This book starts with just one instance of the fallout from the Nazi occupation of Warsaw – one of the young girls snatched out of the Jewish ghetto by our main heroine, Irena Sendlerowa, and smuggled to a Christian family to be brought up in disguise, in ways acceptable to the Aryans. Before she can taste the communion wafer for the first time, however, she's packed up abroad, made a pawn of by the disagreeable British government of the day, then given a new life – not for the first time – in Israel. This tribute, then, to the Righteous Amongst the Gentiles that saved her and a couple thousand others, eventually takes us back to Warsaw, and how the demolished ghetto was still a place of tragedy, nastiness and death, even with the Nazis in full pelt to retreat from the Soviets.
I really like this series of books. It's just a problem there are things in the way stopping me from loving them. For you it might be the use of ghosts, with Irena seeing and conversing with phantoms from the past. For me it's the cutesy, cartoon animals that are all over the place. Irena's white dog is just one step from going the full Milou (Snowy in "Tintin", to some). Either way, there's enough to like, and it's a little shame then that the publishing of this has been a little confusing to those who can't keep up. I said reviewing the first British book that it was the first two quarters of her life, only for this book to say it's the middle of a trilogy, and only for the reality to be that there are now five parts in the original French. So this is parts three and four, and it's only good news that the 2020 publication of the fifth and final bit, which will reveal the Warsaw Uprising to us, is destined to be in English somewhen.
It's actually a little peculiar to think on this evidence that anyone expected the opening trilogy to end where it does, for it clearly leaves things hanging. To me we always needed more, even if some of it does seem a little tacked on due to a certain movie version of the events in the Warsaw Zoo. But I'm certainly grateful the full story of this wonderful woman is being told, and I'm certainly looking forward to its true conclusion some time soon. Before then, this still gets a strong four stars.