The Kommandant's Girl
A Novel
Pam Jenoff
Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau has been married only three weeks when Nazi tanks thunder into Poland. Within days Emma's husband is forced to disappear underground, leaving her alone in the Jewish ghetto. In the dead of night, the resistance smuggles her out and brings her to Krakow, where she takes on a new identity as Anna Lipowski, a gentile.
Emma's already precarious situation is complicated by her introduction to Kommandant Richwalder, a high-ranking Nazi official who hires her to work as his assistant. As the atrocities of war intensify, Emma must make unthinkable choices that will force her to risk not only her double life, but also the lives of those she loves.
THE KOMMANDANT’S GIRL SERIES
The Kommandant’s Girl, 2007
The Diplomat’s Wife, 2008
The Ambassador’s Daughter, 2013
“In her luminous and groundbreaking debut, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shows the unimaginable sacrifices one woman must make in a time of war.” —Park Row
About the Author
Pam Jenoff is the New York Times bestselling author of historical novels centered on the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her fiction gives voice to Jewish survivors, rescuers, and resisters, and to the quieter, often overlooked stories of women in wartime Europe.
Her work draws on a distinctive background. She earned degrees from George Washington University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon, and she later worked for the U.S. Consulate in Kraków, Poland, on Jewish communal and heritage issues. That experience shaped her debut, The Kommandant’s Girl, and her many novels set in occupied Poland and beyond.
Her books return to themes central to Jewish memory: hiding and rescue, the fragile bonds of family and chosen family, the moral complexity of survival, and the long aftermath of loss. The Winter Guest follows Polish sisters sheltering a Jewish American soldier. The Orphan’s Tale centers on a Jewish infant, a circus troupe, and the women who protect him. The Woman with the Blue Star tells of Jews hiding in the Kraków sewers. The Lost Girls of Paris traces women of the Allied resistance.
Jenoff lives near Philadelphia with her family and teaches law at Rutgers Law School.