Eighty-two years ago last week, a Jewish girl hiding in plain sight became a soldier of the Polish Home Army. The record never said her name.

There is a page pasted into the front of a book my family keeps. It is typed in Hebrew, laid out like a poem, stamped with a purple seal, signed by hand on February 7, 1963, and formally dated Jerusalem, the 18th of Shvat, 5723, which is February 12. It reads:

To Mrs. Miriam Dranger,

whose chapter of life was a building-stone in this book,

here it is, given to you as a gift of honor:

for your childhood that was not shamed,

and for your heroic stand

In the name of the Directorate of Yad Vashem

The book is the Hebrew first edition of Joseph Ziemian’s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square, the foundational account of the Jewish children who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived by hiding in the open, in the busiest, most German quarter of the city, selling cigarettes and newspapers to the soldiers who were hunting them. Miriam was one of those children, though her wares were different.

She sold the only thing she had carried out of the ghetto: a song.

She sold the only thing she had carried out of the ghetto: a song.

She was also my husband’s aunt. She was Edna’s older sister. She is the reason any of us exist.

She was also my husband’s aunt. She was Edna’s older sister. She is the reason any of us exist.

I have written about the family on Mila Street who sang after dinner, and about the two sisters who kept themselves alive on the Aryan side by singing on street corners for coins. It was Miriam, fourteen years old, who laid down the rule before they sang a note: Nothing in Yiddish. No Jewish folk songs, no matter how well we know them. Miriam who checked every Polish vowel, because a single flattened syllable could kill them both. Miriam who decided where they slept, whom they trusted, when they ran. Edna was a little girl with a beautiful voice. Miriam was the one who kept her breathing.

Think about what that survival asked of a child. The safest place in Warsaw to hide was in the open, where no Jew would dare stand: among the Germans themselves. So the children stood there. The boys sold cigarettes to the men who were hunting them, made change for them, smiled at them. Miriam and her little sister performed. They sang and danced on the street corners of occupied Warsaw, in flawless Polish, for crowds........

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