From a crowded Sabbath table in Bialystok to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the fires of resistance, one family fights to hold on to who they are as everything around them turns to ash.
Bialystok was once loud with market stalls, heated arguments, and Sabbath songs. But the world shrinks. First to a cellar, then a factory floor, then barbed wire. The Lefkovitz family, patriarch Nachum, fierce Fraida, brilliant Emma and her beloved Yoel, are dragged from a life of comfort into the tightening grip of Nazi rule. Synagogues burn. Hospitals are raided. Children disappear onto transports headed "to the east." Every rumor is worse than the one before, and every choice could mean life or death on the spot.
Inside the ghetto, hunger and terror and betrayal wear people down to nothing. But Emma runs messages, smuggles weapons, hides the pregnant and the hunted. As deportations to the extermination camps pick up speed, she and the underground are forced to weigh an impossible question: walk quietly toward the trains, or turn the ghetto itself into a battlefield.
A Woman of Valor follows the Lefkovitzes from the liquidation of the ghetto and trains packed with the dying, into forests where partisans strike back, and later, the fragile first steps of survivors rebuilding their lives in Israel. It is told with a rawness and closeness that never looks away.
Readers who felt the emotional weight of The Tattooist of Auschwitz won't be able to put this one down.