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

She was referring to a make-believe game we had played when I was little. I was too old for such childish things, and the memory of such games, which I had most often played with my father, caused my sorrow to well up anew. But my mother’s ability to put the best face on any situation was one of the things I loved most about her, and her willingness to make believe, even now, reminded me that we were in this together.

We caught up with the others and continued along the sewer path, which seemed to go on forever. Pawel walked in front, followed by the young couple and then the religious family with the old woman, who, despite looking close to ninety, moved with surprising speed. Surely we must be nearing the city limits, I thought. Perhaps there was some route to freedom ahead, maybe to the forest on the outskirts of the city where I’d heard of Jews hiding. I could not wait to breathe fresh air once more. Pawel led us to the right into a smaller offshoot of the main tunnel and the path seemed to incline upward, as if we were nearing the outside. My heart lifted as I imagined feeling the morning sunlight on my face and leaving the sewer behind forever.

Pawel turned again, left this time, and led us to a concrete chamber, without windows or any other source of light. Maybe four by four meters, it was just smaller than the single-room apartment I had shared with my parents in the ghetto. The sewer waters lapped at the slanted entranceway like waves on a shore. Someone had put some narrow boards across cinder blocks to form makeshift benches and there was a rusty woodstove in the corner. It was almost as if we were expected here.

“This is where you will hide,” Pawel confirmed. He gestured around the chamber. I realized then that Pawel had not been leading us through the sewer pipes to get somewhere else. The sewer was the somewhere.

“Here?” I repeated, forgetting Mama’s earlier warning to be quiet. All heads turned in my direction. Pawel nodded. “For how long?” I could not imagine spending another hour in the sewer.

“I don’t understand,” Pawel said.

Mama cleared her throat. “I think what my daughter is asking is, where will we be going from here?”

“Fools,” the old woman snapped. It was the first time I had heard her speak. “This is where.”

I looked at my mother in disbelief. “We’re meant to live here?” My mind whirled. We could survive here a few hours, a night maybe. When Papa had bade me to go through the hole in our bathroom into the sewer, I had understood it to be transit, a passage to safety. And as we made our way through the filth and despair, I told myself it was necessary to escape. Instead, it was the destination itself. For all of my wildest nightmares, I could not have imagined that we would be staying in the sewer.

“Forever?” I asked.

“No, not forever, but...” Pawel glanced at Mama uncertainly. People living through the war did not have an easy way of speaking of the future. Then he looked me in the eye once more. “When we first made plans, we assumed we would get you out through the tunnel where it ends at the river.” I could tell from the catch in his voice that the “we” he was talking about included my father. “Only now the Germans have that exit guarded. If we go forward, we will be shot.” And if we returned to the ghetto, the same, I thought. We were trapped, with nowhere to go. “This is the safest choice for you all. The only hope.” There was a note of pleading in his voice. “There is no other way out of the sewer, and even if there was, the streets are too dangerous now. All right?” he asked, as if needing me to agree. As if I had a choice. I didn’t answer. I could not imagine saying yes to such a thing. Still, Papa would not have brought us here unless he believed it was the only option, our best chance of surviving. At last I nodded.

“We can’t stay here,” a voice said behind me. I turned. Across the chamber, the young woman with the toddler was speaking to her husband, repeating my protest anew. “We were promised a way out. We can’t stay here.”

“Leaving is impossible,” Pawel said patiently, as if he had not just explained the whole thing to me. “The Germans have the end of the tunnel guarded.”

“There’s no other choice,” her husband agreed.

But the woman took her son from her husband and started for the entrance to the chamber. “There’s a way out ahead, I know it,” she insisted stubbornly, pushing past Pawel and heading in the opposite direction from where we had come.

“Please,” Pawel said. “You mustn’t go. It’s not safe. Think of your son.” But the woman did not stop and her husband followed. In the distance, I could hear them still arguing.

“Wait!” Pawel called in a low voice from the entrance to the chamber. But he did not go after them. He had all of us—and himself—to protect.

“What will become of them?” I asked aloud. No one answered. The couple’s voices faded in the distance. I imagined them walking toward the place where the sewer met the river. Part of me wished that I had fled with them.

A few minutes later, a sound like firecrackers rang out. I jumped. Though I had heard gunfire several times in the ghetto, I had never gotten used to the sound. I turned to Pawel. “Do you think...?” He shrugged, unable to say whether the shots had been aimed at the family that had fled or had been fired on the street above. But the voices in the corridor had gone silent.

I moved closer to Mama. “It will be fine,” she soothed.

“How can you possibly say that?” I