The Goddess of Warsaw

Content Warning: This section discusses war and violence, death and murder, the Holocaust and antisemitism, and suicide.

“My face is our ticket to survival. I have been able to fool the Nazis because of my appearance. I am a tall, willowy, blond, blue-eyed Jew—not the stereotypical mousy, cowering Jewess falsely depicted in their anti-Semitic propaganda, rather the dreamy breed of Aryan goddess seducing an entire nation.”

Bina describes why she is an effective smuggler outside the ghetto. Bina’s “Aryan” looks, combined with her acting skills, are what help her adopt different identities throughout her lifetime—the Polish Irina, the German Petra, and, eventually, the American Lena Browning. This passage speaks to The Complexities of Identity while also being an example of irony since Bina is, in fact, half “Aryan”—she later discovers that she is the “illegitimate” daughter of the Nazi-supporting Baron Konrad Sobieski.

“Resist, not write. Resist, not sit and wait. Let me handle this matter so that maybe some of us can escape and live to tell our stories. Not die with our stories buried in some secret underground time capsule.”

Bina is determined to actively contribute to the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, opposing her husband Jakub’s more passive method of documentation. Bina’s disdain for Jakub’s approach lies in her belief that one must survive in order to resist; she does not yet see that Jakub’s form of resistance does ensure survival of some kind, even if not of the physical body. She later comes to see the importance of documentation and even ends up using it herself, as Lena Browning, to tell her story. Documentation thus becomes a key motif in the text.