A new memoir, Little Edna’s War by Janet Bond Brill, PhD, sheds light on the wartime survival and resistance of a Jewish child during the Holocaust, drawing on firsthand testimony recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation.
Set for release on January 27, 2026, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the book recounts the life of Edna Szurek, a Jewish girl who survived Nazi occupation, the Warsaw Ghetto and active involvement in the Polish Resistance. Written in the first person, the memoir is based on more than five hours of recorded testimony and traces a childhood shaped by some of the defining events of World War II.
The book has already been named an Editor’s Pick by BookLife Reviews and received a Highly Recommended rating from Midwest Book Review.
Edna was born at Mila 18, an address later known as the command bunker of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After escaping the ghetto, she was hidden as a Catholic child and went on to become what is believed to be the youngest member of the Polish Home Army, recruited at the age of 9 as a courier.
According to the book, Edna was sent through sewers and sniper-controlled streets carrying messages for the underground that could determine life or death. By the age of 12, she had been decorated for bravery by Pope Pius XII for her assistance to the Polish Resistance — an act carried out without the pope knowing that the “Catholic war hero” before him was, in fact, a Jewish child in hiding.
Edna survived armed underground combat, the Wola Massacre and capture as a prisoner of war. She was imprisoned at Oberlangen, the only all-female POW camp in Nazi Germany, before being liberated in April 1945 by the Polish 1st Armoured Division under British command.
The foreword to the book was written by Dr. Michael Berenbaum, a leading Holocaust scholar and former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who described the memoir as “a haunting and beautifully rendered account that ensures the voices of survivors will never fade into silence.”
Author Janet Bond Brill said the project grew out of her 37-year relationship with her mother-in-law and was driven by a sense of urgency. “Survivors like my mother-in-law are leaving us,” she said. “I wrote this because our children face a world where denial and antisemitism are rising. Edna’s story shows that one little girl’s courage defied Hitler’s Final Solution.”
Little Edna’s War aims to preserve a rare and personal chapter of Holocaust history, highlighting both survival and resistance through the eyes of a child.