Author Talk: "Little Edna's War"

Smuggler at 7. Resistance fighter at 9. Prisoner of war at 10. A Jewish girl who made history and survived to tell it. On September 1, 1939, German bombs shatter a birthday party in Warsaw. Edna Szurek is four years old. It is the last moment of her childhood. In Little Edna’s War, Janet Bond Brill follows Edna from the starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto through escape to the Aryan side under a false Catholic identity. Interrogated at the Gestapo’s Aleja Szucha, she learns the rule: never admit you are Jewish. Her journey continues through armed resistance with the Polish Home Army, the Warsaw Uprising, the Wola Massacre, and captivity at Oberlangen, the only Nazi camp for female prisoners of war. Liberated before her eleventh birthday, blessed by a Pope who never knew she was Jewish, and hidden inside a stolen identity in an English convent for four years after the war ended, Edna’s story is the Holocaust as one child lived every stage of it, and the long, fierce road back to herself.