In the Warsaw Ghetto of WWII, one young Jewish girl poses as a Polish Catholic to help her people survive Hitler’s invasion.
The story of Edna Stefania Brill, child hero of the Polish Resistance in WWII, receives a long overdue spotlight in Little Edna’s War by Janet Bond Brill, Edna’s daughter-in-law.
Based on Edna’s own recollections and Brill’s historical archives research, Little Edna’s War is the transfixing story of a young girl and her beloved sister finding a way to survive the Nazi invasion of Poland and the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto.
Edna is born to loving parents alongside her seven siblings at 18 Mila Street in the Northern Quarter—a location destined to become famous later in the story as the headquarters of the Jewish resistance. Her upbringing is one of cultured ease among the intelligentsia and Jewish bourgeoisie who live there, but ominous clouds on the horizon by 1939 signal a dark shift in their lives.
On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and shattered Edna’s five-year-old innocence. At a friend’s birthday party, “a deafening blast rocked the house and the front wall collapsed, tumbling into the street.” Edna and her sister Miriam barely escape the rubble and return home, shaken. But the nightmare is only beginning, Edna will soon realize. Viewing the wreckage of Warsaw after Hitler’s blitzkrieg attack, she learns a hard truth:
“Childhood was a luxury we could no longer afford. To survive, we would need to inhabit the same merciless world as adults.”
The Nazi occupation begins its reign of terror by splitting the city in two between the “Aryan” side and the “Jewish Quarter” in October 1940 when Hitler’s lackeys create the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, the largest in all German-occupied Europe. This 3.4 square kilometer area is where all the Jews of Warsaw were crammed into, surrounded by a three-to-four-meter-high brick wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass.
“This barrier, this prison wall, stood as physical manifestation of the division between two worlds: those who would live and those who would suffer.”
Closed off from the world, food became scarce and Edna’s family—as well as thousands of other Jewish families—began to starve. Edna’s fearless and enterprising brother, Yakov, finds a way to cross into “Aryan Warsaw” each day to smuggle food back to the family. Out of necessity, Edna and Miriam join him on this risky endeavor, posing as Polish Catholic orphans for coins and food. The scenes of starvation within the Ghetto are stark and horrific, revealing how hunger was a “gnawing, relentless presence that colored every moment of existence.”
Soon, the men in Edna’s family (except for Yakov) are sent away to a work camp as employment, but it turns out to be a lie. Edna will never see her father and brothers again. The biography recounts Edna’s slow dawning to the evil around her, and she begins to identify with her Catholic nom de plume to stay alive in Aryan Warsaw, finding Polish families to take her and Miriam in throughout the war.
Brill tells Edna’s story in eloquent prose and a strong, engaging voice as she transforms from Edna Szurek to Stefçia Skółkowska, a Polish girl’s name taken from a Warsaw cemetery. Her sister Miriam becomes Marysia-Marja, and they stay together on the streets outside of the Ghetto. Edna and Miriam soon connect with the Polish underground resistance and pour their hatred of the Germans into assisting the fighters; Edna becomes a nine-year-old courier who dashes through the war-wrecked streets to deliver messages.
Edna’s indomitable and courageous spirit animates everything she undertakes—a strength that is almost beyond belief. The sights, sounds, and smells Edna witnessed up close and firsthand—as a child—will chill the hearts of readers. Brill also makes excellent use of created dialogue and other scenes to dramatize Edna’s experiences and thoughts. Lastly, the closing section explores what happened to Edna, Miriam, and Yakov after the war.
“I am deeply Jewish now, and have embraced my identity with fierce pride, yet these relics of another faith live alongside my true self. They are proof of what a human being will do to survive, and what grace can come from unexpected places.”
Little Edna’s War is a powerful posthumous biography that is alive with heroism, hope, and incredible spunk. Here is a girl who outwitted and outlasted the worst evil of her age. What would you do if they came for you?
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