Warsaw (AFP)

Barely a year after being kissed for the first time, the young Jewess Renia Spiegel writes a prayer in her diary asking God to let her live.

It was June 1942, she was eighteen. The German Nazis had just exterminated all the Jews of a district of his city of Przemysl, in the south of Poland. Some Jews were forced to dig their own graves.

"Wherever I look, there is blood, what terrible pogroms, it is killing, murder," she wrote on June 7.

"Almighty God, for the umpteenth time I bow to you, help us, save us! O Lord God, let us live, I beg you, I want to live!"

A month and a half later, his boyfriend, Zygmunt Schwarzer, a Jew but with a work permit allowing him to move around the city, hid him, with his parents, in the attic of a house in the city. outside the Jewish ghetto, risking their lives. But a collaborator betrays them.

Schwarzer, who is 19 years old, describes his death in a note added to the newspaper, which freezes the blood: "Three shots! Three lives lost! It happened last night at ten thirty ... Ma Renusia darling, the last chapter your newspaper is closed. "

After the war, the document is retrieved by the young man, before being given to the mother of the murdered teenager. Then he will spend decades in the safe of a bank. Today, nearly 80 years later, it is published worldwide.

"The Renia Journal" went on sale in English in September and will soon be reissued in Polish. Some fifteen translations are in preparation.

Renia Spiegel has been nicknamed "Anne Frank Polish", according to the Dutch girl victim of the Holocaust and author of the famous newspaper started when she was 13 years old.

- 660 pages -

Renia began her diary in 1939 at the age of 14. She lives with her grandparents: her mother is in Warsaw to promote the cinema career of her little sister Ariana, nicknamed the Polish Shirley Temple.

The girl fills some 660 pages of several notebooks sewn together, telling how much her mother misses her, dreaming of the young green-eyed Schwarzer, composing poems and inserting more sobering passages about the Soviet and Nazi occupation of her city. .

At the end of each entry, the same call for help comes back to his mother and God.

Her sister Ariana, trapped since the beginning of the war in Przemysl where she had spent the summer 39 at the grandparents' house, was saved thanks to the father of her best friend, who took her by train to Warsaw .

"My life was saved by a good Christian, risking the death penalty, he drove me, like his own child, to my mother's house," the 88-year-old lady from New York told AFP in Warsaw. York.

At the time, she was baptized and took the name of Elizabeth. A German officer, falling in love with his mother, sends them both to a safe place in Austria. After the war, they emigrate to the United States.

Schwarzer also survived. Sent to Auschwitz, he was chosen to be spared by the war crime doctor Josef Mengele.

- "Too ripping" -

In the early 1950s, he found Renia's mother in New York and gave him the newspaper.

"She was shocked, she could never read it, you understand, a mother who loses her child ...", said the little sister, now Elizabeth Bellak. She herself only read fragments of it, because "it's so heartbreaking".

The thick volume will finally come out of the trunk by his daughter.

"My name is Alexandra Renata (Bellak), so I owe my name to this mysterious person whom I have never met ... I was just curious to know the past," the girl told AFP Elizabeth, 49-year-old real estate agent.

The two women approached filmmaker Tomasz Magierski, who agreed, courtesy first, to flip through the newspaper.

"I could not get away from it, I probably read it in four or five nights ... I got used to her writing and, to tell the truth, I fell in love with her, from Renia ", he confides to AFP.

"What's sad about this journal is ... you know how it ends, but when you read it, you start to hope that maybe the end will be different."

The poems impressed him. In one of them, on a German soldier, Renia Spiegel shows empathy for the enemy. "I curse a thousand and one cents / But for one, hurt, I cry".

- "It happened" -

In September, all three attended the premiere of the film in Warsaw.

Listening to an on-screen actress singing a poem from her sister, Elizabeth swayed slightly to the rhythm of the music. Then she cried.

"Nationalism, populism, anti-Semitism, all these are coming back again and we do not want the death of millions of people to be repeated," she told AFP.

"Do you know that some people have never believed it, I was there, I can say it happened."

© 2019 AFP