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

of strange, underground world I had never thought of or known to exist. I stared dizzily at the water, my fear rising. I could not swim. No matter how many times Papa had tried to teach me, I could not bear to put my head beneath the water, even in the calmest lake in summer. I would never survive if I fell in here.

“Come,” the man who had popped through our bathroom floor said. He was broad-shouldered and stocky, I noted now that I could see all of him. He wore a simple cloth hat and high boots. “We can’t stay here.” His voice echoed too loudly in the rounded chamber.

He started walking along the ledge, holding the lamp aloft in front of him. Despite his boxy frame, he moved easily along the narrow path with the ease of one who worked in the sewer, spent his days here.

“Papa, who is he?” I whispered.

“A sewer worker,” Papa replied. We followed the worker single file, using the rounded slimy wall to balance ourselves. The tunnel stretched endlessly into the darkness ahead. I wondered why he had chosen to help us, where we were going, how he would ever get us out of this wretched place. Except for the rushing of water, the air around us was silent and still. The awful noises of the Germans above were muted, nearly gone.

We reached a place where the wall of the tunnel seemed to bow outward away from the water, forming a small alcove. The sewer worker motioned us inside the wider space. “Rest, before we go on.”

I peered doubtfully at the small black rocks that covered the ground, wondering where we were meant to rest. Something seemed to move on top of them. Closer, I could see that they were thousands of tiny yellow maggots. I stifled a yelp.

My father, seemingly not minding, sank down to the rocks. His back rose with great breaths of exhaustion. He looked up for a moment and I saw something, worry or fear maybe, cross his face in a way it never quite had before. Then noticing me, he held out his arms. “Come.” I lay across his lap, allowing him to shield me from the filthy, maggot-infested ground.

“I will come back for you when it is safe,” the worker said. Safe for what? I wanted to ask. But I knew better than to question the person who was trying to save us. He stepped out of the alcove, taking the lamp with him and casting us into darkness. The others settled onto the ground. No one spoke. We were still beneath the ghetto, I realized, hearing the Germans above once more. The arrests seemed to be complete now, but they were still combing the buildings, looking for anyone who might be hiding and picking through the meager belongings people had left behind like vultures. I imagined them going through our tiny apartment. We had almost nothing by the end; it had all been sold or left behind when we moved to the ghetto. Still, the idea that people could go through our property, that we had no right to anything of our own anymore, made me feel violated, less human.

All of my fears and sadness welled up anew. “Papa, I don’t think I can do this,” I confided in a whisper.

My father wrapped his arms around me and the feeling was so warm and comforting we might have been back home. I buried my head against his chest, taking comfort in the familiar mint and tobacco scent, and trying to ignore the sewer stench that mixed with it. Mama settled by his side and rested her head on his shoulder. My eyelids grew heavy.

Sometime later, Papa shifted, waking me from sleep. I opened my eyes and peered in the semidarkness at the other families, who were scattered around us sleeping. The younger man from the religious family was awake, though. Beneath his black hat, he had gentle features and a small, trim beard. His brown eyes glittered in the darkness. I moved carefully away from Papa, and crawled gingerly across the slippery floor toward him. “Such an odd thing to do, sleeping among total strangers,” I said. “I mean, winding up here, who could have imagined?” He did not answer, but eyed me warily. “I’m Sadie, by the way.”

“Saul,” he replied stiffly. I waited for him to say something more. When he did not, I retreated back across the floor toward my parents. Saul was the only one in the whole group close to my age, but he seemed to have no interest in being friends.

A short while later, the worker returned, re-illuminating the alcove with his lamp and waking the others. He gestured silently that we had to keep going, so we stood up stiffly and assembled single file to follow the path along the wide river once more.

A few minutes later, we reached a juncture. The worker led us off the main channel, turning right into a narrower tunnel that took us farther from the raging sewer river. That path soon ended at a concrete wall. A dead end. Had he lured us deliberately into some sort of a trap? I had heard stories of Gentiles betraying their Jewish neighbors and turning them in to the police, but this seemed an odd way to do it.

The worker knelt with his lamp and I could see that lower on the wall there was a small metal circle, a kind of cover or cap. He pried it open to reveal a horizontal pipe, then stepped back. The entrance to the pipe was only about twenty inches in diameter. Surely he didn’t mean for us to go through it. But he stood, waiting expectantly.

“It’s the only way,” he said, a note of apology in his voice that seemed to be directed mostly at my mother. “You have to go on your stomach. If you put your head and shoulders through, everything else will follow.” He handed Mama