I held it out to my mother. But she shook her head. “He would want you to have it.” She fastened the clasp around my neck and the chai lay on my chest, close to my heart.

There was a clattering outside the chamber. We stood up, alarmed. Had the Germans come so soon? But it was only Pawel once more. “The light,” he said, pointing to the lone carbide lamp that hung from a hook. “It’s giving off steam on the street above. You must turn it off.” Reluctantly, we abandoned the only source of light we had and the sewer went cold and dark once more.

5

Ella

April 1943

Spring had always come slowly to Kraków, like a sleepy child unwilling to get out of bed on a school morning. This year, it felt as if it might not come at all. Dirty snow still covered the base of the bridge as I made my way from the city center toward Dębniki, the working-class neighborhood on the southern bank of the Wisła. The air was frigid, the wind sharp. It was as if Mother Nature was personally protesting the Nazi occupation as it dragged through a fourth year.

I hadn’t expected to find myself on an errand to this remote part of the city on a Saturday morning. An hour earlier, I had been in my room, composing a letter to my brother, Maciej. He had lived in Paris for nearly a decade, and although I had not had the chance to visit him, the city came alive through the dancing script and detailed description and wicked humor of his letters. I wrote him back in the most general of ways, mindful always that our letters might be read. The Falconess has been hunting, I said at one point. The name was our code for Ana Lucia and her love of wearing animal carcasses as clothing, “hunting” a reference to the times when she was being particularly wretched. Come to Paris, he had urged in his last letter and I smiled as I heard his acquired French affect jump off the page in his words. Phillipe and I would be overjoyed to have you. As if it were that simple. It was impossible to travel now, but perhaps when the war was over, he would send for me. My stepmother would not care if I left, as long as the trip didn’t cost her anything.

I had just finished sealing the letter with a bit of wax when I heard the commotion down in the kitchen. Ana Lucia was yelling at our maid, Hanna. Poor Hanna was often the target of my stepmother’s wrath. We’d once had four full-time house staff. But the war had meant sacrifices for everyone, and in my stepmother’s world that meant making do with one servant. Hanna had been our maid, a tiny waif of a girl from the country with no family of her own—she was the only one willing to take on the work of the entire household staff and so she was the one who stayed, gamely managing housekeeper and butler and gardener and cook duties all at once because she had nowhere else to go.