Three years before she was executed by Nazi soldiers in a Jewish ghetto in Poland, 14 year-old Renia Spiegel began to keep a secret diary.

“I’m looking for someone, to whom I could tell my worries and joys of everyday life,” she wrote on 31 January 1939. “From today on, we start a very hearty friendship. Who knows how long it will last?”

Over the next 700 pages, Renia records not only her teenage preoccupations, such as trivial arguments with her sister Ariana and her first kiss, but also the terrors of the German occupation and the Holocaust.

On 26 June 1941, shortly after her 17th birthday, Renia wrote of being forced to wear a white armband with a blue star to signify she was a “Jude”: “To you I will always remain the same Renia, but to others I’ll become someone inferior.”

A year later she was pleading for her survival: “Wherever I look, there is bloodshed. Such terrible pogroms. There is killing, murdering. Lord God, let us live, I beg You, I want to live!

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

“I’ve experienced so little of life. I don’t want to die. I’m scared of death. It’s all so stupid, so petty, so unimportant, so small. Today I’m worried about being ugly; tomorrow I might stop thinking forever.”

Renia went on to tell of being “shut away in the ghetto” in Przemyśl on 15 July 1942 before being smuggled out by her first love Zygmunt Schwarzer, who was working with the local resistance.

She spent the last days of her life hiding in an attic with Zygmunt’s parents and recorded her final diary entry on 28 July: “Hear O Israel, save us, help us! You have kept me safe from bullets and bombs, from grenades, help me to survive, help us!”

Two days later they were discovered by German soldiers and the three were shot dead on the street.

Photo of Renia Spiegel, who was shot dead by German soldiers in July 1942 (Bellak Family)

How the diary survived the war remains unclear. Somehow, despite passing through Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps, Zygmunt was able to deliver the blue-lined notebook to Renia’s mother and sister in New York in 1950.

Renia’s sister Elizabeth told the BBC: “I have read only some of it because I used to cry all the time. She was like my surrogate mother.

The first page of Renia’s diary, which ran from 31 January 1939 to 28 July 1942 (Bellak Family)

Finding it too distressing to read, the family kept it locked away for 70 years before it was resurrected by Renia’s sister – now known as Elizabeth Bellak – and her youngest daughter Alexandra.

The book – which has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank – is now being published in English for the first time. It was previously published in Poland in 2016 but only received worldwide attention last year.

“She was very intelligent. She was the head of the literary programme in her school. And she was very, very kind and always thoughtful.”