W Hour

Two close calls in one day were enough for me. I realized that the uprising was not like the games I played with Józek before the war. This was a very real battle, in which people were being killed and wounded.

Twelve-year-old Arthur Ney hides outside the Warsaw ghetto walls as the ghetto uprising begins in the spring of 1943, then flees to the countryside with false papers that identify him as a Polish Christian. Returning to Warsaw months later, he must face the realization that his family is gone. He spends the rest of the war in a Catholic orphanage, struggling with loneliness, guilt, fear and indecision about living under a false identity. When the Warsaw Uprising – codenamed W Hour – begins on August 1, 1944, Arthur Ney joins the barricades and fights for liberation.