In his new book, The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson tackles one of the most heralded figures in modern Western history: Winston Churchill.

The subjects you’ve tackled over the course of your career are quite broad and varied. Is there any common thread that unites your interests?
There’s no particular common thread, other than story. I’m always looking for compelling historical events that can be rendered in narrative form, with a beginning, middle and end, so that readers can get caught up in the action and live through it as if they didn’t know the ending. So that’s first. But a corollary motive is to answer the question: What was it like to have lived through that event? Then it becomes a matter of finding the right real-life characters whose experience provides the richest insight.

What compelled you to zoom in and write about this particular slice—just his first year as prime minister—of Churchill’s life and the lives of his family?
What drove me was an interest not so much in exploring that first year but rather in learning how Churchill and his family and inner circle actually went about surviving Germany’s aerial campaign against Britain. I mean, how really do you cope with eight months of near-nightly bombings—essentially a succession of 9/11s? It just happened that the Luftwaffe’s campaign coincided, rather neatly, with that first year. In fact, the year ended with an intense raid that occurred one year to the day after Churchill took office.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Splendid and the Vile.

You’ve described this book as a kind of “Downton on Downing,” because of the way the book chronicles not just Churchill but other people in his life during this period. What were some of the challenges of researching these other figures?
It’s always relatively easy to research so-called “Great Man History,” because leaders like Churchill leave rich archives of documents and vast amounts of scholarship. But often the histories written about them give short shrift to the people who were crucial in helping them get through the day and to the fact that, even in the midst of great events, our heroes still had to deal with such quotidian matters as paying bills and resolving domestic dramas. It’s these little corners of history that most appeal to me, and that can be the most difficult to unearth. But the reward is great, because as I’ve found time and time again, when you open a new window on a subject, you invariably find material that other scholars, looking for other things, are likely to have overlooked.

With so much having been recorded about Churchill already, did you uncover anything in your research that surprised you about the man?
I was surprised and delighted at every turn, actually—especially by the man’s sense of humor and his ability, even in the midst of the most awful events imaginable, to step up and just have fun—whether doing bayonet drills in the great hall of his country home or singing along to “Run Rabbit Run,” one of his favorite songs. Of course, his idea of fun also happened to include watching air raids from the nearest rooftop.

Why are we so interested in Churchill? What makes so many writers want to write about him, and so many readers want to read about him?
Maybe because there’s a heroic clarity to the man that seems so absent in the leaders we have today. Also, there’s always that underlying mystery: How did he do it? That’s what most intrigued me. My goal was to capture a richer, deeper sense of the man and his day-to-day experience and of those who helped him endure—because believe me, he did not do it alone. He relied heavily on family and his closest advisers for wisdom, comfort and simple distraction.

Your footnotes contain fascinating stories and insights that weren’t included in the main text. Would you share your favorite?
I do love salting the notes with little stories. That’s my reward for those stalwart souls who, like me, enjoy a good footnote. I’m a bit hesitant to give these stories away, but I suppose my favorite is the one in which Churchill’s long-suffering bodyguard, Inspector Thompson, describes the uniquely withering quality of Clementine Churchill’s glare whenever she became annoyed with him—which, apparently, was quite often.

“Even in the midst of great events, our heroes still had to deal with such quotidian matters as paying bills and resolving domestic dramas. It’s these little corners of history that most appeal to me . . .”

This book, like your others, is both methodically researched and engagingly narrative. Do you frontload your writing process with research, or do research and writing happen simultaneously?
My ideal is to finish all my research before I begin writing. This never happens. Invariably I get to a point where I feel that I’ve just got to start writing, whether the research is done or not. The story starts begging to come out, scratching at the door. So I’ll start writing those passages for which the underlying source material is most complete. I should point out, however, that the research never does end. I keep reading and tweaking until the final page-proofs are finished and the book is ready to be printed. And then I hope to God that I got everything right—which is why, for this book, I asked three top Churchill experts to read the final manuscript and hired a professional fact-checker to give it a line-by-line, quote-by-quote examination.

What’s the significance of the title, The Splendid and the Vile?
It derives from an observation made by one of Churchill’s private secretaries, John Colville, a central character in the book. In his diary he describes a particularly dramatic night raid, which he watched through a bedroom window. He was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the interplay of searchlights, guns and fire, and the awful reality it represented.

Are there any contemporary figures who embody Churchill’s leadership style—particularly, as you put it, “his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous”?
At the moment, no. Sadly, quite the opposite.

Do you have a favorite Churchill portrayal in film or TV?
No. Frankly, I think they mostly miss the mark, invariably leaning toward caricature. I must note that during the three or four years I worked on this book, I avoided watching any film or television portrayals of Churchill, so as not to distort my own emerging sense of the man. One of my favorite moments in my book is one windy night in the garden at 10 Downing Street, when Churchill, on the verge of a devastating decision, desperately needed the comfort and advice of a close friend, and. . . . Oops, too bad. I see we’ve run out of time.

Author photo © Nina Subin

While hunkered down in her apartment with two young daughters, a 9-month-old son and her husband during the COVID-19 pandemic, Judy Batalion has heard rumors from neighbors and friends of marriages on the rocks because of close quarters and unrelieved familial contact. It’s not nearly the same, Batalion declares, but it reminds her of the Jewish families trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

“Families were under high pressure, squeezed together, and studies show that in the [Warsaw] Ghetto, there was a very high rate of divorce,” Batalion says during a call to her apartment in Manhattan. She quips that her own home is “now also a preschool, an elementary school, a daycare, a corporate boardroom and a gym.”

Uncomfortable? Sure. But nothing like the disruption and terror of Jewish life in Poland under the Nazis, which Batalion describes in The Light of Days, her groundbreaking narrative history of the young Polish women at the forefront of the Jewish resistance. “The norms of family life were turned upside down,” Batalion says. “Many of the men were afraid to leave the house. It was easier for women and children to leave or escape, to go out to hunt for food, to smuggle, even to physically squeeze out through the ghetto walls. So there was a cascade of role reversals.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Light of Days.

Those reversals were part of a confluence of events that led a number of idealistic, restless, brave young Jewish women—some of them barely teenagers—to volunteer as couriers, informants and fighters in the struggle against the Nazis in Poland. Batalion first discovered fragments of their stories in a slender, musty book written in Yiddish that she found in the British Library.

Batalion grew up in Montreal, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. After graduating from Harvard, she spent a decade in London earning a Ph.D. in art history and developing a career as a comedian. “In England I was dealing with issues of my own Jewish identity, because being Jewish there seems so rare,” she says. “I wanted to write a performance piece about strong Jewish women, and I wanted a few historical figures to frame the piece.” So she went to the library.

Batalion was stunned by her discovery of the book, whose title translates as Women in the Ghettos. “I knew right away there was something to it,” she says. She was eventually awarded a grant to translate the book into English, but the translation work required significant contextual research. As her research grew, the translation project morphed into a parallel history project that became The Light of Days.

"I wanted to tell these women’s stories, and I thought telling it as a story would be more appealing to readers."

“Very little has been written in English, even academically, about these figures,” Batalion says. “And the bits that have been written read like encyclopedia entries—a snippet here, a snippet there. But those snippets don’t end up meaning anything. It’s hard to remember them. I wanted to tell these women’s stories, and I thought telling it as a story would be more appealing to readers.”

At the center of Batalion’s book is Renia Kukielka, whose commitment to resistance began when she was 15 years old. “She was a woman of action,” Batalion says. “As her children told me, she wasn’t someone who looked right and left and right and left. She just went! She had gut instincts. . . . She was savvy, smart and daring.”

The Light of Days follows the arc of Kukielka’s life through the early 1940s. Along the way, her story interweaves with those of about a dozen other female activists—such as Bela Hazan, who went undercover in a remarkable way. “At the height of the Holocaust, she worked as a translator and served tea to the Gestapo,” Batalion says. There’s even a photograph of Hazan with two other Jewish activists at a Gestapo Christmas party. “She lied to them that her brother had died so she could get a pass to travel to Vilna. The office sent her a condolence card! Later she masqueraded as a Catholic woman to help Jewish people in the infirmary at Auschwitz.”

“This is not a narrative about the Holocaust that I’d ever heard before. I kept feeling that if I didn’t tell it, who would?"

Then there was Frumka Plotnicki, who was “an introverted, serious person, a person the whole movement looked to and who refused to [escape the ghetto],” says Batalion. “Time and again she was told to leave, but she couldn’t. She had to be there to fight. She was one of the few who went down shooting.”

When Batalion began working on The Light of Days, she discovered that not even a general narrative history of the Jewish resistance in Poland existed. Working from sometimes contradictory memoirs and recorded testimonies, Batalion’s first task was to create a chronology of the resistance—a laborious but necessary effort that adds context and depth to the story she tells. The book has more than 900 endnotes, down from the original 3,000, and two dozen illuminating photographs.

Batalion acknowledges that the valiant women she portrays in The Light of Days were not the only female Jewish resistors in Poland or Europe. They’re just the first ones we’ll be able to read about in such depth. “It felt so important for me that these stories are told,” Batalion says. “This is not a narrative about the Holocaust that I’d ever heard before. I kept feeling that if I didn’t tell it, who would? In the most difficult, tortuous circumstances, they stood up. The bravery of these very young women inspired me.”