While writing the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins, 2020), Judy Batalion was drawn into the cosmopolitan society of inter-war Warsaw – a city filled with theaters, cabaret, and nightclubs with revolving dance floors – that had created these extraordinary young women. Batalion’s debut novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, shines a light on this rarely explored world through the lives of two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them.

Judy Batalion is the author of several books of award-winning nonfiction including The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos and her work has appeared in New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, and many other publications.

HBI was honored to support The Last Woman of Warsaw in 2022 with an Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Award on Women, Gender and the Holocaust as well as The Light of Days with several research awards.

The Last Woman of Warsaw will be published on April 7, 2026 and is available for pre-order now.

This is a companion event to HBI’s art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949, at the Kniznick Gallery, January 27 – April 30.

Register to attend.