The concept of a critical review seems misplaced in the case of a diary of a child-victim of the Holocaust. The inevitable emotional reaction to the young author's tragic fate complicates scholarly evaluation of the diarist's recordings of events, feelings, and thoughts. Whereas the story that the diary tells proceeds implacably toward an in medias res ending, or the violent death of the author, the invariably miraculous survival of the Holocaust diary itself—a tangible object—insists on the palpable presence of the diarist's interrupted life. The historical circumstances of the Holocaust diary call for an especially humble mode of reading which strives toward comprehension of this direct evidence of terror rather than judgment.
Renia Spiegel was fifteen years old when, on January 31, 1939, seven months before the outbreak of the war, she began her diary in Przemyśl, where she moved with her grandparents and her sister, Ariana, later Elizabeth, after...