A Holocaust Survivor Who Wore War, Faith, and Family on a Single Chain
The necklace Edna wore every day. Tangled. Heavy. Entire.
It made a sound before you saw it.
A soft clinking. Gold against silver. Enamel brushing glass.
She wore it every day, a necklace so crowded with charms that they tangled into one another, small chains twisting, pendants catching. From a distance it looked almost unruly.
Not curated. Not symmetrical.
Just everything.
To anyone else it might have looked excessive, the accumulation of decades.
But if you laid the charms out one by one on a table and separated the tangles, you were holding a map.
A two-inch diagram of who she was.
Of where she had been.
Of who she had been.
Of what she had survived.
Of what she had built.
The Cherub
Start with the heart-shaped pendant.
Raphael’s putto painted in miniature on enamel. A Catholic cherub.
This was the self that saved her.
She was eight when she learned to cross herself correctly. Eight when she memorized the prayers. Eight when she understood that survival depended on becoming Stefcia, a devout Polish Catholic girl, so completely that her own mind could not afford to know the difference.
She was a Jewish child from the Warsaw Ghetto, daughter of Avraham and Shulamit, from a family of ten that the Nazis would reduce to splinters.
In churches she prayed with desperate sincerity. She genuflected. She dreamed of Jesus lifting her over burning Warsaw.
The cherub belonged to the self that kept her alive.
Turn it over.
Gott schütze dich.
God protect you.
Three words in German.
The language of the soldiers who sealed the ghetto walls. The language of transports to Treblinka. Of Flossenbürg. Of ovens.
And yet she wore it against her skin.
Protection in the language of both sanctuary and terror.
The Star
Find the Star of David.
Small. Silver. Hanging beside the cherub as though the two had always been neighbors.
Hebrew letters at its center.
She had last seen her brother Yakov when she was eight.
At sixteen, at St Mary’s Convent in England, the Mother Superior told her that a Hebrew had come asking for her. He said he was her brother.
She did not recognize the name.
She did not recognize the man.
On the Aryan side of Warsaw, Yakov had trained them carefully. Never admit you are Jewish. Not to a stranger. Not to a priest. Not even if they hold a gun to your head.
When the Mother Superior asked whether she knew any Jews, she answered in heavily accented English:
“I don’t know any Hebrews.”
She was following instructions.
She had followed them so well that the sentence no longer felt like a lie.
That night, he slipped into her room. Sat beside her bed. Did not argue. Did not demand recognition.
He sang.
The Yiddish lullaby their mother had sung before the ghetto walls closed in.
She did not recognize his face.
But she recognized the song.
The wall she had built to survive did not shatter.
It opened.
She did not recognize his face.
She recognized the song.
The Key
Find the key.
Small. Gold. Unremarkable.
The key was Yakov.
The brother who had taught her how to hide.
The brother who came to her bedside and sang her back.
The Hamsa
Find the Hamsa, the Hand of God in delicate gold filigree, palm open in protection.
Israel.
The place she rebuilt herself after the war. The place where she learned to be Jewish again among people who had never stopped.
The Hamsa belonged to the years when survival turned into living.
The Cornicello
A small coral horn.
Italy.
Porto San Giorgio. A girl still wearing her Catholic mask so convincingly that she was granted an audience with Pope Pius XII and honored as a Catholic war hero.
Identities layered so thoroughly that even recognition could not untangle them.
The Evil Eye
A blue glass bead.
Protection against malice.
She had watched starvation hollow faces.
Watched soldiers hunt daily victims.
Watched the uprising burn.
Protection was not superstition. It was memory.
The Globe
A small gold sphere etched with meridian lines.
She had crossed the world before she was twenty-six.
Warsaw.
The ghetto.
The Aryan side.
Sewers.
German camps.
Italy.
England.
Israel.
America.
She did not travel as a tourist.
She traveled as a fugitive. A refugee. A survivor.
And then she kept going because survival meant living.
Not one life.
All of it, all at once.
The Girls
Two small gold figures of little girls.
Rachel, her firstborn grandchild.
Mia, named for Miriam, the sister who shielded her on Warsaw’s streets and survived the war only to lose the longer battle afterward.
On the necklace, Miriam lived twice.
Not silence.
Not forgetting.
Children.
The Ordinary Charms
Pearls. Enamel hearts. A gold nameplate.
The ordinary accumulations of a woman’s life.
Which is exactly what the Nazis tried to deny her.
A life.
A family.
Grandchildren to lean toward.
Coffee cups to set down.
The Weight
She never explained the necklace.
Never sorted the charms into categories. Never offered a guided tour of trauma.
She simply wore it.
The Catholic cherub.
The Jewish star.
The German prayer.
The Israeli Hamsa.
The Italian horn.
The evil eye.
The globe.
The key.
The girls.
Every morning she clasped the chain around her neck and walked into her American life carrying the whole tangled history of herself, charms catching against one another the way her lives had.
It was heavy.
It was beautiful.
It meant everything and explained nothing.
Because survival is not clean. Not resolved. Not one thing or the other.
It is all of it. All at once.
Worn close to the skin.
Where it catches the light.
Because she was the light.
Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author ofLittle Edna’s War, based on her mother-in-law’s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, her mother-in-law’s Holocaust memoir, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Order Now
