Edna Szurek sang and danced her way through Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Decades later, a Charlie Chaplin melody gave words to everything she had survived.

Edna Szurek sang and danced her way through Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Decades later, a Charlie Chaplin melody gave words to everything she had survived.

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin made a film without dialogue about a world that had stopped making sense. Modern Times was his last silent picture, a comedy about hunger and machines and two people with nothing, trying to stay human in a century that had no use for them. The Tramp and the gamine, a homeless girl as stubborn and quick as he is, build a few small things and lose every one of them. In the last scene the road runs empty ahead and there is no particular reason left to hope. He stops her. He points to the corners of his own mouth. *Smile*, the gesture says. And they walk on toward whatever comes next.

Chaplin wrote the music for that film himself. The theme he composed was aching and almost operatic, lifted from a strain of Puccini, and it had no words. It was only a melody then, a feeling without a sentence to carry it. He set it down and the world moved on.

That year, Edna was two.

She was born into a family that lived on music. Her mother, Shulamit, had been trained as an opera singer, and made her living staging lavish weddings for Warsaw’s well-to-do Jewish families. Her father, Avraham, owned a leather factory and played the violin. The flat on Mila Street was full of children, eight of them, and their mother saw to it that every older child could sing and dance. It was the kind of polish a proud family gives its children for recitals and holidays, for the sheer pleasure of it. No one in that warm and musical house could have dreamed it was training for survival. That was the world that existed before the other one, the one Chaplin had turned into comedy, arrived at her door without the comedy.

She was not quite five when the bombing started. She and her eleven-year-old sister Miriam were at a friend’s birthday party when the first German bombs fell on the city, and the friend’s house came down behind them as they ran. After that the family was sealed into the ghetto with over four hundred thousand others, and Edna, small enough to slip through the gaps in the wall, became a smuggler of food, ducking past a guard the children called Frankenstein and coming back with whatever she could carry. Her father........

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