Nitzachon. When survival becomes victory.

Edna Stefania Brill, dancing with her first born son, Samuel. Circa 1973, Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Look at her.

She is laughing.

Her head is thrown back, blonde hair catching the light. Her mouth is open wide with the kind of laughter that comes from somewhere deep. From the belly. From the soul.

Her blue dress, scattered with tiny silver flowers, spins as she dances. One arm grasps her son’s arm. She looks at him the way mothers look at the children they love most in the world. With uncomplicated, overflowing joy.

The photograph is from the 1970s.

She is in her forties.

She is radiant.

Her name is Edna.

If you knew what she had survived, what those eyes had witnessed, what those hands had done to stay alive, what that body had endured, you might not believe she could laugh like that.

But she does.

She laughs with her whole self.

“If you knew what she had survived, what those eyes had witnessed, you might not believe she could laugh like that.”

How does a Holocaust survivor dance like this?

What She Carried

 

She was not quite five years old when German bombs fell on Warsaw on September 1, 1939.

She was at a birthday party.

By seven, she was a smuggler.

She slipped through a hole in the ghetto wall to bring back food that would keep her family alive. A sadistic Nazi guard the Jews called Frankenstein hunted children who attempted those crossings. Every trip was a coin toss between survival and execution.

Edna and her sister Miriam, blonde Edna and dark haired Miriam, also performed on the Aryan side of Warsaw. They sang and danced for crowds who dropped coins into a hat.

Two little girls.

Borrowed smiles.

Passing as something they were not.

When starvation in the ghetto became inevitable, the girls shed their identities like skins.

The Jewish children vanished.

In their place appeared Catholic orphans with memorized prayers, invented pasts, and carefully practiced gestures.

Edna became Stefcia.

Convincingly enough that she joined the Polish Home Army at nine years old, fighting Nazis with a pistol in the rubble of Warsaw and becoming the youngest decorated soldier in the resistance.

She carried messages through sewers and sniper fire as a courier.

She was wounded by shrapnel.

She survived the Wola Massacre.

After the Home Army’s surrender she was sent to Oberlangen, the only all female POW camp in Nazi Germany.

She was ten years old.

The disguise held.

So completely that she was brought to Rome for an audience with Pope Pius XII, who honored her with a special medal as an exemplary Catholic war hero.

A Jewish girl stood before the Pope and received his blessing.

He never knew.

 

Of the ten members of her immediate family, only four survived the war. Later, war trauma killed two more.

Two out of ten.
The arithmetic of genocide.

The Story We Never Tell

The gates open.
The soldiers arrive.
The war ends.

The book closes.

Survival becomes the conclusion, as though walking out alive were the whole task.

But liberation was not an ending.

For most survivors it was the beginning of an entirely different struggle.

The struggle to reconstruct a self.

Who are you when the identity that kept you alive was not your own?

When you have spent years as Stefcia, crossing yourself and reciting Catholic prayers with such precision that the performance becomes a second skin?

How do you find your way back to Edna?

And if Edna’s world is gone, the family, the neighborhood, the language, the community, what does coming back even mean?

She continued living as Stefcia.

She even received a scholarship to a Catholic convent school in England.

To the world she was Catholic.

Jewish Edna, the daughter of Mila 18, had almost ceased to exist.

Until one day her long lost brother appeared.

He brought nothing with him but a Yiddish lullaby from their childhood.

The melody broke through what liberation itself had not.

She wept.

She remembered.

She began the slow, terrifying work of becoming herself again.

Yet becoming herself as little Edna was no longer possible. The child who had once lived at Mila 18 had been forced to disappear in order to survive. In her place had grown Stefcia, the Catholic girl whose prayers, gestures, and instincts had kept her alive.

That survival identity could not simply be erased.

From that moment forward she carried both lives within her. The Jewish child she had been, and the girl she had become in order to endure.

Reclaiming herself did not mean abandoning Stefcia.

It meant learning how to live with both.

The Harder Courage

There is a kind of courage we recognize immediately.

The courage of the smuggler.

The courage of the resistance fighter.

The courage of the child who survives war.

History celebrates those moments.

But there is another kind of courage that receives far less attention.

It happens years later.

In ordinary rooms.

On ordinary days.

It is the courage to love again when everything you loved was destroyed.

The courage to trust when betrayal could once have cost you your life.

The courage to step onto a dance floor and allow yourself to feel joy.

Edna built a life in America.

She married Harry Brill, a survivor who had been aboard the refugee ship Exodus 1947.

She raised children.

She created a home.

She became known not merely as a survivor but as a woman of warmth, wit, and grace.

One night in the 1970s, wearing a blue dress scattered with silver flowers, she laughed on a dance floor with her son.

Do not underestimate what that took.

“The bravery it takes to be happy after everything you have witnessed belongs to a different order of courage entirely.”

Psychologists call it survivor’s guilt.

The persistent feeling that one’s survival came at someone else’s expense. That joy somehow betrays the dead.

Many survivors never escaped it.

Her brother Shlomo drank himself to death.

Her sister Miriam took her own life decades after the war.

The Holocaust did not end in 1945 for them.

It continued killing across the years and across the continents.

Not by burying the grief.

But by insisting that joy had a right to exist alongside sorrow.

That the music was real.

That her son was real.

That this moment mattered.

Her laughter on that dance floor was not forgetfulness.

It was defiance.

It was proof that the war had not succeeded in taking everything.

Nitzachon

There is a Hebrew word.

נצחון. Nitzachon.

Victory.

Not the victory of armies or conquest.

The victory of the human spirit over the forces that tried to extinguish it.

The Nazis did not only want to kill Jewish bodies.

They wanted to erase Jewish futures.

Jewish joy.

Jewish memory.

Edna’s life was a direct refutation of that project.

Every birthday she celebrated.

Every dance she danced.

Every child and grandchild who carried the family forward.

All of it was nitzachon.

The Courage to Be Happy

History remembers women such as Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, and Irena Sendler.

Their courage was public and world changing.

Edna’s courage included those same qualities.

But it also contained something rarer.

She survived.

She reclaimed her identity.

Then she did something that may be the hardest act of all.

She lived magnificently.

The bravery of the ghetto was extraordinary but understandable. When death is the alternative, the human organism finds reserves it did not know it possessed.

But the bravery it takes to be happy, to trust again, to open yourself to love again, to stand on a dance floor and laugh after everything you have seen, belongs to a different order of courage entirely.

It is chosen.

And sustained.

Every day for the rest of a life.

What Her Story Demands of Us

When Holocaust stories end with suffering alone, survivors risk being frozen inside their victimhood.

But survivors were always larger than the atrocities committed against them.

Edna’s story expands our definition of courage.

It includes the gun, the sewer, and the ghetto wall.

It also includes the dance floor.

“Edna’s story expands our definition of courage. Not just the ghetto wall, but the dance floor.”

Because courage did not end when the war ended.

It continued in quieter ways. In kitchens and living rooms. In marriages and children and ordinary days.

It continued in the stubborn insistence that joy still belonged in the world.

And sometimes it looked like this.

A woman in a blue dress.

Silver flowers spinning in the light.

Her head thrown back.

Laughing with her son.

Decades after everything that tried to kill her.

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. Order Now