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

Sadie. She had come looking for me and unwittingly stepped into view. I willed her to duck back. But she stood motionless, her face frozen with horror. Any second they would see her.

“Come,” Krys urged, not understanding why I had not started away with him. I was paralyzed, uncertain what to do. I heard a scraping below then, Sadie’s footsteps echoing in the sewer as she scuttled away. I coughed loudly to try to mask the sound.

One of the Germans looked over his shoulder. “What was that?”

“Pardon me,” I said. “Spring allergies.” I let Krys lead me away, praying that the Germans would not question further.

“Wait!” the older German called. I froze. Did he suspect something? I turned back to see him staring strangely at Krys.

“You look familiar,” he said.

“I make deliveries,” Krys said, keeping his voice neutral. “You’ve probably seen me around town.” He turned to me. “Come now. Your mother is waiting.” As he led me away, I forced myself not to look back reluctantly at the grate.

My heart pounded as we walked. I could still feel the eyes of the Germans on us as we went, and I half expected them to come after us and detain us for questioning, or worse.

But they did not. “You again,” I said to Krys when we were well away from the alley. I tried to sound annoyed. “Are you following me?”

“Hardly,” he replied. “I work in this neighborhood, at the dock with my father and a bit at the café in exchange for the flat above it where I’m staying. This isn’t your part of the city, though. Cherries again?”

He was trying to be humorous, but I did not smile. “Something like that. I come to the market sometimes for errands.”

“You shouldn’t,” he replied bluntly. “Wandering the city, it’s dangerous. You have to be more careful,” he scolded, as though talking to a child.

I stopped walking and turned to face him. “Why should you care?” I flared. He stepped back as if genuinely surprised by my outburst. “You left me. You didn’t even tell me you were back.” I hadn’t meant to confront him, but now that the words had come out, I wanted answers. “Why?”

“Shh. Not here.” He took my arm and led me down the busy street, away from the shops and the houses, in the direction of the industrial buildings and warehouses by the river. “I’ve wanted to come see you,” he said at last when we were alone on the banks of the Wisła and could not be heard. “I tried to explain when I saw you here a few weeks ago, but you ran away.”

I turned to face him, put my hands on my hips. “I’m here now. So tell me.”

He looked over his shoulder before speaking, as if even here on the riverbank, which was deserted but for some disinterested ducks, someone might be listening. “Ella, I wasn’t gone all of that time because of the army. At least not the army you know.”

“I don’t understand.” Had he been lying about everything?

“I really did enlist and go off to fight.” In my mind, I saw him at the rail station Kraków Główny the day he left, so proud and hopeful in his new uniform, winking at me before boarding the train. “But then Poland was defeated and something else happened. Have you heard of the Home Army?” I nodded. It was rumored early in the war that a group of Polish men had organized to fight the Germans and I had since heard claims that they engaged in acts of sabotage. But as the occupation continued undaunted, resistance seemed surreal, the stuff of fairy tales or legends.

“You see, when it became clear that Poland was going to lose in combat, another soldier told me about an underground army that was forming,” Krys said. “I heard about the work they were going to do, and I knew I needed to be a part of it. There was nothing more to be done on the battlefield; secret operations were our only hope. So I started working with a small group to fight the Germans. Later we joined forces with other similar organizations to form the Polish Home Army.”

I still didn’t understand quite what it all meant—or how it had kept him from coming back to me. “What do you do, exactly?”

He shook his head. “I can’t say. It’s terribly dangerous work, though, fighting the Germans in many different ways. That’s why I had to stay away from you, even after I came back. You see, most people who are a part of this don’t live very long.”

“No...” I said, stung by the notion that something might happen to him. I moved closer to Krys and he put his arm around me.

“I didn’t want to cause you pain. And I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way. I’m not worried for myself. But if I were caught, they would go after everyone I loved. I didn’t come back because I needed to protect you. I still care about you more than anything. But I cannot see you hurt. So you see now why we couldn’t be together.”

“And why we still can’t.” I straightened, pulling away from him.

He nodded grimly. “It’s the only way.”

“Do you think you can defeat the Germans?” I asked incredulously.

“I don’t.” His tone was blunt. “We are no match for their weaponry or their numbers.”

“Then why do it?” He was throwing away his future—and ours together—for an impossible chance. How could someone give their whole life to a fight that at the end of the day could not possibly make a difference?

“Because when people look back on the history of this time, at what happened, they should see that we tried to do something,” he said with determination. I tried to imagine this awful time as a moment in the past, after the world had restored order, but found that I could not. “We can’t sit here and wait for the outside world