The Woman With the Blue Star

The novel opens in June 2016, as an elderly American woman in her early seventies arrives in Kraków, Poland, carrying a bouquet of red flowers. She has been watching a white-haired woman in her nineties who visits the Café Noworolski every afternoon. Tomorrow she flies home, making this her last chance to approach. She crosses the square in the rain, reaches the woman's table, and looks at her face. The woman is not the one she expected.

The story shifts to March 1942. Sadie Gault, an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl, lives with her parents in the Podgórze ghetto, where Kraków's Jews have been confined by the German occupiers. Her mother, Mama, hides Sadie each day in an attic crawl space while both parents report for labor details. Driven from hiding by hunger, Sadie is in the shared kitchen when SS troops arrive for an aktion, a mass roundup. She hides in a steamer trunk and survives the search. When Mama returns and cannot find Sadie, she climbs onto the window ledge, prepared to jump rather than live without her child. Sadie frees herself just in time and pulls her mother back.

In June 1942, nineteen-year-old Ella Stepanek walks the occupied streets of Kraków. She lives with her stepmother, Ana Lucia, an Austrian woman who hosts parties for high-ranking German officers. Ella's father was killed on the Eastern Front, and her closest sibling, Maciej, lives in Paris. Her former boyfriend, Krys, broke things off before enlisting and has not written since. Her old friends shun her because of Ana Lucia's collaboration, leaving Ella isolated.

In March 1943, the Germans liquidate the ghetto. A sewer worker named Pawel guides the Gaults and the Rosenbergs through a hole into the tunnel system below. The Rosenbergs consist of Pan Rosenberg, a religious Jewish man; his elderly mother, Bubbe; and his son Saul, close to Sadie's age. Mama, now pregnant, squeezes through a narrow pipe with the others. As they cross a makeshift bridge over the sewer river, Sadie slips. Her father, Papa, reaches to steady her, loses his balance, and drowns in the current. Pawel leads the survivors to a small concrete chamber that will be their hiding place. The tunnel exit is guarded, and the streets are deadly.

After Papa's death, Mama fastens his gold chai necklace, engraved with the Hebrew word for "life," around Sadie's neck. Weeks pass. Mama maintains routines to preserve normalcy, and Pawel brings food regularly. Sadie grows close to Saul during nightly walks to a moonlit alcove where they read together.

Meanwhile, Ella steps over a sewer grate in Dębniki, a neighborhood across the river, and sees two eyes staring back from below. Days later, Sadie looks up through the same grate and sees the red-haired girl. Haunted by guilt over a Jewish classmate she failed to help when Jewish students were expelled, Ella returns with bread. They begin talking; Sadie reveals her dream of studying medicine. Ella starts visiting weekly, smuggling food from Ana Lucia's kitchen. Both Saul and Mama warn Sadie against trusting a Pole, but she cannot stay away.

Ella also discovers that Krys returned to Kraków without telling her. He reveals that he joined the Polish Home Army, an underground resistance fighting the Germans, and stayed away to protect her.

German soldiers near the grate force Sadie and Ella to find a safer meeting place. Heavy rains flood the chamber nearly to the ceiling, almost drowning Sadie before Saul holds her above water. Pawel is then arrested in the tunnel, and the group's food supply vanishes. One night, Sadie climbs out of the sewer for the first time. She and Ella search for a hidden food cache in the ruined ghetto but find it empty. Krys reluctantly secures potatoes through a black marketeer. During the night above ground, Ella takes Sadie to her house, where Sadie bathes and wears clean clothes for the first time in months. Before returning underground, Sadie entrusts Ella with the chai necklace for safekeeping.

Mama goes into premature labor. Bubbe delivers the baby girl, but the infant's constant crying threatens to reveal the hiding place. Mama decides to take the unnamed child to a hospital where a doctor reportedly shelters Jewish children. Despite Sadie's protests, Mama leaves with the baby, promising to return. She does not come back.

Ella goes to the hospital and learns that Mama arrived severely ill from infection, without the baby. When the Germans came, the staff administered a lethal injection rather than surrender her to a worse fate. The baby was never brought to the hospital. Unable to tell Sadie, Ella lies and visits daily to keep her going.

Bubbe dies in her sleep, leaving Sadie, Saul, and Pan Rosenberg alone. Saul proposes to Sadie, and she accepts. That same night, Krys arrives with crates of munitions for an upcoming uprising in Warsaw, asking them to store the crates overnight. By morning, the crates are gone, stolen and sold to the Germans.

Ana Lucia discovers the chai necklace in Ella's room, deduces that Ella has been helping Jews, and expels her from the house. Ella learns from a resistance contact named Kara that Krys was arrested trying to recover the stolen munitions. Kara reveals that the Germans have mined the sewer tunnels and shares the escape route Krys had arranged: a truck to the Slovak border, then overland to safety.

Ella conquers her claustrophobia and enters the sewer alone. She tells Sadie they must leave immediately and confesses the truth about Mama's death. Sadie is devastated but agrees to go.

As the group moves through the tunnels, mines detonate. The collapse separates Sadie and Ella from Saul and Pan Rosenberg. The two women crawl through a narrow pipe and swim across a flooded basin. Ella tows Sadie, who cannot swim and is bleeding from a wound. A second collapse sends a wave through the basin. One of them is fatally injured, her head cracked against the wall. She presses two items into the other's hand, tells her to go on for both of them, and dies.

The survivor climbs onto the riverbank before dawn. Saul appears, having escaped through the other grate with his father. When he sees she is alone, his face darkens with grief. Together they leave Kraków under the stars.

The epilogue returns to 2016. The narrator identifies herself as Lucy Gault, the baby born in the sewer, now seventy-two. A priest intercepted Mama on the street and hid the baby before Mama reached the hospital. Lucy was adopted by a Polish couple who emigrated to America. She learned her history from Pawel, who survived his arrest and tracked down the baby, and later found Saul, now a widower in California. Saul told her about a brave Polish girl named Ella Stepanek. Lucy came to Kraków to find her.

Studying the woman's brown eyes, Lucy realizes she has not found Ella. The woman confirms: She is Sadie. Before Ella died in the sewer, she gave Sadie her identity card. Sadie used Ella's name to escape and chose to live under it permanently. Ella was the one who died. Sadie found Krys, who had escaped custody, told him of Ella's death, and together they went to Warsaw to fight in the uprising, where Krys was killed. Sadie later traveled to Paris, told Maciej about his sister, and fulfilled her dream of becoming a pediatrician.

Lucy gives Sadie the red flowers. Sadie whispers that their mother was right, that someday there would be flowers. She removes the chai necklace she still wears and gives it to her sister. Reunited after seventy-two years, the two women leave the café together.