The Goddess of Warsaw

Aleksander leaves, and Stach and the Żegota help Bina set up a covert assembly line through the sewers, delivering weapons and ammunition to Zelda. Twelve days later, a distraught Eryk arrives at the apartment: Almost 100 young girls are being held hostage at the Great Synagogue for four days before they will be transported elsewhere as victims of sex trafficking; Dina is one of them. Zelda has instructions regarding this for Bina, but Eryk begs Bina not to carry them out, as he wants his sister to live.

Eryk hands over his father’s prized violin, a Stradivarius, and implores Bina to trade it for Dina’s life. He extracts a promise that Bina will help Dina, and Bina lies and says that she will ensure that nothing happens to Dina. She urges Eryk to sleep a while before he leaves. As he does, she wonders how she will carry out Zelda’s instructions.

Bina meets with Stach again. She explains how 94 young “virgins, religious girls” are being held hostage in the Great Synagogue on Commander Jürgen Stroop’s orders to be trafficked and sexually exploited before they are eventually killed (131). Bina needs to get inside the synagogue with 100 cyanide tablets, and Stach needs to help ensure that Dina’s life is saved.

Bina reveals to Stach that she was pregnant when her father was killed, as ordered by Stach’s father. She was beaten so badly that she miscarried; she later learned that she would never be able to conceive again. Bina offers Stach the Stradivarius in return for Dina’s life, but Stach tells her to keep it. He asks her to wait in his office while he arranges what she needs.

Stach returns looking rumpled but with the arrangements all made: Bina will get 15 minutes inside the synagogue. She wonders what he has done to make this happen and thanks him gratefully.

Bina takes the cyanide tablets, changes into a maid’s uniform, and heads to the synagogue, driven by a man with mismatched eyes: “an arresting silver-gray in one eye, the other a muted brown” (136). As he drops her off, the driver instructs Bina that she is to speak in Polish and German at different checkpoints and to tell the guards that she is there for the “final touches.” Once she is inside, she is to tell Dina to pretend to be dead; someone will come for her. Bina listens, wondering who this man really is.

Bina follows the instructions and gets inside. The guards tell her to distribute sterilized, white dresses to the girls. Once she is alone with them, Bina tells Lilah, a 16-year-old who comes forward, about the plan. Zelda and the fighters have found a way to give the girls a choice about their deaths—at the hands of the Nazis or by suicide. Bina hands out the cyanide tablets and gowns but insists that one of them must remain alive to tell their story; she pretends to look around and chooses Dina. Bina tells Dina, who recognizes her, what to do. Bina promises the girls that they will never be forgotten and leaves as her 15 minutes run out.

Bina wakes up in Stach’s office, having fainted and been brought back by the driver. Stach tells her that the girls took the tablets; their bodies were found by a cleaning team, and there is an uproar. Dina has been hidden in a storage closet by a maid who is a Żegota plant and will have to stay there until all the Nazis evacuate.

To Bina’s questions, Stach admits that the driver is a Nazi but is on their side. He is secretly gay; that is how Stach met him. Bina asks to return to the ghetto, but Stach reminds her of her promise to him.

Two days later, Anna, one half of the Polish couple who settled Bina in, arrives with news: The day after the girls’ deaths at the synagogue, Nazis burned down the Żegota headquarters and captured Stach. Stach had suspected that his assistant was a mole, and the assistant died in the fire. Stach’s father was there, watching the building burn and his son be dragged out.

Bina realizes that Anna was the maid who helped Dina. Anna reveals that she hid Dina in a closet and that Stach later went back to get her out. However, Anna doesn’t know what happened after this. She was on her way to meet Stach when she spotted the fire.

Anna urges Bina to pack her things: She will hold onto the suitcase, and Bina can retrieve it after the mission. Lukas Müller—the driver who took Bina to the synagogue—will collect both of them later that night. Anna also tells Bina the address of the ballet studio where she secretly lives in case there is an emergency—Anna used to be a dancer before the Nazis killed her Jewish teacher, Madame Sosia.

Bina dresses and arms herself for the night. Lukas, whom Bina now realizes was Stach’s lover, picks her up. Underneath her car seat is a Browning P35, the make of gun that Bina had requested from Stach for this mission. He drives her to an establishment where Anna is already waiting; Bina is supposed to get inside, give Anna the coat she has on—which is lined with dynamite—and slip out the back door.

Bina enters the cabaret turned “gentleman’s club,” where Polish women are chosen to entertain Nazi officers. Anna, dressed exquisitely and playing the role of the hostess, pretends not to know Bina. She collects all the waiting girls’ coats and leads Bina to the washroom. She gets her past the guards at the back door by claiming that Bina is on her period.

Bina waits with Lukas until they see the baron and Anna exit the cafe together. Shortly after, the place blows up. As the baron and Anna run, Lukas hails them and offers them a lift, pretending to be Anna’s friend. Once inside the car, Anna strangles the baron with her scarf while Bina shoots him in the thigh, even as the baron identifies her as “Bina Blonski” out loud.

Despite being in pain, when Bina asks him about Stach’s whereabouts, the baron begins to laugh uncontrollably. His laughter brings up a repressed memory for Bina: When she was 12, she arrived home early from school to discover her parents’ bedroom locked from the inside; her mother’s voice mingled with an unfamiliar man’s laughter. Bina assumed that it was Pawel, but she caught a glimpse of the man leaving the room and now remembers that it was the baron.

Shocked, Bina accuses the baron of hating Jews even while he was in love with one, and he expresses his bitterness that Bina’s mother chose her father. Bina realizes that the baron is her biological father and shoots him dead before he can say it out loud. The Browning feels hot in her hand; it is the same type of gun that the baron’s men used to bludgeon Bina’s father to death with.

A few streets away, Lukas turns Bina out of the car with the gun and some cash to use in an emergency. He urges her to hide and wait for him and Anna to return. They drive off to dispose of the baron’s body.

After a couple hours of waiting, Bina realizes that no one is coming for her. She approaches two Polish smugglers in the park and bargains for passage back into the ghetto. One of the men, Vladek, demands money and sex, and Bina agrees to the price.

Vladek leads Bina into a tunnel and demands his payment halfway through. He begins groping her and then stops and asks about her story. When she claims that she is a teacher, he reveals that he used to be a carpenter and reminisces about his generous Jewish boss who used to give out Christmastime bonuses. Bina realizes that Vladek worked for her father, and when she reveals this, he is immediately shameful and apologetic. He tries to return the money, but Bina insists that he keep it; she just wants safe passage through.

Bina emerges in a dark basement inside the ghetto and makes her way to where the fighters have relocated. She is apprehended by a 14-year-old named Sammy, but he takes her to Zelda when Bina declares that it is an emergency. At the bunker, Bina is thrilled to see that Aleksander is alive but is shocked to see Jakub there too.

Zelda welcomes Bina and instructs Jakub to tell her what happened. Jakub describes how when he arrived at Treblinka, he recognized one of the Nazis there as a man he once worked with, Johann Haas. Haas eventually got Jakub out with papers and resources to escape for good, but Jakub came back to the ghetto for Bina.

Zelda reveals that Aleksander and Eryk have been working with other factions of the resistance movement within the ghetto in preparation for Hitler’s birthday. Bina, in turn, reveals that they have lost their contacts—Stach is believed to be dead after having been captured and possibly tortured. Nevertheless, Zelda hails Bina’s achievements on the outside and claims that they are ready to fight the Nazis.

On the dawn of April 19, 1943, Zelda gives a rousing speech to all her fighters. Jakub has been assigned the duty of recording and reporting everything that happens. Bina now respects the power of his pen, just as he respects that she has obtained their weaponry. While she has reconciled with Jakub, she also grows increasingly disturbed by the growing attraction she senses between Aleksander and Tosia.

The fighters take their positions. The moment when the Nazis come marching through, they are torn apart by a series of explosions. Tanks roll in shortly after, and they are pelted and blown up with grenades. The fighting begins in earnest, and Bina is deeply affected when Sammy is hit and killed by a stray bullet. Nevertheless, the Nazis have no choice but to retreat by the end of the night. Just as the fighters are celebrating, however, the door bursts open, and an armed Lukas dressed in Nazi regalia comes marching in.

Bina realizes that Lukas, who is accompanied by soldiers and cameramen, was the real Żegota mole. He orders that everyone except Bina be tied up and delights in the expression on her face. Lukas reveals that Haas, who helped Jakub escape Treblinka, was killed for his actions. He also informs the group that Bina slept with Aleksander, pulling out the sheets of paper from Jakub’s archive, on the back of which Bina had recorded the details of their one-time affair.

Lukas instructs his cameramen to capture Bina’s expressions as he further asserts that she will never know what truly happened to Dina. He then curls Bina’s fingers around his gun and asks her to choose between Aleksander and Jakub. When Aleksander asks to be shot, Lukas feigns a shot at him before pressing Bina’s fingers onto the trigger and killing Jakub instead. Lukas then reveals to everyone present that the baron was Bina’s true father.

Lukas confesses that he is a filmmaker tasked with capturing the highlights of the Nazi victory over the ghetto and that he specializes in infiltrating resistance organizations and taking them down. He orders a couple of his officers to stand guard over the fighters while he heads upstairs to deal with Zelda, who is stationed on the roof.

Bina wakes up, disoriented, in Zelda’s room in the bunker; she has fuzzy memories of an explosion. She overhears a conversation about what happened through the wall next to her: Zelda is dead, but she died taking down as many Nazis as she could; Tosia saved the day with her grenade and dragged an injured Aleksander to safety; and Bina herself stabbed a Nazi guard to death with her knife. However, people are furious about Bina’s true parentage and her betrayal of Jakub.

Bina gathers up some things into a bag and walks into the next room, where Eryk yells at her for breaking his trust about Dina. Aleksander coldly asserts that she should have been the one to die, not Jakub. Heartbroken and ashamed, Bina leaves the ghetto.

Bina runs, hides, and eventually makes it out of the ghetto through the sewers. She waits around the same place she last saw Vladek. When he reemerges again, she asks him to hide her. Vladek reluctantly drives her to the address she gives him.

Bina and Vladek arrive at Anna’s ballet studio, and she asks him to wait while she rushes inside. Anna isn’t there, but Bina finds her suitcase: It has all its original contents, as well as a passport with a non-Jewish identity in the name of Petra Schneider. Bina realizes that this is Anna’s real name. Grateful for Anna’s help, Bina leaves behind a pearl hairpin that was part of her costume on the night of the cabaret bombing to let Anna know that she was there.

Back outside, Bina asks Vladek if he can get her out of Warsaw or at least near the border; he has another idea. Vladek currently works as a driver who supplies the Nazis with mistresses and ferries them around. He suggests that Bina pretend to be one such mistress so that he can ferry her out of the city and into the countryside, but this will cost a lot, and Bina’s survival will depend on her acting skills. Bina offers the violin for the former condition and laughs about the latter, reflecting on how she is “a woman born to become anyone other than who she really is” (219).