For nearly two decades, Edna Stefania Brill was simply my mother-in-law. The warm, generous woman who raised the man I married. The best grandma in the world to my children.
After surviving the Warsaw ghetto, fighting as a decorated soldier in the Polish resistance, and enduring years of war, Edna Stefania Brill found herself in Israel in 1951. What she hadn’t expected was to find love.
In one of the most extraordinary ironies of World War II, a 12-year-old Jewish girl who had fought with the Polish resistance received a personal audience with Pope Pius XII in Italy in 1946. The Pope never knew her true identity.