The Arithmetic of Survival
Ten Szureks entered the war. Four survived. The math did not end there.
Look at this photograph.
Three faces.
A young woman.
A girl.
A young man.
They are Miriam, Edna, and Yakov Szurek.
Out of ten.
Before the war, the Szureks lived at 18 Mila Street in Warsaw. In later years, the address would become the command bunker of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — and later still, a mass grave.
In the 1930s, it was simply home.
Their father, Avraham, owned a leather factory. Their mother, Shulamit, coordinated weddings for Warsaw’s Jewish families, storing tables, china, and linens in the basement beneath their first-floor apartment.
The children played in the courtyard.
They attended Polish-language schools.
They kicked soccer balls with neighborhood friends.
There were eight children.
With their parents, ten.
On September 1, 1939, the bombs fell on Warsaw.
The arithmetic began.
Ten lives. One address. A family not yet aware it was being counted.
The ghetto walls closed around their neighborhood. Nearly half a million people were forced into an area smaller than Central Park.
Avraham lost his factory. The extra rations ended. With nothing left, he went to the Judenrat, the Jewish council that executed Nazi orders.
They promised him work in Lublin.
They promised money would be sent home.
Avraham and Shlomo, the eldest son, volunteered.
Both were strong.
Both believed strength might be enough.
No money ever came.
They were sent to build Majdanek, then transferred from camp to camp.
Avraham arrived at Stutthof on November 28, 1944 — prisoner #33542. From there he was sent to Flossenbürg, where he was murdered.
He was forty-two years old.
Shlomo was there too.
Assigned to the crematorium.
He placed his father into the oven.
Back in Warsaw, the family starved.
Shulamit made a final decision. She paid a gentile woman who worked at Avraham’s factory — someone she trusted — her last zloty to smuggle the girls to the Aryan side.
The woman walked them directly to a Gestapo car.
Miriam and Edna kicked her and ran.
Miriam was thirteen.
Edna was seven.
They were alone in occupied Warsaw. No adults. No safe house.
Their brother Yakov was somewhere outside the ghetto, but he could not be seen with them. If the Germans searched him and discovered he was circumcised, they would kill them all.
Shulamit stayed behind.
She starved to death.
A mother’s final calculation: which children might live.
In July 1942, the Grossaktion began.
More than 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka in eight weeks.
Among them were Edna’s sister Hannah, her brother Mordechai, her aunt Iska, uncle Ezra, and cousins Micha and Karmi.
The twins, Josef and Binjamin, disappeared.
No record remains of how or where they died.
The arithmetic accelerated.
On the Aryan side, three Jewish children survived by becoming someone else.
Edna became Stefcia.
Miriam became Marysia.
They memorized Catholic prayers. They learned how to cross themselves. They buried their Jewish identities so deeply that recovery would take decades.
They survived by performing — singing and dancing in the streets for coins, persuading passersby to see two Polish orphans instead of two Jewish girls marked for death.
Passing was not safety. It was labor.
At nine years old, Edna joined the Polish Home Army, becoming its youngest soldier.
Nom de guerre: Kajtek.
She ran messages through sniper fire during the Warsaw Uprising. She was wounded by a grenade.
On her tenth birthday, October 2, 1944 — the day the uprising surrendered — she received two military decorations: one for valor, one for wounds.
No one knew she was Jewish.
She was captured as a prisoner of war and sent to Oberlangen, the only all-female POW camp in Nazi Germany.
After liberation, she was awarded a papal medal for exemplary Catholic heroism.
She was still in hiding.
When the war ended, four Szureks were alive.
Three had survived on the Aryan side: Miriam, Yakov, and Edna.
One had survived the camps: Shlomo, liberated from Buchenwald.
Four out of ten.
For a moment, the subtraction appeared complete.
It was not.
Shlomo settled in Israel. He married. He had children.
But the crematorium followed him. He drank to escape what could not be escaped.
In 1977, at fifty-three, he was found dead on a street.
The war killed him thirty-two years after liberation.
Miriam also settled in Israel. She remarried.
Tuberculosis left her unable to bear children. The psychological wounds never healed.
In June 1978, at forty-nine, she jumped from the roof of her apartment building in Tel Aviv.
Four became two.
Yakov survived the war by crossing to the Aryan side as a boy. He carried information back into the ghetto — what was happening beyond the walls, what the Germans were doing — intelligence few wanted to believe.
One neighbor, a doctor, listened carefully. Then he said, “Yakov, you are the smart one. You understand. And you will survive.”
After the war, Yakov did more than survive.
He helped found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot — the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz — with survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Years later, Yakov traveled to England to retrieve Edna from the Catholic convent where she had been studying.
She did not recognize him.
She refused to speak to him.
She said, “I don’t know any Hebrews.”
Then Yakov sang a lullaby — the one their mother used to sing.
The walls collapsed.
The Jewish child returned.
Yakov died in 2011, at eighty-four.
Edna arrived in Israel in 1951, at sixteen.
She married Zvi Brill in 1953. On the ketubah, she kept the name she had lived under during the war:
Stefania Skólkowska.
A Jewish wedding.
Under a chuppah.
Signed with a Catholic name.
She later moved to Petach Tikvah, had a son named Samuel, and in 1960 sailed from Haifa to New York.
In 1995, she gave more than five hours of testimony to the Shoah Foundation.
“All my life has been all miracles.”
She died on June 8, 2019, at eighty-four.
This is the final photograph.
Edna and Yakov.
At my wedding.
The last two of ten.
Not healed.
Not whole.
Alive.
Between the first photograph and this one, the arithmetic did its work.
Ten became four.
Four became two.
The Holocaust subtracted in camps and kitchens, in starvation and alcohol, on a street in Israel and from a rooftop in Tel Aviv.
But it did not reach zero.
Edna carried the memory of eight others.
She carried them all.
And she lived.
That is the arithmetic of survival.
Not a story of numbers,
but of what remains after the numbers have done their worst.
Two out of ten.
Standing at a wedding.
Smiling.
The final answer was meant to be zero.
It wasn’t.
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.
