How Two Jewish Sisters Survived by Singing and Dancing for Their Lives
Every person in occupied Warsaw knew the address.
Aleja Szucha 25.
The Gestapo Detention Center.
The very words inspired terror throughout the city.
Once home to Poland’s Ministry of Religious Beliefs and Public Enlightenment, the monumental building had been transformed into the headquarters of the German Security Police. Prison cells and interrogation rooms were constructed in its basement. Up to one hundred prisoners were interrogated there each day.
Few ever reemerged.
Aleja Szucha 25 was not a prison. It was a warning.
Behind those elegant walls, systematic torture was routine. Prisoners were beaten, burned, and shocked with electricity. They were suffocated with broken gas masks, hung by their hands twisted behind their backs, or suspended upside down. Water was poured into their noses. Teeth were knocked out. Fingernails torn away.
A radio played loudly to obscure the screams.
Many prisoners were tortured to death.
Others were driven to suicide.
Those who survived scratched messages into the cell walls with their fingernails—prayers, thoughts of Poland, final words to families they would never see again.
This was Aleja Szucha 25.
Aleja Szucha 25, Warsaw.
Headquarters of the Gestapo Detention Center during the German occupation.
A place people entered—and often never left.
And in 1943, two little Jewish girls walked through its doors voluntarily.
Survival sometimes required walking straight into terror.
By then, Edna and Miriam Szurek had already escaped the Warsaw Ghetto.
They had transformed themselves into Polish Catholic orphans: Stefcia and Marysia. They attended Mass. They knew their prayers. They carried the names of dead Polish Catholic girls. Their brother had forged baptismal papers to match. They performed on street corners, slept in bombed buildings, and survived by being utterly convincing.
But someone suspected Miriam.
Despite her careful transformation, despite the prayers she knew by heart, someone denounced her as Jewish.
Now the fifteen-year-old stood inside the Gestapo Detention Center, facing men trained to identify Jews, extract confessions, and exterminate.
In an interrogation room where countless prisoners had been tortured, a Gestapo officer pulled out his gun and pressed it against her head.
“Sing,” he commanded.
“Prove you’re Polish.”
A Jewish life reduced to a performance—with a gun as the judge.
With cold steel against her temple, Miriam made a choice.
She had always believed her voice was a gift from God.
Perhaps this was the moment He had given it to her for.
She opened her mouth and sang.
A German melody.
Note-perfect.
Achingly beautiful.
She sang with such authenticity, such emotional truth, that the men in the room—men who spent their days torturing and killing—could not reconcile this voice with the prey they had been trained to hunt.
For a few minutes, beauty replaced suspicion.
The Gestapo officers stared, transfixed.
The informant must have been wrong.
This girl could not possibly be Jewish.
When she finished, they did not arrest her.
They did not send her to the basement cells.
Instead, they made her an offer.
Come to Germany.
Sing for the troops.
Entertain the Reich.
Miriam declined.
“I have a little sister,” she said.
“She’s more talented than I am.”
The Nazis made a deal.
Bring your sister back to perform, and we will give you official Kennkarten—German-issued identity papers certifying that you are not Jewish. Papers stamped with the authority of the Third Reich itself.
When Miriam brought her nine-year-old sister back to Aleja Szucha 25, Edna was terrified.
The Jewish child disguised as a Catholic orphan stood shaking in a building where torture was routine and death commonplace. Her small body trembled uncontrollably.
Then—almost without conscious thought—Edna began to tap dance.
Her shaking transformed into rhythm.
Fear became movement.
A nine-year-old Jewish girl danced for her life inside a torture center.
This is what survival sometimes looked like.
While prisoners screamed in the basement below, while blood stained interrogation rooms above, Edna danced.
The Gestapo officers watched, enchanted.
They called her their Wunderkind—their wonder child.
And they gave both sisters what they had promised:
official Kennkarten certifying they were not Jewish.
Two Jewish sisters had walked into the heart of Nazi terror—and emerged with papers that made their false identities unquestionable.
The timing of this miracle matters.
By 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto had already been liquidated. Edna’s mother had starved to death there. Her father and eldest brother had been sent to Lublin, forced to build Majdanek.
In the summer of 1942, the Grossaktion had emptied the ghetto. Over 300,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka in eight weeks.
Among them were Edna’s sister Hannah and brother Mordechai.
Her aunt. Her uncle. Her cousins.
Gone.
But on the Aryan side, three Jewish children survived behind Catholic masks: Edna, Miriam, and their brother Yakov.
And the papers earned inside a torture center protected them again and again.
I struggle with this story.
How do I write about Jewish children who sang and danced in a building where people were being destroyed?
But this is exactly why Edna’s story must be told.
Because survival during the Holocaust was not simple or pure.
It was singing with a gun to your head.
It was dancing in terror.
It was becoming someone else so completely that even your killers believed the lie.
Survival was not clean. It was courageous.
Edna would later join the Polish Home Army at age nine under the nom de guerre “Kajtek.” She would run messages through sniper fire during the Warsaw Uprising, be wounded by a grenade, and become the youngest decorated soldier in Polish military history.
So convincing was her Catholic identity that after the war, Pope Pius XII would honor her—never knowing she was Jewish.
Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Uprising, grandmother, and the woman who became family.
Little Edna’s War tells the full story of Edna Stefania Brill’s survival, resistance, and the lifelong cost of becoming someone else in order to live.
We bear witness so their courage is never forgotten.
Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, based on her mother-in-law’s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
