Every person in occupied Warsaw knew the address: Aleja Szucha 25.
The Gestapo Detention Center. The very words inspired terror throughout the city. This monumental building, once home to Poland’s Ministry of Religious Beliefs and Public Enlightenment, had been transformed into the headquarters of the German Security Police, with prison cells and interrogation rooms built into its basement. Up to one hundred prisoners were interrogated there each day. Few ever reemerged.
Behind those elegant walls, systematic torture occurred. Prisoners were beaten, burned, subjected to electric shocks. 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. The Gestapo knocked out teeth, pulled out fingernails, crushed genitals, damaged eyeballs. A radio was used to obscure the screams of the tortured.
Many prisoners were tortured to death. Others were driven to suicide. Those who survived scratched messages into cell walls with their fingernails: prayers, thoughts of Poland, final words to families they would never see again.
(Pen drawing by Stanislaw Tomaszewski “Medza”, 1942, MW.
This was Aleja Szucha 25. A place of unspeakable horror. A place people entered and often never left.
And in 1943, two little Jewish girls walked through its doors voluntarily.
By then, Edna and Miriam had already escaped the ghetto. They had transformed themselves into Polish Catholic orphans: Stefcia and Marysia. They attended mass. They knew their prayers. They had papers from a cemetery; names borrowed from dead Polish girls. They performed on street corners, slept in bombed buildings, and survived by being utterly convincing.
But someone suspected Miriam.
Despite the Catholic identity she’d so carefully constructed, despite the prayers she knew by heart, someone denounced her as Jewish. And now the fifteen-year-old girl stood inside the Gestapo Detention Center, facing men trained to identify Jews, to extract confessions, to exterminate.
In an interrogation room where countless prisoners had been tortured, where screams were a daily soundtrack, a Gestapo officer pulled out his gun and pressed it against her head.
“Sing,” he commanded. “Prove you’re Polish.”
In that moment, with cold steel against her temple, with her Jewish identity about to become her death sentence despite all her careful transformations, 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. Performed with such feeling, such authentic soul, that it became impossible for these men, men who spent their days torturing and killing, to believe this voice could belong to someone they’d been trained to hunt. Her voice filled that chamber of horrors, and in those minutes, she made them doubt their informant. Made them doubt their own suspicions.
The Gestapo officers stared, transfixed. Their informant must have been wrong. This girl couldn’t possibly be a Jew.
She had convinced them to ignore the denunciation.
When she finished, they didn’t arrest her. They didn’t take her to the basement cells where prisoners were chained in isolation, waiting for the next round of torture. Instead, they made her an offer: come to Germany. Sing for our troops. Entertain the Reich.
But Miriam, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl disguised as a Catholic orphan who had just sung her way out of a death sentence, was brilliant and quick. “I have a little sister,” she told them. “She’s more talented than I.”
The Nazis made her a deal: bring your sister back to perform together, and we’ll give you both official kennkartes. Proper German-issued identity papers that certified they were not Jewish. Papers that couldn’t be questioned. Papers that would replace their fragile cemetery documents with official Reich certification.
Little Edna, Stefcia as she was now known, was terrified.
When Miriam brought her nine-year-old sister back to the Gestapo Detention Center at Aleja Szucha 25, to that building where people screamed as they were tortured, where the stench of death hung in the air, the Jewish child disguised as a Catholic orphan was shaking. She stood in a building where prisoners were broken, where torture was routine, where death was commonplace.
And her small body trembled uncontrollably.
Then, as if her body knew something her conscious mind did not, Edna started to tap dance.
Her feet moved in rhythm. The shaking transformed into movement and sound. A Jewish child dancing for her life in a torture center, her terror channeled into art, her identity hidden behind talent and infectious charm. While prisoners screamed in the basement below, while blood stained the floors of interrogation rooms above, a nine-year-old girl tap danced.
The Gestapo officers, men who had just finished torturing prisoners, men whose hands were stained with blood, watched, enchanted.
They fell in love with her. This small, brave, talented child. They called her their “wunderkind,” their wonder child. And they gave both sisters the papers that would save their lives: official kennkartes certifying they were not Jewish.
Two little Jewish sisters, already disguised as Polish Catholic orphans, had walked into the heart of Nazi terror, into a building where thousands would be tortured and killed, and emerged with papers that made their transformation official, unquestionable, stamped with the authority of the Third Reich itself.
The timing of this miracle cannot be overlooked.
By 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto had already been liquidated. Edna’s mother had starved to death in the ghetto. Her father and eldest brother had been sent to Lublin, forced to build Majdanek, the death camp where so many would perish.
The summer before, in July 1942, the Grossaktion, the “Great Action,” had emptied the Warsaw Ghetto. Over 300,000 Jews deported to Treblinka in just eight weeks. Among them: Edna’s older sister Hannah and her brother Mordechai. Her aunt and uncle and cousins. Everyone who had survived the starvation, the disease, the daily horrors of ghetto life. Gone to Treblinka.
But on the Aryan side, three Jewish children survived behind Catholic masks. Edna (now Stefcia), Miriam (now Marysia), and their brother Yakov. Three children with Polish papers, Catholic prayers, and Jewish souls buried deep. And those kennkartes, earned through a performance in a torture center, protected them again and again.
I struggle with this story. How do I write about Jewish children who walked into a building where prisoners were being destroyed, and performed? How do I capture what it meant to sing and dance in rooms where torture was routine and death was certain?
But this is exactly why Edna’s story must be told.
Because survival during the Holocaust wasn’t simple. It was Jewish sisters who had so thoroughly become Catholic orphans that they could walk into the Gestapo Detention Center, past cells where prisoners waited in terror, past interrogation rooms where torture was routine, and perform. It was Miriam singing away a denunciation with a gun to her head, making men who tortured people for a living see beauty instead of prey. It was nine-year-old Edna’s feet tap dancing away terror in a building where thousands were tortured and killed, making monsters see a charming Polish child instead of a Jewish girl they were meant to murder.
And so it was, two extraordinarily courageous little girls walked into the Gestapo Detention Center at Aleja Szucha 25, disguised as Catholic orphans, and performed their way into papers that validated the lie that kept them alive.
Edna would go on to join the Polish Home Army at age nine, becoming the youngest soldier in the resistance with the nom de guerre “KAJTEK.” She would run messages through sniper fire during the Warsaw Uprising. She would be wounded by a grenade. She would become the youngest decorated soldier in Polish military history, all while maintaining the Catholic identity that had saved her at Szucha. So convincing was her transformation that after the war, the Pope himself would honor her as an exemplary Catholic war hero, never knowing the truth.
On January 27, 2026, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Little Edna’s War will be published. It tells the full story of Edna Stefania Brill’s survival, resistance, and the lifelong journey of reclaiming an identity she’d buried to stay alive.
We bear witness so their courage is never forgotten.
