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

meats. You remember how in the ghetto they sometimes gave us dried pork?” I nodded. It was the Germans’ idea of a cruel joke, giving the Jews food that was not kosher. “We couldn’t eat it, but I stored it away, just in case of an emergency. There are a few sacks of potatoes there, too, that might be salvageable. It is in the apartment building where we lived at Lwowska Street, number twelve, behind the basement wall. If only there was a way to get to it.”

“Maybe my friend Ella can help find it,” I said, before I could think better of it or stop myself.

“The girl on the street? You’ve continued to speak with her?” He sounded horrified. I did not answer. “But, Sadie, you promised me.”

“I know.” I searched for a justification for what I had done, but found none. “I’m sorry. If I ask, perhaps she can help get the food.”

“I don’t like it. We can’t trust her.”

“I think we can. She has known about me for weeks and hasn’t told anyone. Why would she betray us now?” He did not answer. I knew he would agree, or see Ella as a friend like I did. “Anyway, there’s really no other choice.”

“All right,” Saul relented. “If I tell you exactly where the food is hidden, you can send her.”

I considered the idea. I tried to picture Ella, who had spent most of her life in the posh city center, attempting to navigate the ruins of the liquidated ghetto. She would never be able to manage it. “She would stick out,” I said. “And she wouldn’t know her way around. If I could get onto the street, I could go myself.”

Saul’s eyes widened. “Sadie, you can’t be serious.” The sewer was our only hope to stay alive. To consider going to the street was to risk capture and death.

“It’s the only way,” I said.

“I could go,” Saul offered. Yet even as he said it, we both knew that it was impossible. With his yarmulke and beard, he would be detected immediately. I loved him for offering, but he couldn’t possibly go. I was our only hope.

Still, he would not hear of it. “Promise me you won’t go,” he said, his voice somewhere between a command and a plea. I wondered why he would trust my word when I had broken it by talking to Ella. His brow furrowed deep with concern. “I can’t let anything happen to you.” He reached up and touched my cheek. I saw then how his feelings for me had grown, the depth of affection in his eyes. We had known each other such a short time; it hardly seemed possible that we had grown so close. But life seemed to move at a different speed during the war, especially here, when any moment might be our last. Everything was intensified.

I nodded. Saul leaned back, seemingly satisfied by my promise. But my mind still worked. I knew every bit how dangerous it would be to go to the street. If I didn’t, though, we were all going to die, Mama, my unborn sibling, the Rosenbergs and me. There was no other choice.

The next night, I waited anxiously, planning to slip from the chamber. I did not tell Saul, or anyone else, that I was going to see Ella. The skies beyond the grate had been gray earlier and I hoped it would be too cloudy and there would not be enough light for Saul to go read at the annex and invite me to go with him. But as the others were getting ready for bed, he approached me. “Do you want to come with me?” He sought me out more often these days for company, sometimes sharing stories from his youth as we made our way through the tunnels, other nights just ambling beside me in thoughtful silence.

The invitation, which I normally would have welcomed, filled me now with dread. “I’d love to, but I’m exhausted,” I said, hating that I had to lie to him. But it was not entirely untrue; we all had less energy from not eating.

Surprise, then disappointment, crossed his face. “Then I won’t go either.”

Inwardly, I exhaled. “Tomorrow night?”

“Gladly.” Saul touched the brim of his hat and retreated to his side of the chamber. Watching him go, I felt a pang of regret. I looked forward to our walks and it hurt to say no and reject him now.

I waited until the others were asleep. Mama tossed and turned restlessly, made uncomfortable by her pregnancy, and I feared that by the time she fell asleep it might be too late. At last when her movements stilled and breathing went to its heavy, even snore, I crept from the chamber.

I walked down the tunnel, feeling my way in the darkness. The path to the exit Saul and I had found was the farthest I had traveled through the pipes since the night we arrived. As I made my way through the underground crypt alone, silent but for the running of the sewer water, it seemed I might be apprehended at any second. My skin prickled. I saw ghosts of my father, then Pawel. They did not haunt me, though, but rather seemed to guide me, creating faint light in the tunnel just ahead.

At last I reached the basin Saul and I had found. The pipe leading to the street sat high on the far side. There was no way to hoist myself up, I realized. Last time Saul had helped me, but I had not considered how I would be able to manage the high wall to the pipe without him to boost me up this time. I scrambled down into the basin. My eyes had adjusted now, and in the semidarkness, I could make out some boards on the ground. I collected them and made a pile against the wall I needed to climb, hoping that it would be enough. I reached high above me for the