Smile: The Wordless Song That Gave a Holocaust Child Hope
Edna Szurek sang and danced her way through Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Decades later, a Charlie Chaplin melody gave words to everything she had survived.
In 1936, Charlie Chaplin made a film without dialogue about a world that had stopped making sense. Modern Times was his last silent picture, a comedy about hunger and machines and two people with nothing, trying to stay human in a century that had no use for them. The Tramp and the gamine, a homeless girl as stubborn and quick as he is, build a few small things and lose every one of them. In the last scene the road runs empty ahead and there is no particular reason left to hope. He stops her. He points to the corners of his own mouth. *Smile*, the gesture says. And they walk on toward whatever comes next.
Chaplin wrote the music for that film himself. The theme he composed was aching and almost operatic, lifted from a strain of Puccini, and it had no words. It was only a melody then, a feeling without a sentence to carry it. He set it down and the world moved on.
That year, Edna was two.
She was born into a family that lived on music. Her mother, Shulamit, had been trained as an opera singer, and made her living staging lavish weddings for Warsaw’s well-to-do Jewish families. Her father, Avraham, owned a leather factory and played the violin. The flat on Mila Street was full of children, eight of them, and their mother saw to it that every older child could sing and dance. It was the kind of polish a proud family gives its children for recitals and holidays, for the sheer pleasure of it. No one in that warm and musical house could have dreamed it was training for survival. That was the world that existed before the other one, the one Chaplin had turned into comedy, arrived at her door without the comedy.
She was not quite five when the bombing started. She and her eleven-year-old sister Miriam were at a friend’s birthday party when the first German bombs fell on the city, and the friend’s house came down behind them as they ran. After that the family was sealed into the ghetto with over four hundred thousand others, and Edna, small enough to slip through the gaps in the wall, became a smuggler of food, ducking past a guard the children called Frankenstein and coming back with whatever she could carry. Her father was sent to forced labor at Majdanek and died in the camps. Her mother starved. Before the end, her mother did the last thing a mother could do, which was to send her two daughters out of the ghetto to live, if they could somehow manage it, as Catholic girls on the other side.
This is where the music comes back, because it is how they stayed alive.
After a man who was supposed to shelter them tried instead to hand them to the Gestapo for the reward, Edna and Miriam were alone on the streets of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, two girls erasing themselves into two Polish Catholic orphans named Stefcia and Marysia. Their older brother Yakov helped them when he could, though he could not be seen at their side without endangering all three, so he kept his distance and watched over them from across the street. They slept in the shells of bombed-out buildings. They went to mass. They learned the prayers and the crossings and the small unthinking gestures of Catholic children until the performance was seamless and no one thought to look twice.
And to eat, they did the thing their mother had taught them. They sang and they danced on the street corners of Warsaw for coins.
Picture it. A city under occupation, patrols on the corners, informers paid by the head for a Jewish child handed in. And there, in the open, two little girls singing in clear unaccented Polish and dancing for a ring of passersby, beaming and bowing, charming coins out of strangers’ pockets, giving off not the faintest sign that they were the very thing the posters warned about. The voices their opera-singer mother had trained for parlor recitals were now keeping them fed on the street. The dancing that had been a delight in the flat on Mila Street was now a disguise. The thing that had been pure joy was now the armor that kept two Jewish children breathing, and Edna learned to do it with a bright untroubled face, because fear was the one thing that could give her away.
The most unimaginable proof of this came the day Miriam was seized and taken to Aleja Szucha 25, the Gestapo headquarters that was the most feared address in all of occupied Warsaw, a building people did not come out of. Ordered at gunpoint to prove she was a Pole and not a Jew, Miriam did the only thing she knew to do. She sang. And she sang so well that the men in that place, men whose daily work was cruelty, made her an offer: bring your little sister, perform for us, and you will have your papers. So Edna walked in through those doors of her own free will. The two sisters sang and danced for the Gestapo, in the heart of the building where Warsaw’s worst things happened, and they walked back out with kennkartes, identity documents stamped by the Reich itself, certifying that they were not Jewish. Those papers would save their lives again and again. Two Jewish children had performed their way out of the lion’s mouth.
There is a particular cruelty in having to perform happiness while your heart is breaking, and a particular genius in it too, because it is also how a child outlasts an empire.
Edna kept going. By her tenth birthday she had become the youngest decorated soldier in Polish military history, a courier in the Home Army who ran messages through sniper fire during the Warsaw Uprising and was wounded by a grenade, decorated twice, once for valor and once for her wounds. No one knew she was Jewish. Her disguise was so complete that after the war Pope Pius XII honored her with a medal as an exemplary Catholic war hero, never guessing he was blessing a Jewish child who had outwitted the Reich. She had smiled at nuns and at soldiers and at the Gestapo and at a Pope. The smile was the armor. Burying the sorrow was the work of staying alive, and she did it so thoroughly that even after the war, in a convent in England, the part would not come off. She had hidden herself for so long that finding her way back took years. It took her brother Yakov, singing her a Yiddish lullaby from before the war in a voice she at last recognized, to call her home.
Now think again about that melody Chaplin wrote and left wordless.
In 1954, nearly two decades later, with the war over and Edna newly married and building a life in Israel, two songwriters went back to that theme and gave it words at last. They watched the film, watched those two ruined figures walk toward the light, and wrote a lyric about exactly that: about smiling while the heart breaks, about masking sorrow behind a bright face and trusting that tomorrow the sun comes back. Nat King Cole sang it, and it became a standard, and the wordless thing Chaplin had made in the year of Edna’s infancy finally had a voice.
The words were not written for her. They could not have been. But they describe her so exactly that it stops the breath, because the song is an instruction in the precise art she had been forced to master before she was ten. Smile while it breaks. Bury the grief. Wait for the light. The lyricists believed they were writing about a tramp on a road.
They were also, without knowing it, setting down the very method by which a Jewish girl had sung and danced and smiled her way out of the Holocaust alive.
So it is no surprise that “Smile” became her favorite song. Of course it did. It was the only piece of music in the world that had been waiting since 1936 to put words to the thing she could never say aloud.
I think about the shape of that often. A melody is written in the years just after a child is born into a house full of singing. The child’s world goes dark, and the singing becomes the very thing that feeds her, the dancing the thing that hides her, and a little tramp on a screen, the one who has lost everything and points to his mouth anyway, hands her the idea that you can be crushed and still walk on. The dark passes. The child becomes a woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and at sixty she sits down in her own living room to give five hours of her life on tape to the people who would come after. And all that time the melody is traveling beside her, gathering its words somewhere in the middle of the journey, until one day it arrives as a song on the radio that seems to know her whole life by heart.
She survived by smiling through what should have broken her, by singing and dancing in the teeth of people who wanted her dead.
The song that became hers had done the same kind of thing. It outlasted the dark, found its way to the other side, and arrived at last with something to say.
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Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, based on her mother-in-law’s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Order Now.
