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

Never mind, I told myself, pushing the rejection away. I drew my sweater closer against the summer breeze, which now carried an ominous chill. Krys would be back soon and we would get engaged. We would pick up right where we had left off and it would be as if this terrible intermission never happened at all.

3

Sadie

March 1943

A loud scraping sound below awakened me from sleep.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been disturbed by noise in the ghetto at night. The walls of our apartment building, which had been hastily constructed to divide the original dwellings into smaller units, were paper-thin and the ordinarily muffled sounds of daily life passed readily through them. Within our apartment, the night sounds were constant, too, my father’s heavy breathing and snores, my mother’s quiet grunts as she tried to find a comfortable position to rest her newly swollen belly. I often heard my parents whispering to one another in our tiny shared space after they thought I was asleep.

Not that they tried to hide so many things from me anymore. It had become impossible in the year since I was nearly caught and taken in the aktion to ignore the awfulness of our worsening situation. After a grueling winter with no heat and little food, sickness and death were everywhere. People young and old died of starvation and disease or were shot for not obeying the ghetto police orders quickly enough or for some other perceived infraction while lined up for the work details each morning.

We never spoke of the day I was almost taken. But things had changed after that. For one thing, I had a job now, working alongside Mama in a factory making shoes. Papa had used his every influence to keep us together and make sure that we were not assigned to heavy labor. Still, my hands grew calloused and bled from handling the coarse leather twelve hours a day and my bones ached like an old woman’s from being endlessly hunched over the repetitive work.

There was something different about Mama, too—at nearly forty, she was pregnant. My whole life, I had known that my parents desperately wanted another child. Improbably now, at the very worst of times, their prayers had been answered. “Late summer,” Papa said, telling me when the baby would come. Mama had already begun to show, her rounded belly protruding from her thin frame.

I wanted to be as happy as my parents were about the baby. Once I had dreamed of a younger sibling, someone closer to my own age. But I was nineteen, and might have been starting a family of my own. A baby just seemed so useless, another mouth to feed at the worst of times. It had been just the three of us for so long now. Yet a baby was coming, whether I liked it or not. I wasn’t at all sure that I did.

The scraping noise came again louder, someone digging at the concrete. The ancient plumbing must be backed up again, I thought. Perhaps someone was finally fixing the lone, ground-floor toilet, which overflowed constantly. Still, it seemed odd that they were working on it in the middle of the night.

I sat up, annoyed by the intrusion. I had slept restlessly. We weren’t permitted to keep the windows open, and even in March, the room was stuffy, the air thick and foul smelling. I looked around for my parents and was surprised to find them gone. Sometimes after I went to bed, Papa would defy ghetto rules and go sit on the front step and smoke with a few of the other men who lived below in order to escape the confines of our room. But he should have been back by now, and Mama seldom left except for work. Something was not right.

Shouting erupted below on the street, Germans barking orders. I tensed. It had been a year since the day I had hidden in the trunk, and though we had heard of large-scale aktions in other parts of the ghetto (“liquidations,” I’d heard Papa call them once), the Germans had not entered our building since. But the terror had never left me and some instinct told me with absolute certainty that they were now coming again.

I stood and put on my dressing gown and slippers and hurried from the apartment to find my parents. Unsure where to go, I started downstairs. The corridor was dark, except for the faint light that came from the bathroom, so I started toward it. When I stepped into the doorway, I blinked, not only from the unexpected brightness, but also with surprise. The toilet had been lifted completely from its moorings and shoved aside, revealing a jagged hole in the ground. I hadn’t known that it moved at all. My father was on his knees on the ground, clawing at the hole, literally chipping away at the concrete edges and making it bigger with his hands.

“Papa?”

He did not look up. “Get dressed quickly!” he ordered more sharply than I had ever heard him speak.

I considered asking another of the dozen questions swirling through my brain. But I had been raised an only child among adults and I was wise enough to know when to just go along. I went back upstairs to our room and opened the rotting wood armoire that held our clothes. Then I hesitated. I had no idea what to wear, but I didn’t know where Mama was and I didn’t dare bother my father again to ask. Anyway, we had come to the ghetto with just a few suitcases between the three of us; it was not as if I had so much to choose from. I pulled a skirt and blouse from a hanger and started to dress.

My mother appeared in the door and shook her head. “Something warmer,” she instructed.

“But, Mama, it’s not that cold.” She did not answer. Instead, she pulled out the thick blue sweater my grandmother had