It’s a strange time to be reading fiction about the Holocaust, as many of us are wondering if we might be living in the days before the next one. That is how it feels to be immersed in The Goddess of Warsaw, a captivating new work of historical fiction by New York Times best-selling author Lisa Barr, whose previous book, Woman on Fire, was a One Book, One Hadassah selection.

In Barr’s latest novel, when a young Hollywood newcomer wants to direct a film about legendary Golden Age film star Lena Browning, Lena is threatened by a Nazi from her past.

Before she became a star, Lena was Bina Blonski, a wealthy Polish Jewish actress whose tony life and prominent family were destroyed by the Nazis. In flashbacks, readers learn about how the Aryan-looking Bina/Lena survived the Warsaw Ghetto, worked as a spy, vanquished her enemies, supplied weapons to the fighters—and lost her true love.

One of the enjoyable aspects of reading The Goddess of Warsaw is that we know that our hero survives, but how she survives and at what cost to her friends, family and to her humanity are the questions fictional—and real-life—survivors must grapple with. And, as an author’s note explains, Goddess is rooted in actual history: In the ghetto, there were uprisings, smugglers, female spies and survivors to tell the tales. (That Lena survived to exact payback on hidden Nazis in America, however, may be conflating true stories with revenge tales like the film, Inglorious Basterds.)

Part steamy love story, part suspense tale and part revenge fantasy, Goddess is at its best when describing Lena’s past, her life before the Nazi occupation of Poland and in the ghetto:  “We should have left Poland long before the invasion in September 1939. We knew better. We saw the signs; small Jewish businesses targeted and destroyed. We were educated, worldly—we knew. But my mother insisted we stay, believed that our friends in high places would shield us….”

And even after, when Lena sees her old home while acting as a spy for the resistance, she ruminates: “We used to be secular, cultural Jews, mingling with the upper echelon of Warsaw society. We used to speak only Polish—not Yiddish, like most of the ghetto inhabitants. A maid used to wash my hair, and another used to lay out my clothes. Our so-called friends used to be loyal, until they eagerly handed us over to the Nazis like Beluga caviar on a platter…. We aren’t just Jews…we are inhabitants of a planet called Used to Be.”

As an American Jew after October 7, I read those lines wondering if my community is filled with inhabitants of the “planet called Used to Be.”

Hopefully not. But if we are, we can imagine take-no-prisoner heroes like Lena to help us. “With love from the Warsaw Ghetto,” as she says with every Nazi kill.

Amy Klein is a freelance writer and the author of The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant Without Losing Your Mind