Who Will Bring You Bread Tomorrow? The Child Who Survived the Poem
Henryka Łazowertówna wrote one of the most enduring poems to emerge from the Warsaw Ghetto, about the children who slipped through walls, holes and guards to bring food home to their starving families.
She died at Treblinka without ever knowing what became of them.
I know what became of one.
I married her son.
In August 1941, Łazowertówna recited Mały szmugler, The Little Smuggler, a poem spoken in the voice of a starving child who risks his life to carry food through the Warsaw Ghetto wall.
A year later, she was dead.
One of those children was still alive.
She was six years old that August. She was small, blonde and fast.
She was born at 18 Miła Street.
I called her Edna for thirty-seven years.
The poet
Henryka Wanda Łazowertówna was born in Warsaw on June 19, 1909, to Maksymilian Łazowert and Bluma Jeleńska.
She was a Polish Jewish poet who wrote in Polish and had established herself as a serious writer years before the Germans invaded her country.
That matters.
“Poet murdered in the Holocaust” can flatten a person into the manner of her death. Henryka had a life before she became a victim.
Her first collection, Zamknięty pokój, The Closed Room, appeared in 1930. A second, Imiona świata, followed in 1934. She received recognition from Polish literary circles and spent time studying in Grenoble.
Then Germany invaded Poland.
On November 16, 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed. Henryka and her mother were trapped inside with hundreds of thousands of other Jews.
Henryka went to work.
Not only as a poet, but as a relief worker.
She worked with CENTOS, which aided Jewish children, and with the Jewish Social Self-Help. Emanuel Ringelblum recruited her into the clandestine Oneg Shabbat archive, the extraordinary underground effort to record Jewish life under German occupation.
For the archive, Henryka wrote portraits of individual refugee families.
She took people who were disappearing into statistics and gave them faces.
Then she wrote about the children.
The Little Smuggler
The children of the Warsaw Ghetto were starving.
Official German food rations for Jews were deliberately inadequate. Survival depended heavily on food brought illegally into the ghetto.
Adults smuggled.
So did children.
Some were astonishingly young.
They crawled through gaps in walls, squeezed through openings, slipped past guards and crossed into the so-called Aryan side of Warsaw. Their small bodies, one of the very things that made them vulnerable, could also allow them to pass through spaces adults could not.
Then they came back carrying food.
Łazowertówna turned one of those children into a voice.
The Little Smuggler was not written like a funeral lament. It moved with the rhythm of a children’s rhyme.
Through walls.
Through holes.
Past guards.
The child is hungry, brazen and quick. He carries a sack beneath his arm, rags on his body and fear in his heart.
He knows what may happen to him.
He goes anyway.
Because someone has to bring home the bread.
The poem became widely known inside the ghetto. It was recited at literary gatherings, and a musical setting was sung by Diana Blumenfeld, one of the leading actresses and singers of the Yiddish stage, in ghetto restaurants and theaters.
That setting is almost impossible to imagine today.
The Warsaw Ghetto had cafés, restaurants, concerts and theatrical performances even while people starved to death outside.
There were people who still had money.
There were black-market fortunes.
There were artists who performed because performing was one of the few ways left to earn a living.
And there were children carrying food through the wall.
So imagine the room.
People eating food that had entered the ghetto illegally while listening to a singer assume the voice of a child who might have risked his life bringing that food inside.
And the song moved lightly.
It could be remembered.
It could be hummed.
That was part of its power.
No one in the Warsaw Ghetto needed to be told that life was terrible.
But Henryka could make people look at the person behind the bread.
A child.
Who will bring you bread tomorrow?
At the end of the poem, the child’s bravado disappears.
He imagines the day when fate finally catches him.
He tells his mother not to wait for him.
He knows he may die.
Yet his final worry is not for himself.
It is for her.
Who, Mama, will bring you bread tomorrow?
And then there is Edna.
Edna was not a category
My mother-in-law, Edna Stefania Brill, was born Edna Szurek at 18 Miła Street in Warsaw on October 2, 1934.
The address would later become associated with the command bunker of the Jewish Fighting Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
But when Edna was born, Miła 18 was simply home.
In August 1941, when Łazowertówna recited The Little Smuggler, Edna was six years and ten months old.
She would turn seven that October.
She was one of ten children.
Six of them would be murdered.
And Edna was going through the wall.
Ringelblum wrote that Łazowertówna had honored the thousands of tiny smugglers, including children only four and five years old.
History remembers them collectively.
Edna was not a category.
She was one little girl.
Her blonde hair and appearance allowed her to pass more readily as a Polish Catholic child outside the ghetto. Her size allowed her to get through openings adults could not.
She went because her family needed food.
She came back carrying it.
Then she went again.
Every crossing carried the possibility that she would be discovered.
The child in Łazowertówna’s poem is a boy.
Edna was a girl.
There is no evidence that Henryka ever knew her.
There is no evidence that they met.
Yet while one woman was writing about Warsaw’s child smugglers, one of those children was living only streets away.
That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.
Henryka wrote the archetype.
I knew the child.
Henryka’s last journey
By 1942, Henryka was ill and desperately poor.
Ringelblum later wrote bitterly about the money required to escape to the Aryan side and about the Polish friends who did not save her.
During the Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto that summer, Henryka and her mother were taken to the Umschlagplatz.
According to Ringelblum’s account, an attempt was made to remove Henryka from the transport.
Her mother could not be released with her.
Henryka would not leave her.
She understood where the train was going.
She went with her mother.
Both were murdered at Treblinka.
Henryka Łazowertówna was thirty-three years old.
Edna turned eight several weeks later.
The little smuggler was still alive.
And her war was nowhere near over.
Two years later, during the Warsaw Uprising, Edna served with the Polish Home Army.
On her tenth birthday, October 2, 1944, she was decorated for her service.
The answer
One of those children lived.
She lived to eighty-four.
Long enough to survive the Warsaw Ghetto.
Long enough to survive the destruction of much of her family.
Long enough to survive the Warsaw Uprising, German captivity and the war itself.
Long enough to marry.
Long enough to have children.
Long enough for one of those children to become my husband.
Long enough for me to sit across from her for thirty-seven years and listen.
Henryka Łazowertówna went to her death without knowing what became of the children whose hunger and courage she had transformed into poetry.
But the question at the end of her poem has an answer.
Who will bring you bread tomorrow?
Edna did.
She brought it through the brick at six and at seven, until there was no one left to bring it to.
Edna Stefania Brill, 1934-2019
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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.
