56 pages • 1 hour read
Lisa BarrThe Goddess of Warsaw
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Resistance and Survival in the Face of Oppression
Content Warning: This section discusses or mentions death and murder, the Holocaust and antisemitism, anti-gay bias and violence, and suicide.
Set within the historical context of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust, The Goddess of Warsaw touches on ideas of resistance and survival in the face of oppression, through both armed resistance and non-violent means.
Jakub’s archives and Zelda’s resistance fighters are initially at odds with one other, representing two different approaches to resistance. Initially, Jakub believes that the fighters are “radicals” and disapproves of the violence they enact, while Zelda sees Jakub’s work as passivity that only contributes to their problems. However, they eventually come to work together during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: After Jakub escapes from Treblinka and returns to the ghetto, he is tasked with reporting on the revolt. Zelda has come to see the importance of documentation, and Jakub’s acquiescence in turn underscores his acceptance of the fighters’ active approach.
Although Jakub and Zelda are fictional characters, Barr uses them to shed light on two very real historical movements that took place in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by the ZOB, and the Oyneg Shabbos Archives founded by Emmanuel Ringelblum. Both of these are remembered as seminal moments within Holocaust history. By contextualizing these different forms of resistance within real historical movements that had long-lasting impacts, Barr underscores the place for different kinds of resistance in the face of oppression.
The story further explores how different approaches to survival and resistance are interrelated. Bina’s initial approach to life in the ghetto is to smuggle resources in at whatever cost. Her unsentimental pragmatism is juxtaposed against people like the Behrmans, who refuse to give up their music despite the price they pay for it, as they are eventually taken away to concentration camps. Both Bina and the Behrmans are working toward survival, but of different kinds: Bina is focused on keeping the body alive, while the Behrmans are concerned with keeping the human spirit alive despite what happens to their bodies. Then there are the girls at the Great Synagogue, 93 of whom die by suicide while agreeing to help keep just one of them alive. They actively give up any hope of survival in favor of resistance—the act of not falling into Nazi hands while alive is the resistance in itself. However, while they do give up their lives, they also ensure that their story lives on through Dina.
Through this range of approaches and outcomes, Barr thus underscores that not only are resistance and survival interlinked, but all forms of resistance—active, passive, and even self-destructive—are also ultimately ways to survive. Resistance is survival, just as survival is a way to resist.
The Conflation of Justice and Revenge
By centering Jewish experiences during the Holocaust and showcasing the numerous tragedies that came of it, The Goddess of Warsaw deals with ideas of justice, both personal and social. However, the idea of justice is intertwined with that of revenge in this particular story, with Bina’s use of vigilante justice fulfilling her personal vendettas. The conflation between justice and revenge is thus central to the narrative.
Revenge is the biggest driving force in Bina’s life. The story begins with Bina, as Lena, sharing her past with Sienna for the sake of the biopic, which offers the seminal moments and experiences in Bina’s life through her own eyes. This perspective displays how Bina has consistently been fueled by personal tragedy. Her father’s death, Stach’s death, Jakub’s death, and Aleksander’s rejection are the key events that motivate her actions. All of these tragedies have fueled Bina’s desire for revenge, with first the baron and eventually Lukas serving as her biggest targets. It is later revealed that the biopic was part of a larger plan that Bina formulated to expose and eventually kill Lukas—the final piece in her grand plan for revenge.
Stach is also motivated to join the resistance out of a desire for revenge. After Bina is sent to the ghetto, his lover, Mateusz, is sent to a concentration camp. Stach tells Bina that he plans to obtain revenge on his father by toppling the baron’s Nazi machinery and eventually killing him. Stach’s actions are portrayed as helpful and noble because Bina is the narrator and Stach’s goals align with Bina’s: Both of them want the baron dead and are more than happy to work together to achieve this goal. For Stach and Bina, justice and personal revenge are closely intertwined.
Despite this, Bina’s end is not one of regrets and guilt—she is truly at peace after she kills Lukas, overturning the general conception of vengeance breeding vengeance in a never-ending cycle. This is because Bina’s actions and motivations are justified within the larger context of the Holocaust and its horrors, as her personal tragedies are derived directly from these circumstances. Since Bina sees her desire for revenge as a way to attain justice, she is driven to do numerous things that bend moral and ethical boundaries without a second thought—from murdering people, to engineering the explosion, and, on a smaller scale, to manipulating Sienna into making the film.
The conflation of justice with revenge not only fuels Bina’s journey throughout the story, allowing her to do the most unthinkable and extraordinary things, but also assures closure—for the character and the story—once revenge is attained.
The Complexities of Identity
The story begins with its protagonist confessing to another character that her name is not truly hers: Bina’s real identity and backstory are nothing like the people who know her only as a Hollywood actress could imagine. The complexities of identity is thus immediately introduced as one of the text’s key themes. Barr explores the adoption of different identities across a range of contexts in the story, exploring how various characters wrestle with both their authentic and assumed identities in various ways.
The practice of adopting different identities is often a matter of survival, with characters willingly adopting false names and stories to help navigate the dangers of the war and post-war life. Bina turns into “Irina” when working for the Żegota, just as Stach operates under the code name “Motyl.” Similarly, the Müller brothers both take on new identities when they restart their lives in America and Argentina following the war. Across these various situations, the adoption of different identities is a calculated move: Taking on a new identity is what stands between the characters and life-threatening danger.
Identity is also a crucial component of the characters’ experience during the war years in the novel, as the Nazi regime in Poland creates the Warsaw Ghetto to isolate and persecute anyone who is Jewish. This makes Bina’s relationship with her true identity emotionally complicated, and the revelation of her parentage forms a significant moment in her character arc. While Bina has always suspected that she is the product of an affair, she does not learn until later in the novel that the baron—Stach’s father—is also her biological father. Bina’s identity as a persecuted Jewish woman with a Nazi-supporting father leads to her ostracism from her own community within the ghetto, leaving her isolated from both the Jewish community and the “Aryan” one.
Various characters also suppress certain aspects of their identity to avoid discrimination or further pain. Characters like Stach and Stan hide their sexuality from the world and even their loved ones due to anti-gay bias and violence. Bina, Petra, and Dina attempt to leave their pasts behind by either trying to forget what they experienced during the war or adopting new identities altogether—Bina becomes Lena Browning, while Dina becomes Diana Mazur. The adoption of such new identities reflects the trauma that these three women have experienced; thus, when their true identities are revealed, others respond to these revelations with empathy and compassion.
At the end, Bina finds closure by embracing her true identity once again. When she kills Lukas, she reveals not just who he really is but also who she really is. Her public reclamation of her real name and past suggest that Bina can finally enjoy an identity that is authentic and whole.
