Listening to Chopin While Fighting Nazis

Twenty Angels on Her Roof

By: Alex Charns

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

"Twenty Angels on Her Roof": "A blistering, audacious, darkly luminous tale of defiant faith, ferocious innocence, and celestial rebellion. In Charns's latest novella, a razor-sharp, unbreakable 12-year-old dares to marshal angels against the iron cruelty of the Third Reich. In 1942 Nazi-occupied Suwałki, 12-year-old Basia Gwiazdowska serves as lookout while her father listens to an illegal radio and works with the Polish Home Army. After he smuggles twenty Jewish neighbors to safety in Lithuania, the Gestapo arrest him for treason. Left behind with her fury and fear, Basia turns to the Black Madonna, Baby Jesus, twenty Jewish angels, and a mysterious wanderer named Tortuga, assembling a celestial resistance against the machinery of Nazi power.
Charns fuses wartime realism with mystical imagination. Basia's world is historically precise, filled with illegal radios, prison sentences, deported classmates, opportunistic collaborators, yet it is filtered through a consciousness that refuses to accept that evil is the final authority. Angels stand on rooftops in gratitude for mercy shown. Saints negotiate from the margins. Mary and Baby Jesus engage in intimate theological exchanges that oscillate between reverence and irreverence. Free will remains at the story's center. The angels cannot overrule it, even when Basia thirsts for vengeance. Heaven refuses to participate in violence.
What distinguishes the book is its tonal daring. Horror coexists with dark humor; fascist myth collapses under ridicule. Basia emerges neither saint nor symbol but a volatile, questioning child wrestling God in real time. Fate and chance, faith and rage, are examined with audacious moral energy, suggesting that mercy—once enacted—generates forces that outlive terror. Perfect for readers who love fierce historical fiction, mystical wartime defiance, and short, powerful reads charged with faith and rebellion." The Prairies Book Review

"Listening to Chopin While Fighting Nazis": "A deeply revealing, intimate account of a family’s Polish history. As a six-year-old boy, Charns came across a book named ‘I Survived Hitler’s Hell’ by A.P. Gwiazdowski and became curious about his family’s Polish history. As he grows older, he begins to wonder about his family’s claim about risking their lives for their Jewish neighbors in Suwalki, Poland, during WWII and his maternal grandfather Alexander Peter Gwiazdowski’s antisemitic views. Charns took on himself to unravel the truth, throwing himself into meticulous research, which included reading Polish history, interviewing survivors, Internet searches, requesting files under the Freedom of Information Act, and reading FBI memos on his deceased relatives. Soon, it becomes apparent that this story of a family’s role in saving the lives of their neighbors in a small Polish town was not only true but also served as a small-scale version for a considerable chunk of population—rescue efforts ranging from the isolated actions of individuals to organized networks both small and large. Charns details his family’s part in the political resistance to Nazi rule ..." Prairies Book Review.