The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

you to do whatever you had to in order to live. You know that, don’t you?” I did not answer. “Don’t let her death be for nothing.” He pulled me up the riverbank. It was hard for me to walk, the thought of leaving her too much to bear. But she was gone. And staying here was not going to bring her back. Reluctantly, I let him draw me away from the exposed riverbank toward safety, but every step felt like a betrayal of the friend I left behind.

As we neared the street, I looked up at the tapestry of stars in the night sky. They seemed almost blue and it was as if there was one for each of the souls who had been set free. I saw her in the stars above and I knew that it was important that I go on for both of us. I could see it now, the constellations we had seen together that night, beckoning and leading me home.

When we reached the foot of the bridge, I looked back over my shoulder. Kraków, the only city I had ever known, sat shrouded in darkness, except for the sky, which burned pink along the horizon to the east. War still raged, my hometown under siege. And I was abandoning it. My guilt rose.

No, not abandoning, I corrected myself. I was leaving, but I would find a way to fight and honor her memory.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, putting my hand in his. Our fingers tightened around one another’s and together we took our first step toward freedom.

Epilogue

Kraków, Poland

June 2016

The woman I see before me is not the one I expected at all.

As I near her table, I study the woman, who has not yet seen me. Though she must be over ninety, her smooth skin and perfect posture make her look much younger. She has not succumbed to the short hair of old age as I have, but wears her white curls in a high messy bun that accentuates her cheekbones and other strong features. She is, in a word, regal.

Still, close up there is something different about her than I expected. Something familiar. It must be the anticipation, I tell myself, the searching and waiting. The moment I have dreamed of for so long is finally here.

I take a deep breath, steel myself. “Ella Stepanek?”

She does not answer, but blinks once. The rain, which had gone as quickly as it came, had sent other patrons scurrying indoors. But the woman sits, undeterred. As her chocolate-brown eyes focus on me, they cloud with confusion. “Do I know you?”

“We’ve never met,” I say gently. “But you knew my sister, Sadie. I’m Lucy Gault.” I use my family name, the one that had belonged to the parents and sister I’d never had the chance to know.

The older woman stares at me, as if seeing a ghost. “But how is that possible?” She tries to stand, but her knees wobble and she grips the edge of the table so hard that her tea sloshes over the edge of the cup, staining the tablecloth a darker blue. “That can’t be. We were sure you had died.”

I nod, a lump forming in my throat as it always does when I think of the improbability of my survival. By any measure, I should not have lived. I was born in a sewer, hidden from the Germans, who wanted to eliminate the next Jewish generation and killed them without mercy. I saw then the hundreds of thousands of children who had not lived. I should have been among them.

But somehow, at seventy-two, I am still here.

“How?” the older woman asks again.

I hesitate, searching for the right way to explain. Though I have imagined this moment a hundred times and tried to plan for it, words fail me and I struggle to figure out where to begin. “May I join you?” I ask.

“Please.” She gestures to the chair beside her.

I sit down and turn over the coffee cup on the saucer before me. “It sounds strange to say, but I was born in the sewer. You know that part, don’t you? And that my mother smuggled me out?”

Ella nods. “Your mother was trying to take you to a Catholic hospital that she thought was helping to hide Jewish children.”

“Yes, but on her way there, a priest saw my mother on the street in poor condition and warned her that it was not safe to take the baby to the hospital. He hid the baby and then took my mother to the hospital for care. Only my mother was at the hospital when the Germans came for her. I was saved and later adopted by a Polish couple. My adopted parents, Jerzy and Anna, were wonderful people and I had a good life. They decided to emigrate to America when I was five and I had a happy childhood growing up in Chicago. When I was old enough, they shared what little they knew of my past. I learned the rest from Pawel.”

“The sewer worker?” Ella looks stunned. “But he was arrested for helping the Jews. I assumed he died in prison.”

“He was. But he talked his way out of jail and returned to his family.”

“Pawel made it.” Ella’s eyes fill with tears. “I had no idea.”

“Pawel returned to the sewer after he was released to check on Sadie and the others he had helped. But they weren’t there. At first, he thought they had all been caught. Then he realized they fled the sewer or at least attempted to. He didn’t know where they had gone or whether they had made it. But he knew one possibility, at least for my mother, was that she had given birth and left the sewer to hide the baby.”

I pause as a waiter appears and pours coffee. When he has gone again, I continue. “Pawel was the one who had told my mother about the hospital in the first place. So