Daughters of Warsaw is a dual point-of-view historical fiction novel, split between the present time in Seattle and World War II Warsaw. Lizzie in the Pacific Northwest has suffered a series of miscarriages and is wallowing in self-pity and grief when she discovers old photographs of her great-grandmother. This starts her on a trip to Warsaw and a genealogical journey to discover her Polish roots.
She learns that her great-grandmother was Zofia Szczesny, a heroic young woman who helped smuggle food and medicine into the Jewish Ghetto and Jewish children out of the ghetto to be adopted by Christian families to save their lives. This story-book heroine was based on a real-life heroine, Irena Sendler, who rescued Jewish children from the Ghetto.
The Seattle parts of the story were less entrancing than the Warsaw sections, partly because author Maria Frances is able to evoke the horrors of the war, the ghetto, and the day-to-day life in 1942 Warsaw. That said, overall, the story was quite similar in tone and characters to several recent books and didn’t fully rise to its potential. That said, books like this need to be written to keep us aware of how depraved the human heart and mind can get. Humanity has managed, in the last eighty-odd years, to kill 62.5 million people (Ukrainians, Armenians, Jews, Chechens, Urghurs, etc, ad nauseam) in over sixty different genocides. With books that point out both man’s inhumanity to man and the heroes and heroines who combat the inhumanity, we can keep alive our hope that this behavior will be extinguished.
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Daughters of Warsaw (Avon, March 5, 2024) is available through:
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