A Polish teenage diarist
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2019
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Renia's diary spent decades locked in a bank vault. Like many teenagers, she had used it to vent about stupid fights with her friends and to record the thrill of her first kiss. And when the war came, she used it to document the relentless killing of Jews in the town where she lived. Ania Jakubek is on the line from Warsaw to tell us the extraordinary story of Renia Spiegel, and why it stayed unknown for so long. We're also talking about promising signs that Europeans are becoming less bigoted. Oh, and there's a dog.
You can read Ania's article about Renia here. For beautiful drawings, you should also follow Ania on Instagram.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We've got a special guest here to introduce the podcast this week. Take it away. |
| 0:24.4 | This is great radio and this is my parents' dog, Ila, making her first appearance. |
| 0:29.6 | Usually she's really noisy and loves barking, but she's chosen this as her one time to be quiet. |
| 0:35.2 | Maybe she's got stage fright. |
| 0:36.4 | She looked the microphone earlier she was |
| 0:38.0 | feeling quite chipper but oh come on ida say something no okay anyway this is very exciting |
| 0:44.1 | we're in dominic's childhood home in london and there's pictures of him with bad hair everywhere |
| 0:49.7 | i knew i shouldn't invite you here into my safe space. Just looking around his house, everything makes so much sense. |
| 0:55.4 | Like, I'm looking at a trumpet right now. |
| 0:57.7 | There's just instruments and pictures of you with bad hair everywhere. |
| 1:00.6 | It's great. |
| 1:01.7 | Anyway, this is very exciting. |
| 1:03.5 | We're here in London together. |
| 1:05.1 | And what are we talking about this week, Dominic? |
| 1:07.4 | Well, this week Katie did an interview without me because I was busy |
| 1:11.5 | singing away, which I'm sad about because it was with one of our favourite returning guests, |
| 1:17.1 | our unofficial Polish correspondent, Anya Jakubek. But also, yeah, I'm sad to miss it because of the |
| 1:22.5 | subject matter. Anja will be joining Katie later in the show to talk about Rania Spiegel, a Jewish-Polish diarist who was killed during the Second World War at the age of 18. |
| 1:33.6 | Her diaries have finally been published into English for the first time, and Ania will be here later on to talk about them. |
| 1:40.1 | But first. |
| 1:45.0 | Bad week. |
| 1:49.0 | Who's had a good week, Dominic? |
... |
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