Wartime Lies

Wartime Lies is a 1991 novel by the Jewish-American author Louis Begley. Based loosely on the events of Begley’s own boyhood, the novel recounts the experiences of Maciek, a Polish Jew born just before the outbreak of World War II: to survive the war, he is forced to inhabit an entirely false identity. The novel is narrated from the perspective of the older Maciek, who reflects on the permanent effects of being forced to live a lie as a child: “The man with sad eyes believes he has been changed inside forever, like a beaten dog, and gods will not cure that. He has no good deeds to look back upon.” The older narrator makes frequent reference to the classics of European literature, especially Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno.

Maciek is born a few months after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933­—the event which catapulted the Nazis to a consolidated political power in Germany. Maciek’s birth is also traumatic in its own right: his young mother dies as a result. Maciek is raised by his mother’s older sister, Tania, who takes charge of the whole household. His father is a wealthy, Vienna-educated doctor, and Tania, too, is from a wealthy family and a beauty. However, she is a strange, strong character, deemed “unmarriageable” due to her idiosyncratic behavior and rumored love affairs.

Tania is a domineering stepmother, and her behavior takes its toll on the sensitive young Maciek. By the age of three, he suffers from terrible nightmares and several eating disorders. He is saved from his rapidly deteriorating mental and physical condition by Zosia, a non-Jewish Pole hired by the family as a nursemaid for Maciek. Zosia takes the boy to bed with her, mothering him physically and intimately. Soon Maciek starts to get well, and to enjoy the comforts and privilege of his life—only for the war to break out.



Maciek’s father is forced to accompany the Russian army on its retreat from Poland. The Germans arrive and begin rounding up Jews. Zosia is forced to leave Maciek’s household by her father. Jews are being harassed, evicted, and attacked on every side, by Germans and Poles alike.

Tania reveals a gift for survival. She seduces a German administrator and places the family under his protection. Betrayed by informants, he is forced to kill himself and Maciek’s grandmother (who is caught in his home). The SS begins looking for Tania.

With Maciek, Tania flees from boarding house to boarding house. She manages to obtain false “Aryan papers” identifying them as Catholic Poles, and they make their way towards Warsaw, where Maciek’s grandfather is in hiding.



Tania begins to teach Maciek the lies he must tell, the performance he must give, to avoid detection. He hates falsehood, but he understands that the likely alternative is death. Every night, she reviews their performance, demanding perfection, “as if one performer were speaking to another about their art.”

Maciek relies on his well-bred politeness, answering queries with a blank smile. All the while, he registers the horror of what he witnesses around him, such as the cheerful reaction of non-Jewish Poles when the Germans begin shelling the Warsaw ghetto.

Maciek is disturbed by the extent to which Tania seems to enjoy her daring, her performance, and the risks she is taking: “I suffered from her jokes,” he recalls. “I thought they made us feel even lonelier. I didn't like the thought of being a criminal.” He begins internally to resist Tania’s insistence on lying and performance, even as he knows he must maintain the performance in public.



Eventually, Maciek begins to rebel, using Tania’s own preferred methods against her. He alters the requirements for his homework, and she catches him: “When we were alone, Tania said scornfully that if it was my nature to be a cheat it was too bad that I was not at least original and clever at it.”

Maciek and Tania endure the constant fear of discovery, the horror of the Warsaw uprising, and the death of Maciek’s grandfather. They survive until the end of the war, when Maciek’s father returns from a Siberian prison camp with a new wife. Maciek is relieved to be free of Tania, but he does not realize, yet, that he is anything but free of her influence, which will haunt him throughout his life. The family prepares to emigrate.

The novel’s final words are spoken by the older narrator: he writes off his whole childhood identity as “vanitas,” empty lies.



Wartime Lies was hailed as a “masterly first novel” by the New York Times. It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1991 and the Prix Médicis étranger in 1992. In 1993, Warner Brothers green-lit a film version of the novel under the title “Aryan Papers,” written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, but the project was shelved. Begley has written a number of novels since Wartime Lies, most famously the Schmidt trilogy.