There is a card in my files. A copy of it, anyway. The original is held at the Ghetto Fighters’ House archive in Israel, and I have looked at it hundreds of times over the years I spent writing Little Edna’s War. It is small. Brown. The paper has the grain and weight of something that was never meant to last eighty years. Across the top, in bold block letters:

ARMIA KRAJOWA Okręg Warszawski Home Army. Warsaw District.

Below that, a number: 113716. Below that, a Polish phrase I have mouthed to myself many times without quite getting used to the fact that it applies to a nine-year-old girl.

Zaświadczam, że — I certify that.

I will give it to you in the order it appears, because the order is part of what it means.

First, the blank for military rank and nom de guerre. Someone has filled in, by typewriter: ob. Kajtek — Stefanja.

Ob. is the abbreviation for obywatelka, meaning citizen. The Home Army did not call its fighters by military rank first. It called them citizens. Every soldier in the AK, from a general commanding a sector down to a child running messages through the rubble, was first a citizen of the Polish Republic that Germany had refused to recognize. Putting obywatelka on the card was a small, quiet act of defiance built into the paperwork itself. The underground state was not a military. It was a country in hiding, and this card was a passport.

Kajtek was her nom de guerre.

The Name She Chose Herself

When the Home Army asked Edna what she wanted to be called, she did not hesitate. She chose Kajtek.

The name was not a military-sounding pseudonym. It was not a tactical alias. It was the name of the boy from her favorite book.

Kajtek the Wizard, or Kajtuś Czarodziej in Polish, was written in 1933 by a Jewish pediatrician named Janusz Korczak. It is the story of a mischievous Warsaw schoolboy who discovers he can do magic and uses his powers to fight evil. Kajtek leads a double life. On the outside he is an ordinary child. Underneath, he is a wizard, and he is in a war.

Edna’s family had read it to her when she was very small. She was too young to read it herself. But she remembered the boy. The Warsaw child with the secret self, the double life hidden beneath ordinary clothes, the magic aimed at the evil in the world. When the resistance asked her for a name, that is the name she reached for.

She was nine years old. Jewish. Living as a Polish Catholic orphan........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)