Inspirational author Amanda Barrett’s latest book, The Warsaw Sisters shines a light on an oft-forgotten corner of World War II Poland, and the true stories of ordinary individuals who fought to preserve freedom and humanity in the darkest of times.

Hi, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today on Binge Reading, Amanda talks about how she excavates the forgotten fragments of history in her books and why she loves the enduring power of story.

The Warsaw Sisters tells of two women fighting against the darkness engulfing their homeland, one by entering a daring network of women sheltering Jewish children, and the other by joining the ranks of Poland’s Secret Army, the Polish version of the Resistance.

As Warsaw buckles under German oppression, they must rely on the courage of ordinary people – so-called ordinary people – to resist the power of the state.

Binge Reading Thriller Giveaway

Free Books – THRILLERS R US – Mystery and Thriller Lucky Dip

Our Giveaway this week is Thrillers R Us an opportunity to get free books from a wide -ranging selection of mysteries and thrillers from many authors, including my own book, Sadie’s Vow, a San Francisco Mystery set in the mid- 19th century.

 You’ll find the links for downloads for these free books in the show notes for this episode on the website, www.thejoysofbinge reading.com.

Buy me a coffee and defray production costs

And before we get to Amanda, just a reminder you can help to defray the cost of production of this episode by buying me a cup of coffee on Buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx.

And if you enjoy the show, don’t forget, leave us the reviews so others will find us too. I make this plea every time I podcast. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they would love to read.

Events and books mentioned in this episode

The Warsaw Sisters Playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWyLFWfMD6nXlZrylX1eMw-SbKHz7t05P

Irena Sendler – Polish humanitarian https://irenasendler.org/

Warsaw Uprising:  https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-warsaw-polish-uprising

Polish Resistance: https://polandatwartours.com/unsung-heroes-the-brave-men-and-women-of-the-polish-resistance-during-ww2/

Dietrich Bonhoffeur’s fiancée, Maria Von Wedemeyer/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_von_Wedemeyer_Weller

Treblinka: – the concentration camp where many Warsaw Jews died.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/treblinka

Sophie Scholl: ( From The White Rose Resists,) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57008360

Amanda’s books mentioned in this show:

Within These Walls of Sorrow: https://amandabarratt.net/within-these-walls-of-sorrow/

The White Rose Resists; https://amandabarratt.net/the-white-rose-resists-a-novel-of-the-german-students-who-defied-hitler/

My Dearest Dietrich: https://amandabarratt.net/my-dearest-dietrich-a-novel-of-dietrich-bonhoeffers-lost-love/

Books Amanda is reading:

Kristen Hannah, The Women, https://kristinhannah.com/books/the-women/

Jennifer L. Wright, The Girl From The Papers, (A Bonnie and Clyde story – to be released in August.)

https://jennwrightwrites.com/the-girl-from-the-papers

Where to find Amanda Barratt on line

Website: https://amandabarratt.net/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandabarrattauthor/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmandaBarrattAuthor/

Introducing inspirational author Amanda Barratt

Amanda Barratt – inspirational historical fiction

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Amanda. Hello there, Amanda, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Amanda Barratt: Thank you so much. It is such a joy to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: We’re talking about The Warsaw Sisters today. You’ve got a real track record with inspirational historical fiction. The Warsaw Sisters is set in Warsaw during the Second World War, as the ghetto is being set up, that notorious ghetto, a very dark time in Polish history.

What attracted you to this story?

Amanda Barratt: So, writing this novel came out of my previous novel, the research from my previous novel, Within These Walls Of Sorrow, which was set in the ghetto in Kraków, Poland.

And while there I researching that novel, I uncovered all of these incredible stories of women in the Resistance. And there were so many that I couldn’t possibly include them in that book.

A lot of them dealt with Warsaw and as I researched them, as I began to explore them as I explored the daring network of women who rescued Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, and the heroic fighters, women who were fighters in the Warsaw uprising… the more I began to want to bring their stories,

I always return to the theme of women’s experiences in war.

That’s something many of my novels explore, and that’s something I’m very passionate about exploring. Their courage, their sacrifice, their stories have often been underrepresented, and I think it’s so important to be illuminating their stories and bringing them out of their shadows where they deserve to be.

Shining a light in dark places

Jenny Wheeler: Now you do describe it as inspirational fiction and although it is a dark story, you do find strong redemptive elements in it. Is that an important aspect for you?

Amanda Barratt: Absolutely. It’s always important to me because even in the midst of the darkness. that’s often when those spark what I call the sparks of light in the night of war, when those shine the brightest.

And as I researched and as I uncovered stories of ordinary people faced with these unfathomable, unthinkable, circumstances and yet they chose not to turn away from the evil that was unfolding.

They chose to take action. And to me, those stories are extraordinarily compelling and they are stories of people who were a light in the midst of these very dark times.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you find it difficult to spend so much time amongst these grim events? I wondered how you kept your own spirits up as you were writing.

Amanda Barratt: It is very dark. The research is very dark. Spending often years immersed in this subject matter, pouring over research books, pouring over archives… It can be very emotionally draining.

But I’m so passionate about sharing these sorts of stories and exploring and illuminating these heroes that I think more people need to know about.

So, for me, in those moments, when it gets that dark, I always just return to where my passion is.

For Amanda, research is favourite part

Jenny Wheeler: You have got a lot of praise for your historical research. These books are very close to what factually happened, and I wondered how you managed to get that research. How did you put it all together?

Amanda Barratt: Research for me is, it’s my favorite part of the whole process. It’s really being able to delve into the history.

For this book, I relied on more than a hundred nonfiction titles, and I always seek out, not just historical treatises, but the memoirs, the firsthand accounts, those deeply personal experiences of individuals and within those are often where I find the most surprising, the most astonishing things.

Those often become what makes it into my novel. I was also really fortunate to be able to access a lot of transcribed interviews with veterans of the Home Army, those who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, the women who were part of the Polish Resistance.

Those were absolutely invaluable. Being able to hear in their own words what they experienced and how it affected them.

And that was also the same in depicting the Warsaw Ghetto. I listened to countless interviews with Jewish survivors and also non-Jews who worked in the Resistance movement to shelter them.

And those were again, a gold mine of information.

One of my favorite experiences of this entire process was though I wrote the novel in the midst of the Pandemic, so I wasn’t able to travel over to Poland as I would’ve loved to, but I was able to go to a museum a couple of hours from where I lived.

It housed a collection of artifacts and documents related to the Warsaw Uprising and the Polish Resistance, including holding a cap worn by a soldier who fought in the Uprising, looking at copies of the newspaper that these young courier girls used to carry throughout the city to distribute these words of freedom and truth.

It brought to me in such a tangible way, reminding me that these were real people with these real tangible objects, and it made it so much more personal.

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The heroic exploits of ‘ordinary’ women

Jenny Wheeler: Did you say you’d consulted 100 nonfiction books?

Amanda Barratt: Yes, I did. I always want to make sure in case my editor ever asks me, for a source when she’s reading the manuscript. I always keep a list of every book I read, and so I counted what I read for The Warsaw Sisters. And yes, it was over a hundred titles.

Jenny Wheeler: My gosh, that’s amazing. This story involves two sisters, Helena and Antonina.

They have different ways of dealing with the events that are facing them, and. that difference the story creates some distance and conflict between them.

As it progresses, can you outline for us a little bit of what those dilemmas were without giving away too much of the story?

Amanda Barratt: Yes. They each go on separate journeys and journeys that take them apart, but throughout the course of the novel, the enduring bond of sisterhood is something that the novel really explores and something I really love delving into.

So, my character of Antonina, she is works with a network organized and operated primarily by women, the most famous of whom is Irena Sendler.

And many people have heard of her and she is part of that network which rescued Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto and sheltered them on the outside of the city.

Antonina ends up using her flat as a hiding place for these Jewish children in their first hours and days out of the ghetto as they’re adjusting to the shock and the trauma of all of that.

Irena’s story is so inspiring, so I really love being able to draw in and include her as a cameo character in the novel.

And then also through my own character of Antonina, celebrate and honor the other women who worked so courageously and risked so much to shelter these children.

And then my other character, Helena, she is, as I’ve said, inspired by the women who worked in the Polish resistance movement.

Illuminating Warsaw at a horrific period

Most of these women who were these key figures in this organization were in their late teens, in their early twenties.

And before the actual uprising broke out in Warsaw, they served as couriers and they would carry messages all across the city and deposits them in these secret letter boxes and be organizing these meetings between various cells.

It was extraordinarily dangerous work, ‘because often they were carrying the materials on their person. And if they were stopped, as was so often happened in Warsaw, by a German policeman, and discovered with this, it would be an immediate arrest and imprisonment.

And then finally, when the. Warsaw Uprising breaks out these women become fighters on the front lines.

They served as couriers and nurses and many, some of them even combatants, fighting with arms and hand.

These are young women who are suffering and sacrificing as soldiers, and their stories are extraordinary. They’re remarkable, and that they did this… And that they survived this…

I really love just being able to bring them to light, to illuminate their stories and to illuminate the story of the Warsaw Uprising through their stories, which is something I think a lot of people may, especially in North America, where I live, may not have heard of.

Smuggling in food, smuggling out children

Jenny Wheeler: Now you mentioned that social worker, Irena, she is a real true life character, isn’t she?

Amanda Barratt: Yes. Her name is Irena Sendler and she was one of the leaders in what became a very vast network of people who were helping the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Irena, from the very beginning of the ghetto almost, she was entering the ghetto. And at first, she and her few female colleagues who were allowed to enter the ghetto.

They were smuggling in food. They were smuggling in medicine. They were smuggling in typhus vaccines, mostly at first, just for their acquaintances whom they known before the war, whom they were desperate to help.

And it grew. And finally, when, as the situation in the ghetto grew more dire, and then as the deportations of the Treblinka extermination camp began, where train loads of Jewish men, women, and children were daily being sent out of the ghetto to be murdered.

Then Irena and her colleagues began to embark on an even more dangerous mission, smuggling out these children and knowing that if they couldn’t save, the hundreds of thousands of those who were in the ghetto, they could do what they could for the most vulnerable.

And together this group of women saved it’s estimated as many as 2,500 Jewish children.

The Warsaw playlist – a lot of Chopin

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, fantastic. Two of your characters are gifted musicians,

The link between them, the thing that absolutely draws them together, is their shared passion and talent for music. And I noticed that you do have a playlist for this book on YouTube. Tell us a bit about that playlist.

Amanda Barratt: I loved creating the playlist. I listen to so much music as I write and as I’m thinking about the story, and it provides such inspiration for me.

I wanted to be able to make that accessible to readers. It includes lots of Chopin, which is my character Antonina’s favorite piece.

And she and her boyfriend, who is a Jewish and a musician, really share a special bond with Chopin. What I also loved was including was songs from the Warsaw Uprising. During the fighting and in the days before, there were a lot of musicians who were composing these patriotic songs.

And they became famous and I loved listening to them. They were inspiring as I brought that journey of my characters together. The playlist includes a lot of that and also includes some music soundtracks from some films that were inspiring. It helped to create the atmosphere of the novel.

Jenny Wheeler: Look, you did mention the book before this one. Within These Walls Of Sorrow, also set in Warsaw, as you’ve mentioned. Is there something about Poland that particularly draws you? You don’t have family links or anything like that?

Amanda Barratt: Yes, I’m of Polish heritage, so it’s very special to me to be able to explore these stories because, although I don’t believe that my immediate relatives were there during the war, they came and were living in America at the time, it’s definitely possible that there were extended family over there.

To think about what they must have endured and the stories of ordinary people…

The Polish narrative and what Poland endured and also the story of the Polish resistance is something that I did not know a lot about.

I certainly didn’t learn a lot about it in school, and so to be able to explore that story, explore both what Poland suffered and both the incredible courage of the Polish people.

I’m really passionate about being able to illuminate and explore that.

Putting women on the billboards

Jenny Wheeler: It is interesting how a number of these important stories of these kinds of events have featured men, but I can’t think of any that, like an international movie, that has really highlighted women’s efforts.

Amanda Barratt: Yes, I completely agree. There was a Hallmark Hall of Fame film about Irena Sendler, but I would really love to see her story on the big screen in rather a Schindler’s List budget sort of way.

Because the story of her is just so remarkable. And I think that yes, I’d love to see more women’s stories illuminated in that way.

Jenny Wheeler: Your books have won important awards Within These Walls Of Sorrow won two Christie awards for Book of the Year and Best Historical Fiction.

And the story before that one, The White Rose Resists also won a Christie Award for historical fiction. Tell us a bit about the Christies for people who might not understand the significance.

Amanda Barratt: So, the Christie Awards, which I was just completely stunned, still stunned, and so honored by those, is a very large award in the inspirational Christian fiction community.

They are held once a year at a gala. And it was really special.

I have many authors whom I admire who have been honored with the Christie in the years past. So to share that was really meaningful.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. The White Rose Resists was another World War II story. You obviously love this World War II period, and that one as well was based on a true story about students who resisted Hitler.

I had no idea there were students who resisted Hitler, so tell us a little about that one.

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