Content Warning: This section discusses wartime violence, the Holocaust and antisemitism, and death.

As a bildungsroman, Uprising explores the growth and development of Lidia as she matures throughout the novel and learns to live in a city decimated by Nazi occupation. As the protagonist and a dynamic character, Lidia experiences major internal changes throughout the text, which reflects her personal growth.

At the novel’s start, the author portrays Lidia as headstrong and immature. She angrily plays the piano in defiance of her mother and fails to grasp the severity of the war. When she and Papa check on the house during the Siege of Warsaw, she plays her piano, earning an angry rebuke from her father for alerting the neighbors to their location. He warns her, “Things have changed, Lidia, and you must change too. You must be smart in everything you do. You must be careful at all times, because a single mistake will carry a high price” (22). The next time she goes into the house with Ryszard, she remembers her father’s warning; she does not play the piano and promises herself that she “w[ill] not make a single mistake” going forward (32). From that point on, Lidia begins to change, learning the dangers of living under Nazi rule.