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.

In August 1944, if you stood on the east bank of the Vistula River and looked west, you could watch Warsaw die. Smoke darkened the sky by day. Fires lit it by night.

Soldiers of the Red Army stood on that bank for weeks.

On the opposite bank, inside the burning city, was a nine-year-old Jewish girl with a pistol and a nom de guerre.

Her name was Edna. She was my mother-in-law.

Born at 18 Miła Street, later the site of the ŻOB command bunker during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, she survived the ghetto, escaped to the Aryan side under a false Catholic identity, and became one of the youngest soldiers in the Polish Home Army. Her nom de guerre was Kajtek. She carried messages through sewers and sniper alleys, was wounded by a grenade, and received Poland’s Cross of Valor when the Warsaw Uprising surrendered.

The Home Army surrendered on October 2, 1944.

It was her tenth birthday.

Nine years old when she picked up the pistol. Ten on the day the city laid down its arms. An age for schoolbooks and skipped rope, not sewers, false identities, and burning cities.

She had already learned what happened when the world watched and did not come.

In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose against the Germans with pistols, homemade grenades, and almost nothing else. They did not expect to win.

They expected to choose how they died.

For nearly a month, a few hundred fighters held off the SS while the ghetto burned around them.

Hidden on the Aryan side under a false Catholic identity, Edna watched the glow from an apartment window. Inside those flames lay her birthplace.

So did almost everyone she had ever known.

So did the Allied governments.

Appeals reached the outside........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)