Yet as she sits before me now, something is still not right. Taking in the familiar shape of her eyes, something inside me shifts. I know then that I have not found the woman I came looking for. “Only you aren’t Ella, are you?” She does not answer. Her fine porcelain skin pales even more. “At least, you weren’t always.”

Her hand, resting on the edge of the table, begins to tremble once more. “No,” she says, her voice scarcely a whisper. “I wasn’t.”

A realization rises up in me like a wave, threatening to sweep me under, the words so unreal that I hardly dare speak them. “Then I guess,” I say slowly, “that makes you Sadie.”

“Yes.” She reaches out and touches my cheek with shaking fingers. “Oh, my baby sister...” Then, without warning, the woman whom I’ve met just minutes ago falls into my arms. As I embrace her, my mind reels. I came here looking for answers about my sister.

Instead, I found my sister herself.

A few seconds later, we break apart. I stare at her as the reality sinks in: Sadie, my sister, is alive. She clings to my arm like a life raft, not wanting to let go. “But how is it even possible?” I ask. “All of these years, I thought you had died in the sewer.” I had searched, of course, every possible archive for a record of my sister, Sadie Gault. But after an entry in the ghetto records showing that she had been interned there, the trail went dark. I knew from Pawel and Saul that she had escaped to the sewer with our parents, and that our mother and father had both died. I assumed that Sadie had perished, too.

“When you were born, things became very difficult,” Sadie begins. “We couldn’t keep a baby from crying and giving us away in the sewer. So our mother took you to find a safe place to hide you. She left me with the Rosenbergs, Saul and his family.” I feel then how awful it must have been for Sadie to have been left behind alone. She might have hated me for it. “Mama never returned. She died in the hospital.” Her eyes fill with tears. Although I have grieved her my whole life, I am filled with newfound sadness as I think of the mother I never knew.

Sadie continues, “Several weeks after Mama left, Ella came to the sewer to rescue us. She said that our hiding place had been compromised and it wasn’t safe for us to stay any longer. We would have to flee with her. But the Germans had laid mines in the sewer, and as we tried to escape, several detonated. The sewer walls collapsed, separating Ella and me from Saul and his father. We tried to escape another way, through a chamber, but it flooded. I couldn’t swim. Ella saved me.” As she relives the memory, her eyes fill with tears. “But the basin wall caved in and the waters swept us under. Ella was slammed against a wall and gravely injured. She died before we could get out.”