“You didn’t come right back to Kraków after the war?”

She shakes her head. “But after Communism ended, Maciej was able to get back his and Ella’s family home in Kraków. The government had taken it after the war when their stepmother was arrested as a collaborator. He left it to me when he died. It’s a beautiful house not far from here. I didn’t move into it, though. There were too many painful memories. I sold it. I have a small apartment now.” She gazes out across the square. “I’ve lived all over the world. In the end, I came home. It was strange coming back to this part of the world after so many years abroad. But there was something that called to my soul. This is home now.” I envy her peace, and her calm sense of belonging with her past.

“What happened to Ella’s stepmother, the collaborator?” I ask. The woman means nothing to me, yet I am curious to fill in all of the missing pieces.

“She died in prison before she could stand trial. She was not a nice person and she caused Ella a great deal of pain. Still, it was a sorry end to a selfish life and I would not have wished it on her.”

I try to process all that I have learned. My sister and I had lived all of these years, not knowing that the other still existed. We had lost so much time. “Tell me,” I say, drawing my chair closer. “Tell me everything.” I had found not just my sister, but a treasure trove of information about the family I never knew and a way to fill in the pages of blank history I thought were lost forever. “I want to know it all, about our parents, about our family before the war.” I want to know more than how they died. I want to understand how they had lived.

But Sadie shakes her head. “I can’t just tell you.” I wonder if, as with so many survivors, the past is simply too painful to share. She stands, as if to go. Anxiety rises in me. We’ve lost so many years. Perhaps it is too late. “Let me show you instead.” She holds her hand out to me.

I stand up. “I would like to see the places our family lived.”

“I can show you where our apartment was before the war, and even the place we lived in the ghetto,” she offers.

“But not the sewer?” Although it sounds macabre, some part of me is curious about the awful place where I was born, an indelible piece of our history.

“I’m afraid not. That was all closed up long ago. I considered going back down there. But it’s for the best.” I nod. Though I was born there, the sewer isn’t who we are, just a tiny piece of our rich, full lives. “There are other places,” she adds. “The places Papa and I used to walk and play, and a memorial in the ghetto.” Tiny pieces, I mused, that would at last complete the puzzle of our family history.