The Last Złoty
The Gestapo Car
The Judenrat had promised work in Lublin. Papa and Shlomo, his eldest son, would earn wages, and the wages would send food home to Miła Street. The two left the Warsaw Ghetto together. No money came back. No food. No word.
The family began to starve.
Shulamit watched her children grow thin. She understood that the ghetto might kill them, and she made a desperate decision. She gave her last złoty to a Polish worker from Avraham’s leather factory and entrusted her two youngest daughters to him. It was all she had left to buy them a future.
But the worker’s wife did not lead the girls to safety. She took them by the hand and led them toward a Gestapo car.
Edna was eight. Miriam was thirteen.
As they approached the car, the sisters looked at each other.
One glance was all it took.
They needed no words. In the same instant, both girls kicked the woman as hard as they could.
And they ran.
They ran from the car, from the woman their mother had trusted, and from a betrayal that might have cost them their lives. Behind them was the last promise their mother had been able to buy. Ahead lay a city where a stranger’s suspicion could mean death.
The Szmalcownicy
In occupied Poland, blackmailers who preyed on Jews in hiding were known as szmalcownicy.
The term was associated with szmal, slang for money. Some blackmailers came from criminal circles; others were ordinary civilians who discovered that a Jewish person’s desperate need for secrecy could be exploited for profit.
Nazi persecution created the conditions for this trade. Jews found outside the ghetto without authorization faced arrest, deportation, or death. Those sheltering them also faced severe punishment, including execution. A person living under a false identity could not safely appeal to the authorities when threatened.
Blackmailers operated near ghetto walls, railway stations, markets, and other public places. They looked for signs they believed might identify someone as Jewish: a name, an accent, a frightened reaction, or simply an appearance they chose to question. Men could be subjected to humiliating attempts to determine whether they were circumcised.
The demand was brutally simple: pay, or risk denunciation to the Germans. Money, jewelry, clothing, and other valuables could be taken. Even payment offered no assurance that the blackmailer would remain silent or not return.
Poles who sheltered Jews could also become targets of extortion. The Polish underground condemned blackmail and, in some cases, sentenced perpetrators to death. Yet the danger persisted.
I cannot know everything about the woman who led Edna and Miriam toward that Gestapo car. What I know is the story Edna told: their mother had trusted someone to help them escape, and the girls found themselves being taken toward the Germans.
For Jewish children trying to survive beyond the ghetto walls, that was the terrible uncertainty. Someone offering help might also be someone willing to betray them.
Singing Among the Hunters
Edna and Miriam were not alone. Their older brother Yakov had learned to move between the ghetto and the so-called Aryan side. He knew the streets, the dangers, and people who might help. According to the family’s account, he helped his sisters navigate their precarious new lives.
They needed food, and food required money. So the girls did something astonishing: they drew attention to themselves.
They sang Polish songs and danced in Warsaw’s streets and courtyards. Edna passed a hat for coins. Each performance offered a chance to eat, but it also exposed their faces to strangers who might recognize or denounce them.
Their experience belonged to the wider world of Jewish children surviving on the Aryan side, including those who sold cigarettes around Three Crosses Square, later described by Józef Ziemian. Edna and Miriam did not sell cigarettes. Their way of surviving was to sing.
The sisters lived under Catholic identities, Stefania and Marysia. Edna told how those identities were connected to the names of two girls on a gravestone. They had to inhabit those names convincingly, in their speech, their prayers, and their behavior.
A mistake could be fatal.
Every audience could hold a hunter. They sang anyway.
What the Złoty Bought
Shulamit died of starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto. She never saw her daughters again.
She had given away her last złoty because she believed it might purchase their safety. Instead, the arrangement led them toward a Gestapo car.
She gave her last złoty to buy her daughters a future. Instead, she bought betrayal.
What saved Edna and Miriam in that moment was not money. It was a glance between two sisters, their shared instinct to act, and the courage to run.
Later, survival would demand something different: singing, smiling, and appearing unafraid in a city where being recognized as Jewish could cost them their lives.
The szmalcownicy made their living from fear. Edna and Miriam made theirs by never letting it show.
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
