening around her and to her mother,
Renia still allows her adolescent fancies to focus on her wish to be physically
embraced by her young lover, her imagined rivalry with other girls—whether she
is pretty enough to win out over them—and other petty matters. It actually
takes a relatively long time for the nature of her situation to sink in to her
consciousness. These fanciful romantic insecurities weave in and out of dreams
and poetic effusions, and the alter ego that her diary increasingly
becomes. Even as late as 29 October
1941, musing on her anxieties to one of her friends, she writes:
Now I am sinking into some kind of
stupor and what is it?—an aversion? I don’t think so. I was thinking yesterday
and I said this to Nora, “You know, Norka, I am tired of life.” This sentence
coming out of a seventeen-year-old-girl’s mouth amuses me, and it’s not
accurate. It’s not life I’m tired of, because after all I haven’t really lived
yet; I’m tired of anticipation, idleness, and maybe precisely the desire for
life....” (p. 246)
Such is the weltshmerz, love-sickness and loneliness of an ordinary young
person caught up in what is surely the greatest crime against humanity in human
history.
Contrast such moon-struck rhapsodizing
with what Renia writes a few days later on 7 November 1941,
Again a day came when all former worries
faded. Ghetto! The word is ringing in our ears, it terrifies, it torments… (p.
254)
Though they manage to bribe their way
out of this Aktion, when a policeman
“let himself be bribed,” the child inscribes in her diary in words addressed to
her mother: “I’m suffering here too and going though things that can make one’s
hair go white” (p. 255).
In these exaggerated comments, as well
as in the mood swings, we can see Renia attempting to grasp the nature of the
threats against her and some equanimity in her emotions so as to deal with
them. But she still can only articulate her true feelings and intellectual
self-awareness by projecting into the relative trivia of her consciousness.
Thus she reacts on 8 November 1941 to a sympathetic comment of Zygu to be her
guide through the morass they must trudge through—his position as a medical
assistant:
…I
shall deliberate over an issue brought up today by Zygu. I need to consider it
carefully, mull over it and understand.
This is how it started! It started with him saying that I’m childish, that I’ve
got a child’s mentality, that I have not matured psychically to the level of my
seventeen years… (p. 255)
And on and on, until she claims,
So
I told him he doesn’t know me at all. Then Z. took the offensive and accused me
of being like a doll that he plays with and if he presses a button, it makes me
react…(p. 256)
Zygu is not all
that mature either, as he shows off his sophomoric knowledge of psychology, to
be sure. Renia tries to defend herself and answer his supercilious comments
(“mansplaining”). However, this lovers quarrel would be a farcical argument at
cross-purposes and misunderstandings, if the concrete circumstances were no so
pressing and dangerous. In another context we could hear echoes of literary
works such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman
or Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. This is
not the time (there is not much left) and place (it is sinking beneath their
feet) for an adolescent couple’s lovers’ tiff.
It is hard to
tell sometimes whether she has entered the ghetto or only so far suffering
tightening restrictions on everyday matters of life. She tries to be mature and
assess her situation, but each day poses confusing and frightening questions
she cannot answer. Sometimes she suddenly finds her voice to break out of the
silly prattle of adolescent egotism to say, as on 15 December 1941:
Oh, I must have
changed a lot. Well, perhaps I’m really not myself any more, maybe I’m the
lining of Zygmunt’s soul. (p. 274)
But all too
easily she slips back into a prayer to have her mother’s caresses and to
express her virtually total helplessness.
With the turn of the year and the coming of her next birthday, she keeps
trying to stake stock of her situation, her options, her practical hopes, her
lack of will to take what pleasures she can of life. Yet when she cries out in
despair, who knows whether it is because she still cannot understand what it is
or how she loves Zygu and if he has betrayed his commitment to her from some
other little girl or whether she actually has started to grasp what the Nazi
regime is doing. On 5 January 1941, she writes:
No, I’m lying to
the world that I’m indifferent to it; it’s not true! I am hurt, I am simply
writhing in pain. (p. 285)
She doesn’t have
the insight or experience to evaluate her own feelings, let alone the words and
the body language of others. Clever as she is in school-learning and ambitious
to be a poet, when it comes to specific occasions, she is lost. She cannot
process the event, the words, or their implications. Another girl, Jaroska, says of Zygmund: “He
looks like a real Yid in that hat.”
Renia doesn’t know what to say or think. Is such a statement “ruing the
image for me” of what her would-be lover is, looks like to the world, reflects
back on her own condition as a Jew? “I’m unable to see it.” (p. 290) Of course, not: the stereotypical Jew cannot
fit her dream of the boy she adores. “I’m seventeen,” she writes, “and when I
look into his eyes I forget everything that’s sad in the world” (p. 294).
On 30 January
1942, with no letter arriving from her mother, the news all bad about her
family and about the people in her community, including the small circle of
teen-age friends with whom she shares an emotional bond that sometimes protects
them from adult concerns, she, becomes angry; and in a poem in which those
passions, fears and confrontations with reality make themselves manifest, even
if the language is still simplistic and based on literary clichés:
If I was just like you are now
I would have all the boys in tow
I’d be surrounded by many a lad
And let them kiss me!
Let them go mad!
I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t care
The young girl’s shame would not be there
I’d fling my arms wide open, then
I would deny it all again
I’d kick back those who are a drag
Then I would show a lot of leg
And hike my dress up high enough
Go let the blinding light shine through
With so much grace
Who could ever face
So much temptation and resist?
(p. 296)
She complains of
having a bad period, of her grandparents dying, of friends trying to steal away
her lover boy, of missing her mother terribly, of needing God’s help and
direction, and then, as here, of seeking revenge against her rivals, behaving
like a street tart (such as insult her) and kicking up her heels and lifting
her dress to drive the boys crazy, have real physical love-making, and vent her
rage at the world in all its unfairness and cruelty.
On 23 March
1942, she tries to encapsulate all her mixed feelings into one word, but then
displays the split between her conscious awareness of the reality that besets
her and all other Jews caught in the claws of the Nazi murderers and the silly
childish dreams of her adolescent immaturity:
It’s so ironic.
They are closing our quarter (I won’t be able to see Norka); they are moving
people out of town; there are persecutions, unlawfulness. And on top of
that—there’s spring, kisses sweet caresses, which make me forget about the
whole world. (p. 317)
Is the Polish
word for irony ironia the term she is
really looking for? Can it encompass the terrible contrast between
incarceration, starvation, torture and killing and the naïve dreams of a pure
love? What she actually experiences and reads about in her mother’s few letters
goes beyond the ironic situation she tries to describe. Somewhere between 20
and 24 April 1942 (the uncertainty marks her loss of sense of real time), Renia
writes in a dramatic series of exclamations between two poems:
I stifle this
scream in me. I would run out into the fields, spread my arms wide and scream
like mad. May! Paradise! Spring! Spriing! And then… One more embrace like this.
Which would contain everything. God! I’m so terrible!
I’ve received
postcards from Mum and Ticiu. Sad cards, horrible! And I, their child, feel so
bright and singsong?! This is a terrible sin. Forgive me. Because I… (p. 331)
Her grammar, syntax and logic break down
here. Her spelling and lapses into silence mark the confusion she feels, her
inability to control her emotions, her wishes and her anxieties. Thinking that
she has been rejected by Zygu, frustrated by her mother’s continuing absence
and unable to face up to the political situation, Renia continues to lash out
at the fantasy versions of those she loves. She keeps repeating the terrible
state she is in. That Zygu has allowed others to read her diary makes her feel
violated (raped), and all this is a censored version of what has really invaded
her innocent child’s life.
When I thought that somebody had forced
(well, yes, forced) their way into my personal, most intimate realm, no, I
didn’t feel emptiness, but a terrible, burning shame….I have some terribly
sweet dreams to think through… (p. 334)
Meanwhile, she feels that “my writing’s
quite sober”. In fact, “It’s horrible and cold.” Renia tells her diary, “Today
I’ll daydream; I’ll imagine things…” But she always lost in her fantasies,
writing in the diary, especially in her verses. More and more, too, the editor
of the book adds footnotes identifying quotations and allusions to books
(Polish, Russian, German), novels, poems, essays, films and lessons learned in
school. Her make-believe world, albeit mostly present in inference and
innuendo, derives increasingly from the intellectual world she longs for, the
future education she will be deprived of, the professional career that is
closed to her, the intimacy that she wants more than the physical contact of a
lover.
As the end draws closer, Renia’s vision
sometimes darkens, but she seem never—until the final few days—to accept what
is happening around and to her. Elizabeth Bellack, her younger sister’s
“Epilogue” and “Notes” I think exaggerate the mature understanding of what
appears in the diary. She dismisses the tensions in the relationship between
Renia and Zygu, saying “their little arguments were just the ups and downs of
young people in love” (p. 428) Zygmund, two years older and active in trying to
save lives on the outside, is more serious, and tries his best at once to sooth
the frightened girl and make her understand what can and can’t be done
realistically.
But the sister, although turned into the
“Shirley Temple of Poland” by her mother’s ambitions, was always too young—and
not near enough geographically—to judge what Renia was going through or writing
about. Her perspective is one of an adult looking back, idealizing Renia’s
talents and feeling guilty for not having been able to help her. What we do have in Renia’s Diary, all seven hundred pages in the original manuscript,
is powerful enough, a sensitive, emotionally-charged record of an adolescent
girl on the cusp of adulthood who falls in love, feels emotions she is not
ready to process and could not express due to the pressures of her mother’s
(and father’s, as well) absence and the terrible, cruel and violent actions
around her. Neither of the sisters, nor their childhood friends, or even their
close relatives could have appreciated the efforts made by Zygu (who eventually
became a doctor in America) or the non-Jewish neighbours and parents of the
school-mates made, at the risk of their own safety and lives, to help them as
much as they did. In hindsight, the
trauma Elizabeth went through was enough to keep her from reading the diary until
almost the end of her life, avoiding telling her own children what she and
Renia had experiences—indeed, who they were, having been baptized a Catholic
and changed her name, again not until very late.
A fuller appreciation of the diary would
require a great deal of historical contextualization, to see this adolescent
girl’s experiences in the light of the Polish, Russian and German forces at
work to destroy them and rarely to protect them, against the lives and deaths
of other Jews,
especially those who survived and wrote their own memoirs and autobiographies,
or whose artistic and intellectual achievements were ripped apart by events,
left at best incomplete or in fragments, or were never allowed to develop past
the most elementary trials. Renia, like
the short story writer Bruno Schulz—one of those who oeuvre barely exists today after the fires of hell scattered or
burnt them into oblivion—stands as a symbolic representation (as Marcin
Romanowski puts it) “of a fragile individual colliding with the brutal reality
of the 20th century.” On the one hand, how much great literature,
art, music, drama and ideas have been lost because of the cruel and stupid
people who perpetrated—and allowed to happen—the Holocaust. On the other, how
many ordinary human beings, whole communities, loving families and innocent
children were murdered or had their lives blighted beyond repair!?
But let us leave the last word to the
eighteen year old girl who wrote, in all her innocence, confusion and
sensitivity, on 7 June 1942, a few weeks before she was shot:
Wherever I look, there is bloodshed.
Such terrible pogroms. There is killing, murdering. God Almighty, for the
umpteenth time I humble myself in front of You, help us, save us! Lord God, let
us live, I beg You, I want to live! I’ve experienced so little of life,
nothing, I don’t want to die. I’m scared of death. It’s all so stupid, so
petty, so unimportant, so small. Today I worry about being ugly; tomorrow I
might stop thinking forever. Yes, yes, war is terrible, savage, bloody. I feel
I’ve become like that because of it. (pp. 364-365)
