book challenge update

I FINALLY finished this book.

In the spring of 1939, a 15 year old Polish girl named Renia Spiegel began to keep a diary.  Renia was from an upper middle class Jewish family.  At the time she began her diary, Renia was living with her grandparents.  Renia's mother and younger sister Ariana were living in Warsaw, where Ariana was pursuing an film/acting career.  (Ariana was known as "the Shirley Temple of Poland".) Renia's father was living on the family estate, raising wheat and sugar beets.

When the war came, in September 1939, Renia and Ariana and their grandparents were in the Soviet-occupied portion of Poland, and Renia's mother was still in Warsaw, under German occupation.

The diary chronicles Renia's everyday life -- missing her mother, going to school, friendships, teenage angst, and later, romance.  She included numerous poems, most of them gloomy.  But Renia also wrote about life under Soviet and then German occupation, about being sent  to live in a ghetto and fearing deportation to a concentration camp.  (She was shot and killed by the Nazis in 1942, at the age of 18.)   Renia's writing focuses on her relationships with her family and her friends, and her growing  romance with Zygmunt Schwartzer.  It's really not until the end of the book that her personal trials and tribulations take a back seat to the horrors of the Nazis.

The diary is extensively annotated by Renia's sister (now known as Elizabeth Bellak), who survived the war and emigrated to the United States.  With my Kindle I found it very easy to flip between Renia's text  and Elizabeth's lengthy footnotes. The footnotes offer background information, Elizabeth's recollections, and insight into Renia's character.

It's a very moving story, definitely worth reading if you're looking for understanding of how the war and the Holocaust affected the lives of ordinary people.  It's like many other Holocaust diaries and memoirs, important for historical context and greater understanding of the human condition.

It was not an exciting book, though.  Elizabeth's notes and afterword tended to focus more on the war and the Holocaust, and provided much insight.

It's important to learn from Renia's history, especially in light of current world events.  We recently saw yet another right wing white supremacist attack on a synagogue, this time in Germany on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year. And I am mindful of the predicament of the Kurds in northern Syria -- "never again" means never again for any ethnic or racial minority.

But now that I have finished this book, I will be moving on to something light, fluffy and entertaining.