The Woman with the Blue Star
In March 1943, Krakow, Poland is a cold, unforgiving city under increasingly brutal occupation by the Nazis. Eighteen-year-old Sadie has escaped the ‘aktions’ before, but during a much bigger raid designed to clear the ghetto permanently of all its Jewish inhabitants, she and her parents’ one hope is to escape into the sewers. Only Sadie and her pregnant mother survive this dangerous journey.
Pam Jenoff offers us another atmospheric and accomplished treasure, paying tribute to the small group of Jews who managed, against all odds, to survive World War II in the sewers of Lviv, Poland (now Ukraine). This riveting story is told in alternating chapters by Ella, a privileged girl, and Sadie, her Jewish counterpart, living (and I use the word hesitantly!) in the sewers with her mother and an orthodox Jewish family. To leave their fetid, stinking home is to invite certain death.
Although the girls’ backgrounds are markedly different, Ella, an orphan, suffers her own deprivations and humiliation at the hands of her hated stepmother. This character-driven novel plays out against the growing companionship of these two unlikely friends, who catch sight of each other through a sewer grate but might barely have noticed each other in a different life. The pace is unrelenting due, in part, to the hardship and cruelty it invokes and the constant terror of being seen or heard. Starvation looms large every day, and the stink is all-pervading. Though the story is at times terrifying, Jenoff gives us some light at the end of the tunnel in her prologue.
As 2020 fades behind us, we can perhaps look back compassionately at our complaints about being sequestered during a pandemic, because novels like this one help us to understand the resilience with which people have withstood the very worst of times and survived.
