How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis: The True Story of the Holocaust Rescuers, Zofia Sterner and Her Family

Immunologist Dziarski debuts with a dynamic narrative detailing how his aunt Zofia Sterner (1908–2006) helped save Jews from the Nazis during WWII. Zofia Domańska, a bank clerk and a Polish Christian, married Wacek Sterner, a Jewish engineer, in 1935 Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the city was riven by “frequent raids, arrests, and mass killings.” Though Wacek obtained fake identity papers certifying that he was a gentile railway worker, Hitler’s plans for the “ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe” loomed. In 1941, the city’s Jews were officially confined to the Warsaw ghetto (though Wacek remained at large). Zofia sought ways to help Warsaw’s Jews: she delivered packages to ghetto residents; helped the resistance draw up fake identity papers; and worked with labor prisoners to sell their valuables for the money to bribe guards. Later she fabricated Wacek’s death to keep him safe. Though they were eventually separated and Wacek spent time in a German POW camp, the couple was reunited by the war’s end. Drawing from Zofia’s diary entries and interviews with his aunt, Dziarski renders in palpably urgent, first-person, present-tense writing the remarkable story of a woman who was driven by her belief that “every life was precious” to save strangers, most of whom would never know her name. It’s a worthy tribute to the extraordinary bravery of a remarkable woman. (Sept.)