“I was coincidentally born at Mila 18,” he says. “Most of you might know that that’s where the bunker was. Ziv Lubetkin and the headquarters were located there, and that house was located inside the ghetto. That street was a street that contained 99% Jews before the war, only the servants and the housekeepers were…
There is a photograph sitting on my desk as I write this. It is from 1948, the year Israel declared itself into existence and was immediately fighting five armies for the right to keep existing.
Beshert · בַּאשֶׁערט
September 1947. Two sections of one magazine. A boy behind wire. An actor among the Voices of the Dead. They would never meet.
Stefcia (Kajtek), age nine, during the Warsaw Uprising, 1944.
Before she was Kajtek, she was Stefcia. Before she was Stefcia, she was Edna.
They are all smiling—leaving behind a continent of murdered families, and all that cannot be said.
Edna, Sam, and Harry on the deck of the TSS Olympia, Haifa Harbor — September 1, 1960 (Brill family archive).
The photograph is not a good one.
Blurred. Crowded. Taken on a sun-struck deck in Haifa, strangers…
Shakespeare in a Nazi prison camp and the ten-year-old little girl who kept the album
The final scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, staged by French POWs at Stalag X-B in northern Germany, 1944. From the album Souvenir de ma Captivité compiled by Sylvain Masson.
In the winter of 1944, two Jews were hiding in plain…
How Does a Holocaust Survivor Dance? There is a Hebrew word for this. Nitzachon. Laughing. Dancing. Fully alive. Victory. Not the victory of armies, but the victory of life over those who tried to destroy it.
This dance is that victory.
"Inspirational Women" podcast interview with Host Kate Daniels on Movin 92.5 FM in Seattle, WA.
LIVE Interview w/Janet
March 8, 2026
LISTEN HERE
3/8/26 – Dr. Janet Bond Brill
Inspirational Women is a weekly podcast that features women who are leaders in their field, entrepreneurs, authors or women carving new paths in education, the environment, charities,…
Thank you Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley for celebrating Allentown’s Edna Brill for Women’s History Month.
In ‘Who will tell my story?’ Edna once asked. Daughter-in-law Janet Bond Brill answers with a book on glamours grandma who foiled the Nazis as a kid.
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…
