The Woman with the Blue Star by Pam Jenoff (read e books online free TXT) 📕

feast on whatever they could find. But it was daytime now, and I would not expect the vile rodents to be about.

The noise came again from below, too loud to be a rat. I looked down. Two eyes stared back at me. These were not the beady eyes of an animal, but dark circles ringed with white. Human. There was a person in the sewer. Not just a person—a girl. At first I thought I imagined it. I blinked to clear my vision, expecting the sight to have faded like some sort of a mirage. But when I looked again, the girl was still there. She was skinny and filthy and wet, staring up. She had stepped back a bit, as if afraid to be seen, but I could still make out her eyes in the darkness, searching. Watching me.

I started to remark aloud about her presence. Something stopped me, though, a fist that seemed to clench my throat, silencing my breath so that no sound would come. Whatever had forced her into that awful place meant that she did not want to be found. I should not, could not say anything. I gasped for air, willing the tightness to ease. Then I looked around, curious if anyone else had noticed, seen what I had just seen. The other passersby carried on heedlessly. I turned back again, wondering who the girl was and how she had come to be down there.

When I peered into the sewer again, she was gone.

6

Sadie

We were back in our apartment on Meiselsa Street, Papa whirling Mama around the kitchen to the tinny piano music that came through the floor as if it was one of the grand ballrooms in Vienna. When they had finished dancing, Mama breathlessly called me to the table where a fresh, delicious babka sat cooling. I picked up a knife and cut into the moist pastry. Suddenly, there was a rumbling beneath my feet and the floor began to crack. Papa reached across the table for me, but his hand slipped through mine. I screamed as the ground gave way and we fell through to the sewer below.

“Sadele.” A voice roused me from sleep. “You must be quiet.” It was Mama, softly but firmly reminding me that we could not cry out in our dreams, that we must be silent here.

I opened my eyes and looked around the damp, smelly chamber. The nightmare of falling into the sewer had been real. But my father was nowhere to be found.

Papa. His face appeared in my mind as it had in the dream. He had seemed so close, but now that I was awake, there was no way I could reach him. Even after a month, his death was still a constant pain. A knife shot through my heart anew every time I woke up and realized that he was dead.

I closed my eyes once more, willing myself to return to sleep so the dream of home and my father could come again. But it had slipped beyond reach. Instead, I pretended Papa was lying there beside Mama and me, that I could still hear the snore I used to complain about.

My mother gave me a reassuring squeeze, then rose and walked across the chamber to the makeshift kitchen in the corner to help Bubbe Rosenberg, who was shelling beans. Though the dimness of the chamber remained unchanged, I could tell from the noises on the street above that it was nearly dawn.

A few days, Mama had said. A week at most. That was more than a month ago. Once I could not have imagined staying in the sewer for so long. But there was simply nowhere to go. The ghetto had been emptied, all of the Jews who lived there killed or taken to the camps. If we went onto the street, we would be shot on sight or arrested. The sewer, which ran beneath the length of the city, opened at the Wisła River, but the entrance was guarded by armed Germans. I felt certain that Papa had not meant for us to stay and live in the sewer like this. But he had taken whatever plan he had for our escape with him to his watery grave. We were, quite literally, trapped.

I looked out from the corner where we slept. We had taken one side of the chamber as a sleeping area and the Rosenberg family the other, leaving the area in between for a kind of makeshift kitchen. Pan Rosenberg sat across the chamber, reading. I looked around for Saul, but he was nowhere to be found.

I sat up on the wood planks that formed my bed a few inches above the ground, bones aching in a way that reminded me of the pains my grandmother used to complain about. I thought longingly of the eiderdown quilt that had once covered my bed in our apartment, a far cry from the thin piece of burlap Mama had found for me here. I reached for my shoes at the foot of the bed. Mama still insisted, as she had the day we arrived, that we keep our feet dry, instructing me to swap between the two pairs of socks I had daily. I came to understand why: the others, who were less careful, developed infections, sores and pain from the dirty water that constantly seeped through our shoes.

I brushed my teeth, using a bit of the clean water from the pail and wishing for some baking soda to make them fresher. Then I walked to where Mama was preparing breakfast. The day after Pawel had left us, the others sat around, as though waiting for him to come and take us from here. But Mama set about making the chamber as inhabitable as possible. It was as if, despite her promise to me that it would be only a few days, she knew we were going to be here much, much longer.

My mother kissed me on the top of