28 Days

Safier, David. 28 Days. 2020. 416p. ISBN 9781250237149.

Mia and her family are prosperous Poles who, though nominally Jewish, are not practicing. As a young girl, Mia watched with indifference as Hitler took power in Germany, but grew increasingly concerned at the rhetoric and the actions of the Nazis. Then in September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland from the West, quickly followed by the Soviet Union from the East, effectively ending that country's independence. At first not much changed, but then strict laws controlling the lives of Jews were put in place. Soon, Mia and her family found themselves forced into Warsaw's ghetto, a small space where hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed, with very small possibility of employment and never enough food to eat.

Mia, who looks Aryan, the Nazis' standard for the perfect race, is able to smuggle herself out of the ghetto to go and acquire food she can bring back and sell at a large profit. On one particular instance in 1942, she is stopped by bounty hunters, but is saved by a man she does not know, and who kisses her to make it seem she is his girlfriend. This was Mia's first kiss. Over the next weeks, life in the ghetto becomes worse, and there are rumors that it will soon be emptied and everyone will be forced into concentration camps out east, or suffer an even worst fate.

Then Mia runs into the boy again, who is Jewish and works for the resistance. Mia quickly joins and begins to fight back against the Germans. Her mother and younger sisters are killed during German raids to empty the ghetto, and with nothing to lose Mia throws herself into a deadly fight where the only triumph is surviving one more day ..

Armed with small-caliber guns and homemade petrol bombs against the Germans' superior weapons, armored vehicle, and training, the Warsaw ghetto Jews nevertheless manage to repulse their assault to destroy the ghetto for 28 days, marking the longest and most violent resistance against German occupation in the history of the Second World War.