Sunrise Shows Late: A Novel

A love story about a young woman in a displaced-persons camp and a fellow survivor smuggling guns and DPs to Palestine.
Like Manya Gerson, the young heroine of Sunrise Shows Late, author Eva Mekler was born in Poland and spent some time in a displaced persons' camp in Germany. Although Mekler and her family left the camp when she was 4, her descriptions of Manya's experiences as a displaced person ring with simple authenticity.

At the beginning of the novel, Manya returns to her old neighborhood in Warsaw only to realize there is nothing left for her in Poland. A veteran of Poland's resistance movement, she is also a Jew and a communist--unpopular things to be in post-World War II Poland. In search of a new life, Manya winds up in a D.P. camp in Allied-occupied Germany.

There she meets two very different men: Emmanuel Kosak, a scientist who offers her a safe life in Paris; and Bolek Holzer, who smuggles Jews into Palestine and is committed to the defense of an Israeli state. Manya's choice may not surprise anyone, but how she gets there makes for an interesting journey.