Elizabeth Bellak

Elizabeth Bellak, née Ari­ana Spiegel, was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Staw­ki, Poland, a daughter of Bernard Spiegel and his wife Róża Maria Leszczyńska. She had an older sister, Renia Spiegel. Under her birth name, as a child Elizabeth became a popular stage and film actress called as "the Shirley Temple of Poland." She went to live in Warsaw with her mother to advance her film career. When World War II broke out, she and Renia were staying with their grandparents in the town of Przemyśl and could not be reunited with their parents. In 1942, the Jews of the town were forced by the Nazis into a ghetto. Renia was murdered by the Nazis trying to escape, but Elizabeth survived and made her way back to Warsaw. There she took the real-life role of a Catholic girl in a convent school under a false name. After the war, she and her mother emigrated to the USA, settling in New York City, and she started a new career as a schoolteacher. She was ultimately reunited with her sister’s wartime diary, in which Renia had documented their experiences and shared intimate personal reflections. Elizabeth wrote the foreword and afterword for the English translation published in 2019 in the USA as Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal. The two sisters were also the subject of a Polish documentary film called Broken Dreams, directed by Tomasz Magierski.