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

he went there to look for her. He learned that she had come to the hospital, but not with the baby. He did some more digging and found the priest who had saved me and learned where I had been placed. When I was older, I corresponded with him for many years. He told me about my family. But there were so many questions he couldn’t answer.

“So I came to find you to learn more about them, or at least about my sister. I would like to know her.” This is what I wanted, to find the last link to the sister I had never known and to capture, now while I still can, the stories that would bring her back to life. This is why I had come all of this way. My entire family had been killed before I was old enough to know them. I have had a good life, filled with a husband who had loved me, two children and now grandchildren. But this piece has always been missing, a hole where my past should be. I want to know the people I had lost.

I put the bouquet of flowers down on the table. “These are for you.”

Ella does not take the flowers, but stares at them for several seconds. “Mama was right,” she whispers to herself.

“Excuse me?”

“She said that there would be flowers someday.” Her words are confusing to me and I wonder whether the surprise of my coming has been too much. She presses her lips together, as if there is something else she wants to say but cannot. “So then how did you find out about me?” She still has more questions than answers.

“Saul,” I reply.

“Saul?” Ella smiles as she repeats the familiar name, the lines about her mouth deepening. Her eyes dance. “He’s still alive?”

“Yes, he’s a widower living in California with many children and grandchildren. He never forgot about Sadie, though.”

“He made it after all,” she says with a quiver, sounding as if she is speaking more to herself than to me.

“Before Pawel died, he told me about the other family, the Rosenbergs, who had lived in the sewer,” I explain. “Years later, I was able to find Saul. He gave me so many of the answers I was seeking about what had happened to my family. He had been separated from Sadie as they fled, and he was never able to learn what became of her. But he told me that she had a friend, a brave Polish girl, Ella Stepanek, who helped them escape. I began researching, trying to find this woman who had helped my sister. For years I hit a dead end, but then after Communism ended and I could get to the archives in Poland, I learned that there had been a young woman named Ella Stepanek who fought in the Warsaw Uprising. I thought it might be you.” She blinks, not answering. “So I came to find you.”

Yet as she sits before me now, something is still not right. Taking in the familiar shape of her eyes, something inside me shifts. I know then that I have not found the woman I came looking for. “Only you aren’t Ella, are you?” She does not answer. Her fine porcelain skin pales even more. “At least, you weren’t always.”

Her hand, resting on the edge of the table, begins to tremble once more. “No,” she says, her voice scarcely a whisper. “I wasn’t.”

A realization rises up in me like a wave, threatening to sweep me under, the words so unreal that I hardly dare speak them. “Then I guess,” I say slowly, “that makes you Sadie.”

“Yes.” She reaches out and touches my cheek with shaking fingers. “Oh, my baby sister...” Then, without warning, the woman whom I’ve met just minutes ago falls into my arms. As I embrace her, my mind reels. I came here looking for answers about my sister.

Instead, I found my sister herself.

A few seconds later, we break apart. I stare at her as the reality sinks in: Sadie, my sister, is alive. She clings to my arm like a life raft, not wanting to let go. “But how is it even possible?” I ask. “All of these years, I thought you had died in the sewer.” I had searched, of course, every possible archive for a record of my sister, Sadie Gault. But after an entry in the ghetto records showing that she had been interned there, the trail went dark. I knew from Pawel and Saul that she had escaped to the sewer with our parents, and that our mother and father had both died. I assumed that Sadie had perished, too.

“When you were born, things became very difficult,” Sadie begins. “We couldn’t keep a baby from crying and giving us away in the sewer. So our mother took you to find a safe place to hide you. She left me with the Rosenbergs, Saul and his family.” I feel then how awful it must have been for Sadie to have been left behind alone. She might have hated me for it. “Mama never returned. She died in the hospital.” Her eyes fill with tears. Although I have grieved her my whole life, I am filled with newfound sadness as I think of the mother I never knew.

Sadie continues, “Several weeks after Mama left, Ella came to the sewer to rescue us. She said that our hiding place had been compromised and it wasn’t safe for us to stay any longer. We would have to flee with her. But the Germans had laid mines in the sewer, and as we tried to escape, several detonated. The sewer walls collapsed, separating Ella and me from Saul and his father. We tried to escape another way, through a chamber, but it flooded. I couldn’t swim. Ella saved me.” As she relives the memory, her eyes fill with tears. “But the basin wall caved in and the waters swept us under. Ella was slammed against a