“Take the trash as well,” Mama said distractedly, surprising me. She held up a small bag, which was to be sunk to the base of the riverbed with stones. It always seemed strange to me that one could not leave garbage in a sewer. But there could be no sign that we were here.

Outside the chamber, I gazed longingly down the tunnel in the direction the water flowed, away from our hiding place. I desperately wanted to escape the sewer, fantasized every day about running away. Of course, I would not leave Mama. And the truth was that as awful as things were down here, they were a million times worse above. Many times we had listened in horror as screams rang out from the streets and then there were gunshots followed by silence. Death hung like a scepter above, waiting for all of us if we were captured. We didn’t want to be trapped underground—yet everything hung on our making it work.

Farther along the tunnel, I heard a noise. I jumped back instinctively. No SS or police had come into the sewer during our time here, but the threat of being discovered was ever-present. I listened for the sound of growing footsteps and, hearing none, I ventured forward in the tunnel once more. As I rounded the place where the tunnel curved, I noticed Saul, crouched on the ground.

I moved closer. When we first came to the sewer, I had been curious about Saul. He was the only one here close to my age and I hoped that we might be friends. At first, he had been standoffish. Though soft-spoken and kind, he didn’t talk much and his nose was often buried in a book. I could not blame him—he didn’t want to be here any more than I did. “It’s his religion,” Mama had told me once in a low voice, after witnessing my failed attempt to talk to him. “The boys and girls stay separate among the more observant Jews.” But as the weeks in the sewer passed, he had grown a bit friendlier, offering a word or two of conversation when the moment presented itself. More than once, he had looked across the chamber with his kind, dancing eyes and smiled at me, as if commiserating in the ridiculous awfulness of our situation.

Saul was often missing from the chamber and several times I had woken at night to find him gone. A few weeks earlier when I saw him creeping out, I had followed him from the chamber. “Where are you going?” I asked.

I expected him to be annoyed by my question. “Just exploring,” he said simply. “Come with me if you’d like.” I was surprised by the invitation. He started down the tunnel without waiting to see if I would accept. Saul walked ahead of me at a swift pace, and I struggled to keep up as he turned this way and that down a dizzying path through tunnels I had never explored. I could not have found my own way back if I wanted to. The waters had slowed to a trickle and there was a kind of eerie silence as we traveled through the pipes.