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

calculating the extra difficulties childbirth and a newborn would bring. For a second, I wondered if he might refuse to take my mother. I held my breath, waiting for him to say that it wouldn’t work and we would have to find another way.

But the man disappeared back into the hole to make way and my mother stepped forward. She handed Papa her satchel, then sat on the ground with effort, putting her legs through the hole. Under other circumstances she would have slipped through easily. “Little bird,” our father called her, and the name suited, for she was thin and girl-like even as she approached forty. However, she was bulky now, bearing the rounded stomach on her lithe frame as though holding a melon. Her skirt pulled down embarrassingly, revealing a patch of white belly. I thought, as I often had, that she was too old to be having another child. Mama let out a small yelp as Papa pushed her through the hole, then disappeared into the darkness.

“Your turn,” Papa said to me. I looked around, stalling for time. Anything to avoid going into the sewer. But the Germans were at the door of the building now, knocking hard. Soon they would break down the door and it would all be too late. “Sadie, hurry!” he said, and I could hear the pleading in his voice. Whatever he was asking me to do, he was doing to save our lives.

I sat on the ground as Mama had done and stared down into the hole, dark and ominous. A stench filled my nostrils and I gagged. Something rebellious and stubborn arose in me, eclipsing my normal obedience. “I can’t.” The hole was dark and terrifying, nothing visible on the other side. It was like the time I had tried to jump from a high tree branch into a lake, only a thousand times worse. I could not bring myself to go through with it.

“You must.” My father didn’t wait for further argument but shoved me roughly. The bulk of my clothes caused me to stick halfway down and he pushed me again, harder. The filthy edges of the concrete tore at my cheeks, cutting them, and then I was falling into the darkness.

I landed hard on my knees. Cold, foul water splashed up around me from the ground, soaking my stockings. I caught myself to avoid tumbling farther by grasping at a slimy wall. As I stood, I tried hard not to think about what I might be touching.

Papa lowered himself through the hole and landed beside me. From above, someone re-covered the floor. I had not seen anyone behind us and I wondered who, a neighbor Papa had paid perhaps or someone doing a good deed or too scared to drop into the sewer himself. Our last bit of light was eclipsed. We were trapped in the pitch-blackness of the sewer.

And we were not alone. In the darkness, I could hear people moving around us, though I could not tell who they were or how many. I was surprised that there were others. Had they come through a toilet hole to get here as well? I blinked, trying unsuccessfully to adjust my eyes. “What is happening?” a woman’s voice asked in Yiddish. No one answered.

I took a breath and started to gag. The smell was everywhere. It was the stench of water filled with feces and urine, as well as garbage and decay that thickened the air. “Breathe through your mouth,” Mama instructed quietly. But that was worse, as if I was eating the filth. “Shallow breaths.” This last bit of instruction did not help much either. The sewer water swirled ankle-deep, soaking through my boots and stockings, and the icy wetness against my skin caused me to shiver.

The stranger lit a carbide lamp and the light licked the rounded walls, illuminating a half-dozen strange, scared faces around me. Closest stood two men, one about my father’s age and the second appeared to be his son and maybe twenty or so. They were dressed in the yarmulkes and black clothing of religious Jews. “Yids,” Papa would have called them before the war came and we were all lumped together. He did not mean it unkindly, but rather as a sort of shorthand to refer to the religious Jews. They had always seemed so foreign to me with their own customs and strict observance, and in some ways I felt I had more in common with Gentile Poles than these other Jews.

Behind them stood another family, a young couple with a little boy of two or three sleeping in his father’s arms, all wearing nothing but pajamas beneath their coats. There was a stooped elderly woman, too, though she stood apart and I couldn’t tell which of the families she belonged to. Perhaps neither. I did not see any other girls or children close to my age.

As my eyes adjusted, I looked around. I had imagined the sewer, if I considered it at all, as pipes running beneath the ground. But we were in an immense, cavernous passageway with a rounded ceiling at least twenty feet across, like a tunnel that a freight train might pass through. The middle of the tunnel was filled with a swift current of black water, wide and deep enough to be a river. I had not imagined that such a vast body of water was rushing endlessly beneath our feet. The sound as it echoed off the high walls was almost deafening.

We stood on a thin lip of concrete not more than two feet wide that ran along one side of the river and I could just make out a second ledge running parallel on the far side. The current was strong and seemed to pull me in as I clung to the narrow path. I had read a book on Greek mythology once about Hades, lord of the underworld; now I seemed to find myself in just such a place, a kind