All of my fears and sadness welled up anew. “Papa, I don’t think I can do this,” I confided in a whisper.

My father wrapped his arms around me and the feeling was so warm and comforting we might have been back home. I buried my head against his chest, taking comfort in the familiar mint and tobacco scent, and trying to ignore the sewer stench that mixed with it. Mama settled by his side and rested her head on his shoulder. My eyelids grew heavy.

Sometime later, Papa shifted, waking me from sleep. I opened my eyes and peered in the semidarkness at the other families, who were scattered around us sleeping. The younger man from the religious family was awake, though. Beneath his black hat, he had gentle features and a small, trim beard. His brown eyes glittered in the darkness. I moved carefully away from Papa, and crawled gingerly across the slippery floor toward him. “Such an odd thing to do, sleeping among total strangers,” I said. “I mean, winding up here, who could have imagined?” He did not answer, but eyed me warily. “I’m Sadie, by the way.”

“Saul,” he replied stiffly. I waited for him to say something more. When he did not, I retreated back across the floor toward my parents. Saul was the only one in the whole group close to my age, but he seemed to have no interest in being friends.

A short while later, the worker returned, re-illuminating the alcove with his lamp and waking the others. He gestured silently that we had to keep going, so we stood up stiffly and assembled single file to follow the path along the wide river once more.

A few minutes later, we reached a juncture. The worker led us off the main channel, turning right into a narrower tunnel that took us farther from the raging sewer river. That path soon ended at a concrete wall. A dead end. Had he lured us deliberately into some sort of a trap? I had heard stories of Gentiles betraying their Jewish neighbors and turning them in to the police, but this seemed an odd way to do it.

The worker knelt with his lamp and I could see that lower on the wall there was a small metal circle, a kind of cover or cap. He pried it open to reveal a horizontal pipe, then stepped back. The entrance to the pipe was only about twenty inches in diameter. Surely he didn’t mean for us to go through it. But he stood, waiting expectantly.

“It’s the only way,” he said, a note of apology in his voice that seemed to be directed mostly at my mother. “You have to go on your stomach. If you put your head and shoulders through, everything else will follow.” He handed Mama something, then climbed into the pipe, and it seemed impossible that his stout frame would fit. He had done this before, though. He slid in, and a moment later he disappeared.