Book & Author: Little Edna’s War: A True Story of Resistance and Hope An Evening with Dr. Janet Bond

Learn about a young girl’s extraordinary journey surviving the Holocaust, told through the eyes of Dr. Janet Bond Brill, her daughter-in-law and one of the people who knew her best.

In her new book Little Edna’s War: A True Story of Resistance and Hope, Dr. Brill shares how Edna Szurek was just a young girl when the Nazis invaded Poland and her childhood was turned upside down. Edna and her family lived at Mila 18 in the Warsaw Ghetto, which later became the headquarters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

By seven, she was slipping through cracks in the ghetto wall to smuggle food. By 10, she carried a pistol and coded messages for the Polish Home Army — its youngest decorated soldier — operating under the name Stefania Skółkowska, a Catholic identity borrowed from a Warsaw cemetery headstone. Pope Pius XII personally pinned a medal to her chest, unaware he was honoring a Jewish child who had outmaneuvered the Reich. She survived the ghetto, a prisoner-of-war camp, and a convent.

Little Edna’s War is Dr. Janet Bond Brill’s reconstruction of the woman who became her mother-in-law and, over thirty-seven years, her closest friend. Using more than five hours of testimony recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation and a lifetime of shared memory, Brill gives full account to a child who defied every plan designed to erase her.

Join Dr. Brill for a conversation about testimony, narrative, and what one extraordinary life reveals about childhood, identity, resistance, and survival during the Holocaust. Reservations required.