Renia's Diary
Page 34
* Given that the day for the previous entry was incorrect, the next day would have been Wednesday.
* July 28, 1941, was a Monday.
* August 11, 1941, was a Monday.
* August 12, 1941, was a Tuesday.
* Renia possibly means Werner May, the author of Deutscher National-Katechismus.
* September 10, 1941, was a Wednesday.
* Poems inspired by the waltz “The Blue Danube”, composed by Johann Strauss in 1867.
* The year 5702 of the Jewish calendar started that day.
* Renia’s grandmother.
* A village near Zaleszczyki, now part of Ukraine.
* November has thirty days. On Monday, it was December 1, 1941.
* December 8, 1941, was a Monday.
* A paraphrase from Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz.
* December 23, 1941, was a Tuesday.
* Probably: a day and a half.
* January 24, 1942, was a Saturday.
† An allusion to the verse of a song by Julian Tuwim (lyrics) and Henryk Wars (music) performed by Hanka Ordonówna in Mieczysław Krawicz’s film The Masked Spy (1933).
* It should be March 16, 1942.
* March 11, 1942, was a Wednesday.
* This entry has been written by Renia’s friend Nora.
* It might be a reference to Antek from Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s The Peasants and the title character from Józef Birkenmajer’s Opowiadania Margośki [Margośka’s tales].
* Leon Trotsky’s words.
* This term appears several times throughout the diary, but its meaning is never clear. It might be Renia and Zygmunt’s inside joke, a metaphor for their love/relationship.
* Quote from a popular waltz entitled “Gwiżdżę na wszystko” (I Don’t Care About Anything), with lyrics by Krzysztof Lipczyński and music by Jan Markowski, performed by Mieczysław Fogg.
* April 26, 1942, was a Sunday.
* Protagonist of Maxim Gorky’s series of novels The Life of Klim Samgin, describing the life of Russian intelligentsia at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its Polish translation (by Karolina Beylin) was published in the years 1929–1930.
* First two lines refer to Rajnold Suchodolski’s “Śpiew” (Singing), written during the November Uprising: “Welcome, May dawn / illuminate our Polish land.”
* May 6, 1942, was a Wednesday.
* May 8, 1942, was a Friday.
† Words written backward.
* This is my fiancée (German).
* It is not clear who Renia is referring to here.
* A prewar town in Poland (near Zaleszczyki), a district during the German occupation.
* Within many ghettos there were Jewish police units, set up by order of the Germans. They guarded the ghetto, collected money and taxes, gathered labor forces, and more. While they were officially part of the Judenrat, they were often eyed suspiciously by them, as well as by the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto.
* Members of the Jewish Ghetto Police (Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst).
* A reference to one of the most important prayers in Judaism, Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O, Israel: the Lord, our God, the Lord is one”).
* Most likely it refers to the attempt of stopping the destruction of the ghetto undertaken by the Wehrmacht lieutenant Dr. Albert Battel (1891–1952). For saving about one hundred Jews from the Przemyśl Ghetto, he was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1981.
† Heeres-Unterkunft-Verwaltung was responsible for managing military quarters.