I started to reach down and then hesitated. An image popped into my mind from a few years earlier when I had found a stray dog in the street. I had brought it home proudly, but Ana Lucia scowled. My stepmother hated animals and mess and I was certain she would make me turn it out once more. To my surprise, she did not. “You’ve taken it on now and you’ll have to take care of it.” As awful as my stepmother was, she felt duty bound and she made me feed and walk it until, months later, it died.

It was the worst thing to compare this poor girl in the sewer to an animal. But I knew that if I helped her now, she would somehow become my responsibility and that terrified me.

Still, I pushed the bread through the grate. “Here!” The girl was several feet below me, and as the bread sailed too far to the left of her, I feared she would miss it. But she moved with surprising speed and scrambled to catch it in her hand. Realizing that it was food, her eyes widened with delight. “Dzie˛kuje˛ bardzo.” Thank you very much. She smiled with her whole face and the joy she found in the tiny piece of bread broke my heart.

I expected her to gobble it down, but she did not. “I have to share it,” she explained, as she put it in her pocket.

It had not occurred to me before that there might be others below ground with her as well. “How many of you are there?”

She hesitated, as if unsure whether to answer. “Five. My mother and I, plus another family.”

I noticed then the tear on her sleeve, a line that went evenly around the circumference where stitches of fabric had been pulled out. My breath caught. Sadie had worn a band with a blue star, just as my classmate Miriam had. “You’re Jews.” She lowered her chin in confirmation. Of course, some part of me had known that already. Why else would one hide in the sewer?

“Are you from the ghetto?” I asked.

“No!” she snapped, taking offense. “The ghetto was a place where we stayed for a few awful months; it was not my home. I’m from Kraków, just like you. We lived in an apartment on Meiselsa Street before the war.”

“Of course,” I replied quickly, chastised. “I only meant, was the ghetto where you came from before here?”

“Yes,” she said softly. My eyes traveled above the alleyway to the east. The Germans had built a high-walled ghetto in Podgórze, a neighborhood just a few kilometers east along the riverbank from here, a few years earlier and forced all of the Jews from Kraków as well as from the surrounding villages to move there. Then, just as improbably, they had emptied the ghetto and sent all of the Jews away. “When the Germans liquidated the ghetto, we were able to escape to the sewer.”