The Woman with the Blue Star

Kraków, 1942. When the ghetto is liquidated, eighteen-year-old Sadie Gault and her parents escape into the sewers beneath the city, where they live in darkness and filth, dependent on a sewer worker who knows the tunnels and has chosen, at enormous risk, to keep them alive.

Above ground, Ella Stepanek — the daughter of a wealthy family, isolated in a house run by a collaborating stepmother — sees a face in the grate of a storm drain. The two girls begin passing food, news and small acts of care between the street and the tunnels, and the friendship they build becomes as dangerous to them as the occupation itself.

The Woman with the Blue Star is a work of historical fiction drawn from documented accounts of Jews who survived the war in the sewers of Polish cities. It alternates between Sadie's and Ella's voices and does not soften what occupation and hiding cost the people who lived through them.