LITTLE EDNA'S WAR Multimedia Presentation to Come to FAU

Little Edna's War: A Live Multimedia Presentation will take place at Florida Atlantic University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Boca Raton on Wednesday, December 16, 2026, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The event will be held in the Friedberg Auditorium, with free admission and parking. Advance reservations are required.

For nearly 40 years, Edna Brill lived quietly at The Tiffany in Bal Harbour. Few of her neighbors knew that as a 9-year-old Jewish girl, she had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, hidden as a Catholic orphan and carried weapons as an armed courier in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. She was wounded, decorated for bravery, and in 1946 received a medal from Pope Pius XII himself, who never knew the young hero before him was Jewish.

Now her daughter-in-law is bringing that story home. On Wednesday, Dec. 16, Dr. Janet Bond Brill will present Little Edna's War, a live cinematic multimedia program, at Friedberg Auditorium at FAU's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Boca Raton. Admission and parking are free.

Brill, a longtime Parkland resident who taught at the University of Miami and Florida International University, is producing the event herself, at her own expense. She will not be selling books.

“South Florida was Edna's home for decades, and almost no one here knew what she had done,” said Brill. “My goal is simple: I want to fill Friedberg Auditorium with people who will hear Edna's story and carry it forward.”

Little Edna's War: A Live Multimedia Presentation will take place at Florida Atlantic University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Boca Raton on Wednesday, December 16, 2026, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The event will be held in the Friedberg Auditorium, with free admission and parking. Advance reservations are required.

The program weaves Edna's own USC Shoah Foundation video testimony with archival photographs, wartime documents, music and visual storytelling. The book behind it, Little Edna's War, ranks among Amazon's Top 5 bestselling Holocaust biographies.

Edna's husband, Harry Brill, was also a survivor. He reached Palestine aboard the famed refugee ship Exodus 1947 and fought in Israel's War of Independence before the couple made their life in South Florida.

​ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the bestselling author of six books, including five health and wellness titles from publishers such as Random House and Wiley, with more than 200,000 copies in print. A three-time University of Miami alumna who earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate at the University of Miami, she now brings the rigor of her scientific training to a deeply personal new chapter. Her newest book, Little Edna's War, currently ranks among Amazon's Top 5 bestselling Holocaust biographies and preserves the extraordinary Holocaust story of her late mother-in-law, Edna Brill.

The book draws on Janet's thirty-seven-year relationship with Edna, more than five hours of testimony archived by the USC Shoah Foundation, and years of research in military, historical, and family records. Blending the intimacy of personal memory with meticulous historical documentation, Little Edna's War traces Edna's journey from the Warsaw Ghetto to life under a false Catholic identity, service as a child soldier and courier in the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising, imprisonment in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps, and the rebuilding of her life in the postwar Jewish diaspora.

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