History Archives - Little Edna's War

No One Is Coming: What Warsaw 1944 Teaches Israel About Allies

Articles, Blog, History, NewsJuly 29, 202682Views 0Likes 0Comments

Twice in two years, the world watched Warsaw burn and did not come. A nine-year-old Jewish girl survived both fires. What her generation learned became the State of Israel. We should not need to learn. Edna (”Kajtek”), age nine. Born at 18 Miła Street in Warsaw, she survived the Warsaw Ghetto, became one of the…

She Saved Her Sister From the Nazis. She Never Escaped the War.

Articles, Blog, History, NewsJune 8, 2026143Views 0Likes 0Comments

Three documents tell the story of Miriam Dranger, a Jewish girl who sang for the Gestapo, saved her younger sister, and lived with a war that internally did not end in 1945. Miriam Szurek walked into the most feared address in occupied Warsaw and came out alive. Miriam Dranger and her sister Edna after…

‘Coincidentally’ Born at Mila 18: An Address History Would Claim

Articles, Blog, History, NewsJune 1, 2026109Views 0Likes 0Comments

“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…

What We Are Forgetting About Israel and America

Articles, Blog, History, NewsMay 20, 2026152Views 0Likes 0Comments

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

Articles, Blog, History, NewsApril 28, 2026228Views 0Likes 0Comments

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.

Kajtek – A Child in Disguise, a Jewish Martyr, and the Name She Carried Into War

Articles, Blog, History, NewsApril 13, 2026185Views 0Likes 0Comments

Stefcia (Kajtek), age nine, during the Warsaw Uprising, 1944. Before she was Kajtek, she was Stefcia. Before she was Stefcia, she was Edna.

A Tale of Two Ships

Articles, Blog, History, NewsApril 10, 2026115Views 0Likes 0Comments

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…

To Be or Not to Be at Stalag X-B

Articles, Blog, History, NewsMarch 18, 2026216Views 0Likes 0Comments

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?

Articles, History, News, UncategorizedMarch 11, 2026193Views 0Likes 0Comments

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.

HaKol Magazine – Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley

Blog, History, NewsMarch 8, 2026238Views 0Likes 0Comments

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.