I landed hard on my knees. Cold, foul water splashed up around me from the ground, soaking my stockings. I caught myself to avoid tumbling farther by grasping at a slimy wall. As I stood, I tried hard not to think about what I might be touching.

Papa lowered himself through the hole and landed beside me. From above, someone re-covered the floor. I had not seen anyone behind us and I wondered who, a neighbor Papa had paid perhaps or someone doing a good deed or too scared to drop into the sewer himself. Our last bit of light was eclipsed. We were trapped in the pitch-blackness of the sewer.

And we were not alone. In the darkness, I could hear people moving around us, though I could not tell who they were or how many. I was surprised that there were others. Had they come through a toilet hole to get here as well? I blinked, trying unsuccessfully to adjust my eyes. “What is happening?” a woman’s voice asked in Yiddish. No one answered.

I took a breath and started to gag. The smell was everywhere. It was the stench of water filled with feces and urine, as well as garbage and decay that thickened the air. “Breathe through your mouth,” Mama instructed quietly. But that was worse, as if I was eating the filth. “Shallow breaths.” This last bit of instruction did not help much either. The sewer water swirled ankle-deep, soaking through my boots and stockings, and the icy wetness against my skin caused me to shiver.

The stranger lit a carbide lamp and the light licked the rounded walls, illuminating a half-dozen strange, scared faces around me. Closest stood two men, one about my father’s age and the second appeared to be his son and maybe twenty or so. They were dressed in the yarmulkes and black clothing of religious Jews. “Yids,” Papa would have called them before the war came and we were all lumped together. He did not mean it unkindly, but rather as a sort of shorthand to refer to the religious Jews. They had always seemed so foreign to me with their own customs and strict observance, and in some ways I felt I had more in common with Gentile Poles than these other Jews.

Behind them stood another family, a young couple with a little boy of two or three sleeping in his father’s arms, all wearing nothing but pajamas beneath their coats. There was a stooped elderly woman, too, though she stood apart and I couldn’t tell which of the families she belonged to. Perhaps neither. I did not see any other girls or children close to my age.

As my eyes adjusted, I looked around. I had imagined the sewer, if I considered it at all, as pipes running beneath the ground. But we were in an immense, cavernous passageway with a rounded ceiling at least twenty feet across, like a tunnel that a freight train might pass through. The middle of the tunnel was filled with a swift current of black water, wide and deep enough to be a river. I had not imagined that such a vast body of water was rushing endlessly beneath our feet. The sound as it echoed off the high walls was almost deafening.