By the time Irena Koretz turned 16, her family had been forced from their home in Warsaw, fled to four different locations, endured a year in a slave labour camp and survived four months hiding in a cramped attic. The four of them, including her sister and parents, were the only Jewish family to survive the war intact out of thousands in Boryslaw, Poland (now part of Ukraine), she would later say. She documented unimaginable days of terror and deprivation in a diary with a pencil and neat handwriting. Her poetic entry on Aug. 8, 1944, when Soviet troops finally...