The Goddess of Warsaw by Lisa Barr is an enthralling novel that begins in 2005 Los Angeles, with a meeting between Lena Browning, a movie star from decades prior, and Sienna Hayes, who wants to direct and star in a biopic about Browning's life.
Browning tells Hayes that it's not her real name, rather the make of the gun she used to kill the Nazi who pistol-whipped her father to death. She also notes that the she will be performing the ending of the proposed movie, which makes sense at the end of the book. It then goes back to 1943 Warsaw, with Browning's original name of Bina Blonski, and she a Jew forced into a cramped ghetto by the Nazis. She becomes a spy, mingling with Germans, gathering information, and procuring weapons to fight with. Blonski was a survivor, doing what she had to do to stay alive and to further the cause she fighting for, becoming ruthless and violent in the process. She also delivers the cyanide pills that ninety-three young women take their lives with, lest they be first raped and then killed by Nazis. The only girl who survives is 10-year-old Dina, the sister of Blonski's co-conspirator Eryk. The final fighting scene in Europe features a Nazi who had masqueraded as part of the resistance, Lukas Muller, killing Blonski's husband Jakob, after telling him of her sleeping with Jakob's brother, Aleksander.
Blonski escapes Europe and travels to America where she takes on the name Browning and becomes a movie star, one who secretly hunts and kills Nazis who escaped to America, many to work for the U.S. government. Michael Mueller, the brother of Lukas, comes to her with a script for The Goddess of Warsaw, to be the admiring story of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. If Browning didn't do the movie, Mueller showed that he knows where Aleksander and his wife and children live, and they'd come after them if she doesn't comply. Browning says she'll do it, and has a plan. The climatic scene of the movie is to be filmed and Browning poisons Michael and some two dozen Nazis, then blows them up, with it appearing an accident as she had swapped out fake dynamite for actual munitions, then blowing them up, with it appearing an accident.
Back to current times, her now friend Hayes finds Dina alive and well in Europe, and the two of them go there for a violin performance of Dina's. Browning also sees Anna, who provided her with a false identity to escape Warsaw. Browning and Anna both know that ninety-two-year-old Lukas Muller is alive in Argentina, a famous director under the assumed name Armand Arias. He had recently filmed a movie in which the last scene exactly mirrored something that happened in Warsaw. They discuss how he will be at his first public performance in years at the Venice film festival, where Browning and Hayes will be announcing their movie, Femme Fatale.
When Muller was to be presented with the top award at the festival, Lena walks on stage and proclaims the truth about who she is and what he did. The audience thinks it's a planned skit, until Browning shoots him dead, then shouts "that's with love from the Warsaw Ghetto." It's a great book and Barr in the author's note notes that she the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
