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

we were captured. We didn’t want to be trapped underground—yet everything hung on our making it work.

Farther along the tunnel, I heard a noise. I jumped back instinctively. No SS or police had come into the sewer during our time here, but the threat of being discovered was ever-present. I listened for the sound of growing footsteps and, hearing none, I ventured forward in the tunnel once more. As I rounded the place where the tunnel curved, I noticed Saul, crouched on the ground.

I moved closer. When we first came to the sewer, I had been curious about Saul. He was the only one here close to my age and I hoped that we might be friends. At first, he had been standoffish. Though soft-spoken and kind, he didn’t talk much and his nose was often buried in a book. I could not blame him—he didn’t want to be here any more than I did. “It’s his religion,” Mama had told me once in a low voice, after witnessing my failed attempt to talk to him. “The boys and girls stay separate among the more observant Jews.” But as the weeks in the sewer passed, he had grown a bit friendlier, offering a word or two of conversation when the moment presented itself. More than once, he had looked across the chamber with his kind, dancing eyes and smiled at me, as if commiserating in the ridiculous awfulness of our situation.

Saul was often missing from the chamber and several times I had woken at night to find him gone. A few weeks earlier when I saw him creeping out, I had followed him from the chamber. “Where are you going?” I asked.

I expected him to be annoyed by my question. “Just exploring,” he said simply. “Come with me if you’d like.” I was surprised by the invitation. He started down the tunnel without waiting to see if I would accept. Saul walked ahead of me at a swift pace, and I struggled to keep up as he turned this way and that down a dizzying path through tunnels I had never explored. I could not have found my own way back if I wanted to. The waters had slowed to a trickle and there was a kind of eerie silence as we traveled through the pipes.

Finally, we reached a raised alcove, much smaller than the one where we lived. Saul gave me an awkward boost to help me into the space, which was just big enough for the two of us. Moonlight streamed through a broad grate, illuminating the alcove. It was high up and close to the street. Coming here in daylight would have been impossibly dangerous. Saul reached into a notch in the wall, searching for something, and I wondered what he had hidden. He pulled out a book.

“You’ve been here before,” I remarked.

“Yes,” he admitted sheepishly, as if I had discovered a dark secret. “Sometimes I can’t sleep. So I come here to read when the moonlight is good enough.” He fished out a second book, With Fire and Sword, and handed it to me. It was a historical Polish story and not a book I would have chosen for myself. Here, though, it was like gold in my hands. We dropped to the floor and sat side by side, reading in silence, our shoulders inches apart.

I walked to the alcove with Saul many nights after that. I didn’t know if Saul wanted my company, but if he minded, he didn’t complain. Our first business was always reading, but when it was cloudy or the moon dropped too low to illuminate the chamber, we would talk. I learned that Saul’s family was from Będzin, a small village near Katowice to the west. Saul and his father had decided to flee to Kraków after the occupation, thinking things would be better here. But Saul’s older brother, Micah, a rabbi, had stayed behind to be with the Jews who remained in the village and had been forced into the smaller ghetto the Germans had created in Będzin.

Saul had a fiancée. “Her name is Shifra. We’re to be married after the war. When my father and I had the chance to get out, I begged her to come with me. But her mother was too sick to travel and she refused to leave her family. I learned from a letter from Micah after we left that she was forced into the ghetto as well. I’ve had no word from her in some time, but I can only hope...” He trailed off. Hearing the warmth in his voice as he talked about Shifra, I felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. I imagined a beautiful woman with long dark hair. One of his own people. Saul and I were friends; I had no right to expect more. I realized in the moment both that I felt affection toward him and that my feelings were completely one-sided.

Back in his village, Saul had trained to be a tailor. But he wanted to be a writer and he told me stories he had written from memory, eyes dancing beneath his black hat. I loved hearing all of his ideas about the books he wanted to publish after the war. Though I had once planned to study medicine, I had tucked that idea away long ago. I had not known it was possible for people like us to have such big dreams, especially now.

Saul had become the closest thing to a friend I had found in the sewer. But now as I found him crouched low against the wall in the tunnel, he did not smile. His face was serious, eyes pained.

“Hello,” I ventured, moving toward him. I was surprised to see him here; he and his family seldom left the chamber on Shabbos. He did not answer. “What’s wrong?”

He held up his leg, and as I moved closer, I could see below the rolled cuff a deep gash on the back of it, oozing blood.