A new historical novel by New York Times bestselling author Judy Batalion is bringing the rich, vibrant world of pre-war Jewish Warsaw — and the women who fought to defend it — to a wider audience, with NHPR’s literary podcast helping to introduce the book to Granite State readers.
The latest episode of NHPR’s Check This Out features host Rachel Barenbaum in conversation with Batalion about her debut novel “The Last Woman of Warsaw,” published by Dutton/Penguin in April 2026. The book builds on the deeply researched ground Batalion broke with her bestselling nonfiction work “The Light of Days,” which chronicled the young Jewish women who became couriers, fighters, and resistance leaders in Nazi-occupied Poland.
A Story of Two Young Women
“The Last Woman of Warsaw” is set in Poland in the late 1930s, in the years just before the Nazi invasion shattered one of the largest and most culturally vibrant Jewish communities in Europe. The novel follows two very different young Jewish women whose lives become entwined as they search for a missing teacher.
Fanny Zelshinsky is an artist from an elite Jewish family, weighing whether to go through with her upcoming wedding and what kind of life she wants to lead. Zosia Dror has fled her religious family and joined a new youth movement dedicated to social equality. When the famous artist Wanda Petrovsky disappears, Fanny and Zosia — an unlikely pair — must work together to find her before it is too late.
The setting is intentional. By placing her characters in the years before the war, Batalion puts readers inside a world that was full of ambition, art, politics, romance, and ordinary daily life — a world that was about to be deliberately destroyed, and one whose richness is too often flattened by retrospective focus on what came after.
From Nonfiction Bestseller to Debut Novel
Batalion is best known for “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos,” which spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 20 languages, and is being adapted for film by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners. That work pulled hundreds of women out of the historical shadows and into the light, documenting their roles as smugglers of weapons, intelligence, food, and hope into the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland.
In her conversation with Barenbaum, Batalion described how the years she spent in archives researching “The Light of Days” left her with stories and emotional textures that the constraints of nonfiction could not fully capture. The novel form, she explained, gave her room to sit inside the interior lives of her characters in a way the historical record could not always support.
“I never feel like my work is complete,” Batalion told Writer’s Digest in a recent interview, describing the recurring pull back to this material — a pull rooted in her own family history as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
Why It Matters Right Now
The book arrives in New Hampshire at a moment when the question of how — and whether — to teach Holocaust history is very much in the headlines. The state legislature recently rebuffed an attempt to allow what amounts to Holocaust denial in classroom debates, reaffirming that lessons drawn from the historical record are not up for negotiation.
Against that backdrop, novels like “The Last Woman of Warsaw” do critical cultural work. They put faces, names, voices, and full inner lives onto a chapter of history that is sometimes reduced to statistics or political abstractions. They remind readers that the Jewish communities of pre-war Europe were not victims-in-waiting but full participants in modern life — artists, activists, students, parents, lovers, dreamers — whose loss is incalculable and whose memory deserves to be honored.
The novel also celebrates a theme that runs through Batalion’s body of work: that Jewish women were not bystanders to history but active agents within it, including in the most dangerous moments imaginable. The young couriers and resistance fighters who inspired her nonfiction live again, in different form, in the characters of Fanny and Zosia.
NHPR’s Literary Lineup
The episode is part of Check This Out, NHPR’s podcast and on-air feature that pairs novelist Rachel Barenbaum with rising and established literary authors for in-depth conversations about craft, research, and the books they write. The same episode also explores the rise of digital-first publishing — a relevant counterpoint to the traditional print pathway that brought “The Last Woman of Warsaw” to readers.
For New Hampshire book lovers, Check This Out has become a reliable source of recommendations from outside the bestseller-bestseller cycle. Recent episodes have ranged across literary fiction, memoir, and history, with Barenbaum’s interviewer-as-fellow-novelist sensibility producing conversations that feel less like promotional stops and more like working dialogues between writers.
Batalion’s appearance is among the more anticipated of the season, given the reach of her earlier nonfiction. For listeners new to her work, the episode is a useful entry point; for longtime readers, it offers behind-the-scenes insight into how a meticulous historian translated what she found into fiction. The novel is available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats from Dutton/Penguin.
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