Author Nina Willner

About the author:

Nina Willner is the award-winning author of two critically acclaimed nonfiction books. The Boys in the Light (Dutton/Penguin Random House 2025) was named Amazon's #3 Best Book of 2025 – Top Nonfiction, and Best History Book of the Year, received a Kirkus starred review, and won a 2026 Christopher Award. Willner's first book Forty Autumns (HarperCollins Wm Morrow 2016) was named a "Top 15 Nonfiction Book of 2016" by The CS Monitor . Prior to her writing career, Nina was a US Army intelligence officer who led sensitive missions behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. After a career in intelligence, Nina lived in Moscow, Minsk, Prague, Ottawa and Istanbul working on numerous humanitarian missions. After years living abroad, she now writes narrative nonfiction full time from her home in Washington DC.

The Boys in the Light follows the parallel journeys of Company D and Eddie Willner, the author's father, as they are caught up on two sides of World War II.

At sixteen, Eddie Willner was among the millions of European Jews rounded up by Hitler's Nazis. He was forced into slave labor alongside his father and his best friend, Mike, and spent the next three years of his life surviving the death camps, including Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in the United States, boys only a few years older than Eddie were joining the army and heading toward their own precarious futures. Once farmers, factory workers, and coal miners, they were suddenly untested soldiers, thrust into the brutal conflicts of WWII.

A company of 3rd Armored Division tankers, led by 23-year-old Elmer Hovland, quickly became battle-hardened and weary, constantly questioning whether the war was worth it. They got their answer when two emaciated boys stepped out of the woods with their tattooed arms raised.

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