A Lifetime of Fighting Nazis
Please note that I am now an Affiliate Marketer on Amazon. This means my book reviews will include a link to the book on Amazon. If you purchase the book using my link, I will earn a small commission. This is at no additional cost to you. More details here. Thank you for supporting my Book Blog in this manner.
*****
Historical fiction has so much to teach. Here are a couple of horrific Holocaust facts now…
In the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto, SS commander, Jurgen Stroop, mandated that a group of Jewish girls become sex slaves for the officers. Instead, in Masada fashion, these ninety-three girls chose suicide to submission.
I read about this in Lisa Barr’s book, The Goddess of Warsaw, and was flabbergasted. Here is the January 8, 1943 story in The New York Times that validates this fact of history.
Another shocking fact from the novel was learning about Operation Paperclip, a post-war secret intelligence operation that brought 1600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and scientists to America to bolster our space race with Russia. Many of these men were accused of war crimes and/or stood trial at Nuremburg.
Entire books have been written about this topic. But somehow, I didn’t know about it until Lisa Barr’s novel.
In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, she tells us about these and other real-life events she wrote into her novel such as the Ringelblum Archives, the destruction of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, and the Nazi presence in Hollywood post-World War II.
Beyond so much history to learn, the fictional tale weaving them all together is very compelling. Let me tell you about that now…
Lena Browning is the star of the novel and the first-person narrator of the book. She is a fictional character who we meet in 2005 in Hollywood at the age of eighty-five after a long career. At the moment, she is in a meeting with Sienna Hayes, who at twenty-seven is the current “It Girl” in town. Sienna is hoping to make her debut as a director by creating a movie of Lena’s life.
Sienna is in for a lot more than she imagined and she figures this out very quickly. It is on page six that Lena hurls a major biographical tidbit at Sienna when she says, “Browning is not my real name. It’s the make of the gun I used to kill the Nazi who pistol-whipped my father to death.”
Ultimately, Lena agrees to work with Sienna with the caveat that Sienna must do the ending Lena’s way. It is her intent that the last segment of the biopic be done in real time with herself acting and Sienna directing. Lena’s goal is to correct her past while she still can.
For the next two hundred pages (the book is 346 pages long) we learn Lena’s story. She was born in Warsaw, Poland to a wealthy Jewish family. Her name at birth was Bina Blonski. As this portion of the novel starts, it is 1943, her immediate family has been murdered by the Nazis, and she is living in the Warsaw Ghetto with her husband, Jakub. Because of her looks – she is a tall, willowy, blond, with blue-eyes – she is able to slip out of the ghetto to the Aryan side where she has been smuggling food and medical supplies for her fellow Jews for almost two years. How does one slip out of the ghetto? Through the sewers.
But as things become increasingly dire in the Ghetto, Bina becomes more radical and joins the resistance. Ultimately, she leaves the Ghetto to work full time on the Aryan side procuring ammunition, guns, and grenades with the help of Zegota, a Polish resistance group sympathetic to the Jewish cause. During this portion of her life, she is Irina Zielinski. She trusts absolutely no one, and she is ready, willing, and able to take care of any situation that comes her way.
When the war ends and Bina/Irina becomes Lena after making her way to Hollywood, we think all those Nazis are far behind her, but that is not the case, another shocker for me. I did not know about the Nazi presence in Hollywood after the war.
Suffice it to say that Lena has an entire adult lifetime of exacting revenge and she is good at it. And she continues fighting Nazis until the very end.
Since this is a first-person narration, we know Lena is going to live through it all, but trust me she goes out in a blaze of glory.
I was rooting for her the whole way.
I really liked this book. Five stars!
*****
Click here to learn more about The Goddess of Warsaw on Amazon.
*****
Thank you for reading this review. It would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to my blog/newsletter. You will receive exactly 28 emails from me in a year’s time. They will include 4 reports for book lovers and 24 slice-of-life blogs. Thanks for considering this. Lorie
Leave a Reply