The only sour note that day was that her mother, whom Eva called Agi(from Agnes), was not around to help celebrate. She was in Budapest about to have minor surgery. Still, Eva felt her mother could “have managed to come.”...

The Nazis considered Poles subhuman and, after crushing the country “like a soft-boiled egg” in the fall of 1939, treated them with contempt. Young Poles, if allowed to live at all, were to be raised as beasts of burden, with just enough...