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

the baby was born: get up and fix our hair, brush our teeth after breakfast. She had created lessons and simple games to pass the time. But without her, the order she had established disappeared. I napped often, looking for my family in my dreams. I tried to imagine what the next lesson would have been, if Mama were still here to teach it. I did not dare to write on the little chalkboard Pawel had given us that contained the very last of my mother’s handwriting, wanting to hang on to that bit of her forever.

“Get up!” Bubbe snapped again one morning. Nearly a week had passed and I still spent most of my days sulking in bed. “What would your mother think?” she demanded. She was right. The tiny living area that Mama and I shared, which she had kept so neat, was a mess now, the few belongings I owned strewn about. My hair was unkempt, clothes dirty.

“Does it matter?” I cried. Overcome with sadness, I stood and ran from the chamber into the tunnel to the main pipe where the water ran fast and deep. I looked down at the rushing water, wishing that the river would carry me away to safety far beyond the sewer and the war. I could step into it and be swept away to Papa. I imagined a reunion with him, though I could not picture where. I reached my foot toward the water and dipped it in, the iciness seeping through my shoe. I pictured darkness too thick to see through, felt the water filling my lungs. Could I simply let go or would I fight until the last? Or I might be carried downstream to where the sewer met the outside river and be shot. Any which way would be an escape from this hellish prison.

I leaned farther forward. But I could not do it. There was a sudden shuffling sound behind me. I turned to face Pan Rosenberg. He saw me near the water and his face seemed to crumple with understanding. “Sadele, no.” The nickname, one my mother used for me, brought tears to my eyes.

I tried to think of an explanation for what I had been doing so close to the edge. “You need to do better,” Pan Rosenberg said before I could speak. He pointed upward. “Up there, almost no more Jews live.” He did not bother to spare me from the truth the way my parents and others had when I was younger. There was no safety in hiding things anymore. “We are the last of our kind and down here we are alive. You owe it to your parents to go on.”

“But what is there left to go on for?” My voice was plaintive as I spoke these words of despair aloud for the first time.

“You must go on for your mother,” he replied. “After all, she left for you.”

“How can you say that?” I demanded, feeling the full rush of pain and loss behind my words, which came out rudely. “She abandoned me.”

“No, no,” Pan Rosenberg said. “She left to save you. Your mother didn’t leave because she didn’t care. She left because you and your sister were the only thing she had left to care about, and she thought leaving was her best chance to save you both. You don’t want that to be for nothing.”

He continued, “You are the only one of your family. You have an obligation to go on.” He was right. Though my heart ached with pain, I needed to be strong and do what was right for Mama’s sake—just as she had tried to do for me.

“My mother...” I still could not let go of the fact that she had abandoned me—or ignore the danger she was likely in right now. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. But you owe it to her to survive, no matter what.”

“But what if she doesn’t come back?”

For a second, I hoped that he would protest that wouldn’t happen and deny the possibility that Mama might not return. But he would not lie to me. “Then you owe it to her to live in a way she would have wanted. To make her proud.”

He was right, I realized. What would Mama think if she could see me now, messy and undisciplined, all of her hard work undone? I vowed that I would start a routine after that, and force myself to walk for exercise, to study and to keep myself clean.

Pan Rosenberg led me back inside and went to his corner of the chamber. A moment later, he returned and handed me a book. “I carted as many books as I could from our home to the ghetto.”

I nodded. “Like my father.” The two men were so similar in that way; despite their outward differences, they might have become good friends if they’d had the chance.

I had known about Pan Rosenberg’s books—it was where Saul got the ones we read each night. His father, Saul had explained, simply couldn’t bear to leave them, and insisted on grabbing the few he could when fleeing. “He guarded his books in the ghetto and only once, when we were nearly freezing to death and there was no wood, did he let us burn one for kindling,” Saul had explained. It was one of the few times, Saul said, that he had seen tears in his father’s eyes.

In all the months in the sewer, though, Pan Rosenberg had never personally offered any of his precious books to me—until now. I accepted the book, a collection of stories by Sholem Aleichem, eagerly. I opened to the first page, struggling to see the words in the dim light. “It’s too dark in here,” he said apologetically. “You probably have to go to the place beneath the grate to read with Saul.” I was surprised he knew about that.

“I always wanted a daughter,” he added. “I hoped that my wife and I might have had one if we