Wartime Lies

Blurb

Wartime Lies is a semi-autobiographical novel by Louis Begley first published in 1991. Set in Poland during the years of the Nazi occupation, it is about two members of an upper middle class Jewish family, a young woman and her nephew, who avoid persecution as Jews by assuming Catholic identities. Time and again the boy, who narrates the story from some remote point in time, reminisces about how he learned at an early age to lie in order to survive. Thus, his whole adult life is founded on the "wartime lies" of his childhood.
Wartime Lies won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1991. The French version, Une éducation polonaise, won the Prix Médicis étranger in 1992.