The Goddess of Warsaw

by Lisa Barr

Funny, how war both entraps and frees you. What’s the point of niceties, manners, morals, and suppressed emotion when you could die at any given moment?

was saved by the U.S. government, as part of its Operation Paperclip, a top secret intelligence program in which sixteen hundred high-ranking Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were rescued from Nazi Germany, their criminal pasts wiped clean, and given U.S. government employment after the war. Why waste a brilliant mind, right?

Survival is about secrets, about extraordinary measures taken to stay alive. The equation is absolute: If you survived, it meant others did not. The trauma of a second chance at life, a second act, is at once miraculous and unendurable.