The Woman with the Blue Star: A Novel
"An emotional novel that you will never forget." --Lisa Scottoline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eternal
From the author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of courage and unlikely friendship during World War II -- Now a New York Times bestsller!
1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents in the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous tunnels beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers.
Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it's a girl hiding.
Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close, but as the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds. Inspired by incredible true stories, The Woman with the Blue Star is an unforgettable testament to the power of friendship and the extraordinary strength of the human will to survive.
Highly recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Washington Post, CNN, BookTrib, Goodreads, Betches, AARP, Frolic, SheReads, and more!
Don't miss Pam Jenoff's new novel, Code Name Sapphire, a riveting tale of bravery and resistance during World War II.
Read these other sweeping epics from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff:
The Lost Girls of Paris
The Orphan's Tale
The Ambassador's Daughter
The Diplomat's Wife
The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach
The Kommandant's Girl
The Winter Guest
From the author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of courage and unlikely friendship during World War II -- Now a New York Times bestsller!
1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents in the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous tunnels beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers.
Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it's a girl hiding.
Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close, but as the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds. Inspired by incredible true stories, The Woman with the Blue Star is an unforgettable testament to the power of friendship and the extraordinary strength of the human will to survive.
Highly recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Washington Post, CNN, BookTrib, Goodreads, Betches, AARP, Frolic, SheReads, and more!
Don't miss Pam Jenoff's new novel, Code Name Sapphire, a riveting tale of bravery and resistance during World War II.
Read these other sweeping epics from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff:
The Lost Girls of Paris
The Orphan's Tale
The Ambassador's Daughter
The Diplomat's Wife
The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach
The Kommandant's Girl
The Winter Guest
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Community Reviews
Author Pam Jenoff says that The Woman with the Blue Star emanates from her "love and reverence for the people who lived through the Holocaust, born out of the years I spent in Eastern Europe working on Holocaust issues." She was inspired to write the book when she discovered the unimaginable true story of a group of Jewish citizens who hid for many months from the Nazis by living in the sewers of Lviv, Poland. She relates, "When I find a story that makes me still gasp, I'm hopeful that others will feel the same." She was taken by a "particularly moving story where a young girl in the sewer had looked up through the grate and seen a young girl buying flowers. When she remarked on the disparity between the girl on the street and herself, her mother said, 'Someday there will be flowers.' I was struck by the horrific circumstances which they endured, as well as their ingenuity and resilience in surviving there."
Jenoff wondered what would happen if "the girl above and the girl below had the chance to meet and become friends." The result is The Woman with the Blue Star, a thoroughly engrossing, beautifully written, and deeply moving tale of two young women, roughly the same age, who find themselves existing in starkly contrasting circumstances in the same city at the same time in history. Their first encounter impacts both of them profoundly and they develop a most unlikely and dangerous friendship.
The book opens in Krakow in 2016. Via a first-person narrative, a woman in her early seventies explains that she has traveled to Poland from America in search of a woman around ninety years of age. She watches as the older woman takes her usual seat at a table in a cafe, trying to summon the courage to approach her. When she does, she says that "the woman I see before me is not the one I expected at all." The identities of the two women, and the reason why the younger of the two has traveled so far to speak to the older one is an intriguing mystery with which Jenoff deftly pulls readers into the story immediately.
The action then turns back to Krakow in March 1942. "Everything changed the day they came for the children," Sadie relates in her first-person narrative. She describes the day the Nazis raided the three-story building in the ghetto in which she and her parents have been forced to take up residence with a dozen other families. While her parents labor during the day -- her father was an accountant before the war -- Sadie is supposed to remain hidden in the attic crawl space. But, cold and restless, the days stretched on endlessly in a place where she could not stand up and did not have enough light to read her beloved books. So when she grew hungry, she dared venture downstairs to the kitchen in search of crumbs and a glass of water, and remained there for a few minutes reading The Count of Monte Cristo. When she hears tires screech and loud voices outside, she knows she has stayed too long. The Nazis have commenced an "aktion" -- a sudden unannounced arrest of large groups of Jews to be taken from the ghetto to the concentration camps. "The very reason I was meant to be hiding in the first place." With insufficient time to make her way back to the attic, Sadie hides in the place she was shown by her mother, listening as the soldiers yell, "Kinder, raus!" ("Children, out.") "It was not the first time the Germans had come for children during the day, knowing that their parents would be at work." Eventually, there is silence until the laborers return to find their children gone.
Jenoff offers yet another first-person narrative from Ella that commences in June 1942. She is heartbroken because Krys, the young man she loves, refused to become engaged before going off to fight. Ella's mother died of influenza when she was just a toddler and her two older sisters have married and moved away. Her older brother, Maciej, is living in Paris with his partner, Phillipe. Ella has been left to reside in the family home with her stepmother, Ana Lucia. Her father, Tata, insisted upon renewing his army commission when the war started, and was declared missing and presumed dead shortly after leaving. Now, Ella spends the evenings listening to Ana Lucia entertaining Nazi soldiers, "the higher ranking, the better," having decided to convert the Polish people's captors into friends in order to protect herself. Because Tata died without a will, Ana Lucia has inherited the beautiful home and all of his money, leaving Bella at her mercy. "When you are young, you expect the family you were born into to be yours forever. Time and war had made that not the case."
And then in March 1943, with Sadie's forty-year-old mother expecting a baby in late summer, the Nazis commence another "aktion." She observes that the toilet in the apartment building has been lifted from the floor, revealing a hole in the ground, and her father is frantically chopping the concrete edges to make the hole bigger. As everyone in the ghetto is being rounded up and gunfire erupts, she is horrified when her father directs her to climb through the hole, down into a dark, ominous, foul-smelling void. When she hesitates, her father shoves her and she lands on her knees. She is shocked to see that others are already there. "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 you mouth,' Mama instructed quietly. 'Shallow breaths.'" Soon a stranger leads them on a perilous, tragic journey through tunnels under the city, eventually delivering them to the place where Sadie will remain for months.
The Woman with the Blue Star begins with suspense, quickly segueing into a fast-paced, heart-stopping tale about people forced to endure horrific conditions in order to stay alive. It is not an easy book to read, because Jenoff compassionately, but candidly, details the hardships that Sadie and the others suffer and the dangers they encounter. When Sadie's father tells her she must go through the hole in the floor to the sewer below, she believes that she is making her way to a safe place, consoling herself with the belief that the trip is a means to an end. "Instead, it was the destination itself. For all of my wildest nightmares, I could not have imagined that we would be staying in the sewer." There is no escape, with Nazis patrolling the streets of Krakow and shooting Jews on sight, and blockades preventing escape. Ironically, they are stowed away within a maze of pipes and passageways . . . none of which lead to freedom. "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." The need to remain hidden and quiet causes increasing consternation as the days pass, the meager food supply further diminishes, the sounds coming from above grow increasingly ominous, and her mother's pregnancy progresses. How will they be able to care for an infant, much less keep a baby from crying and bringing unwanted attention to them?
Because none of them can leave, their survival is completely dependent upon the assistance of those who dare venture into the sewer to bring them food. Jenoff says that she was "moved by the selflessness of those who helped them, most notably a sewer worker,. . ." Indeed, in the book, it is a sewer worker, Pawel, who risks his own life in order to deliver the needed sustenance to Sadie and the others. Before the war, he was a thief in order to feed his wife and child. Because Sadie's father showed him kindness, he decides that saving Sadie and the others "is my life's work." It becomes his chance for salvation.
The relationship between Sadie and Ella is not the only friendship that Jenoff explores. Among those sheltering in the sewer is a family of observant Jews. Saul and his family escaped to Krakow from a small village, believing that conditions would be better there. His older brother, Micah, a rabbi, stayed behind and was forced into a small ghetto. Saul's fiancee, Shifra, refused to flee with him, remaining behind to care for her sick mother and family. As time passes, and Saul's hope of seeing Micah or Shifra again dims, Saul and Sadie grow close, sneaking away to another part of the sewer at night that provides more light in order to read and talk, eventually developing feelings for each other. But if they manage to escape the sewer when the war ends, will their relationship endure?
Jenoff says writing the book proved to be a very powerful experience. She penned it in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, so "I was writing about isolation while we were in isolation." The story resonated with her -- and will with readers, as well -- in part because it is an exploration of the need for human connection created during a period of time when readers have themselves been separated from their family and friends.
The Woman with the Blue Star is a haunting, poignant, and gut-wrenching epic about the resilience of the human spirit and the indomitable will to live that was displayed by so many during World War II. Sadie is a determined young woman whose parents instilled in her a love of learning and encouraged her dream of studying medicine. She will do whatever is necessary to protect her mother, unborn sibling, and those with whom she hides, believing that Krakow will be liberated and they will be freed any day. Although Ella lost her mother at a very young age, she was a stranger to adversity even during the early days of war. "Sequestered in my world of privilege and protection, I didn't often see the hardships that the ordinary people were facing during the war." But even before she catches her first glimpse of Sadie, she gradually realizes that war is taking its toll on the city she loves and its people, noticing, for the first time, the lack of food, the destruction, the fear, and the Germans' brutality, even as Ana Lucia welcomes it into their home. Once she does see Sadie, she is changed forever. She is at first wary. "Keep your head low, that was the lesson I had learned from the war. . . . Stay out of everyone's way and you might have a chance of coming out on the other side." Ellla knows that if she begins helping Sadie, she will somehow become responsible for her. But she is unable to turn away from the girl in the sewer and resolves to do whatever it takes to help her, proving herself braver than she ever knew she could be.
The Woman with the Blue Star is a mesmerizing, towering work of historical fiction that should be read by every fan of the genre. Jenoff meticulously and believably creates the world in which Sadie and the others are forced to abide, as well as the world above -- a city under siege. Her characters are endearing and sympathetic, their plights intriguing and gut-wrenching, and their friendship unforgettable and inspiring. She says that the message she hopes readers will take from the story is that it is possible for people to transcend their differences and connect with each other. Indeed, despite all of the heartbreak, loss, and adversity depicted in the story, Jenoff has artfully crafted a story that is ultimately uplifting and hopeful. The book is an outstanding choice for book clubs because of the themes and plot twists that lend themselves to discussion.
Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.
Jenoff wondered what would happen if "the girl above and the girl below had the chance to meet and become friends." The result is The Woman with the Blue Star, a thoroughly engrossing, beautifully written, and deeply moving tale of two young women, roughly the same age, who find themselves existing in starkly contrasting circumstances in the same city at the same time in history. Their first encounter impacts both of them profoundly and they develop a most unlikely and dangerous friendship.
The book opens in Krakow in 2016. Via a first-person narrative, a woman in her early seventies explains that she has traveled to Poland from America in search of a woman around ninety years of age. She watches as the older woman takes her usual seat at a table in a cafe, trying to summon the courage to approach her. When she does, she says that "the woman I see before me is not the one I expected at all." The identities of the two women, and the reason why the younger of the two has traveled so far to speak to the older one is an intriguing mystery with which Jenoff deftly pulls readers into the story immediately.
The action then turns back to Krakow in March 1942. "Everything changed the day they came for the children," Sadie relates in her first-person narrative. She describes the day the Nazis raided the three-story building in the ghetto in which she and her parents have been forced to take up residence with a dozen other families. While her parents labor during the day -- her father was an accountant before the war -- Sadie is supposed to remain hidden in the attic crawl space. But, cold and restless, the days stretched on endlessly in a place where she could not stand up and did not have enough light to read her beloved books. So when she grew hungry, she dared venture downstairs to the kitchen in search of crumbs and a glass of water, and remained there for a few minutes reading The Count of Monte Cristo. When she hears tires screech and loud voices outside, she knows she has stayed too long. The Nazis have commenced an "aktion" -- a sudden unannounced arrest of large groups of Jews to be taken from the ghetto to the concentration camps. "The very reason I was meant to be hiding in the first place." With insufficient time to make her way back to the attic, Sadie hides in the place she was shown by her mother, listening as the soldiers yell, "Kinder, raus!" ("Children, out.") "It was not the first time the Germans had come for children during the day, knowing that their parents would be at work." Eventually, there is silence until the laborers return to find their children gone.
Jenoff offers yet another first-person narrative from Ella that commences in June 1942. She is heartbroken because Krys, the young man she loves, refused to become engaged before going off to fight. Ella's mother died of influenza when she was just a toddler and her two older sisters have married and moved away. Her older brother, Maciej, is living in Paris with his partner, Phillipe. Ella has been left to reside in the family home with her stepmother, Ana Lucia. Her father, Tata, insisted upon renewing his army commission when the war started, and was declared missing and presumed dead shortly after leaving. Now, Ella spends the evenings listening to Ana Lucia entertaining Nazi soldiers, "the higher ranking, the better," having decided to convert the Polish people's captors into friends in order to protect herself. Because Tata died without a will, Ana Lucia has inherited the beautiful home and all of his money, leaving Bella at her mercy. "When you are young, you expect the family you were born into to be yours forever. Time and war had made that not the case."
And then in March 1943, with Sadie's forty-year-old mother expecting a baby in late summer, the Nazis commence another "aktion." She observes that the toilet in the apartment building has been lifted from the floor, revealing a hole in the ground, and her father is frantically chopping the concrete edges to make the hole bigger. As everyone in the ghetto is being rounded up and gunfire erupts, she is horrified when her father directs her to climb through the hole, down into a dark, ominous, foul-smelling void. When she hesitates, her father shoves her and she lands on her knees. She is shocked to see that others are already there. "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 you mouth,' Mama instructed quietly. 'Shallow breaths.'" Soon a stranger leads them on a perilous, tragic journey through tunnels under the city, eventually delivering them to the place where Sadie will remain for months.
The Woman with the Blue Star begins with suspense, quickly segueing into a fast-paced, heart-stopping tale about people forced to endure horrific conditions in order to stay alive. It is not an easy book to read, because Jenoff compassionately, but candidly, details the hardships that Sadie and the others suffer and the dangers they encounter. When Sadie's father tells her she must go through the hole in the floor to the sewer below, she believes that she is making her way to a safe place, consoling herself with the belief that the trip is a means to an end. "Instead, it was the destination itself. For all of my wildest nightmares, I could not have imagined that we would be staying in the sewer." There is no escape, with Nazis patrolling the streets of Krakow and shooting Jews on sight, and blockades preventing escape. Ironically, they are stowed away within a maze of pipes and passageways . . . none of which lead to freedom. "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." The need to remain hidden and quiet causes increasing consternation as the days pass, the meager food supply further diminishes, the sounds coming from above grow increasingly ominous, and her mother's pregnancy progresses. How will they be able to care for an infant, much less keep a baby from crying and bringing unwanted attention to them?
Because none of them can leave, their survival is completely dependent upon the assistance of those who dare venture into the sewer to bring them food. Jenoff says that she was "moved by the selflessness of those who helped them, most notably a sewer worker,. . ." Indeed, in the book, it is a sewer worker, Pawel, who risks his own life in order to deliver the needed sustenance to Sadie and the others. Before the war, he was a thief in order to feed his wife and child. Because Sadie's father showed him kindness, he decides that saving Sadie and the others "is my life's work." It becomes his chance for salvation.
The relationship between Sadie and Ella is not the only friendship that Jenoff explores. Among those sheltering in the sewer is a family of observant Jews. Saul and his family escaped to Krakow from a small village, believing that conditions would be better there. His older brother, Micah, a rabbi, stayed behind and was forced into a small ghetto. Saul's fiancee, Shifra, refused to flee with him, remaining behind to care for her sick mother and family. As time passes, and Saul's hope of seeing Micah or Shifra again dims, Saul and Sadie grow close, sneaking away to another part of the sewer at night that provides more light in order to read and talk, eventually developing feelings for each other. But if they manage to escape the sewer when the war ends, will their relationship endure?
Jenoff says writing the book proved to be a very powerful experience. She penned it in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, so "I was writing about isolation while we were in isolation." The story resonated with her -- and will with readers, as well -- in part because it is an exploration of the need for human connection created during a period of time when readers have themselves been separated from their family and friends.
The Woman with the Blue Star is a haunting, poignant, and gut-wrenching epic about the resilience of the human spirit and the indomitable will to live that was displayed by so many during World War II. Sadie is a determined young woman whose parents instilled in her a love of learning and encouraged her dream of studying medicine. She will do whatever is necessary to protect her mother, unborn sibling, and those with whom she hides, believing that Krakow will be liberated and they will be freed any day. Although Ella lost her mother at a very young age, she was a stranger to adversity even during the early days of war. "Sequestered in my world of privilege and protection, I didn't often see the hardships that the ordinary people were facing during the war." But even before she catches her first glimpse of Sadie, she gradually realizes that war is taking its toll on the city she loves and its people, noticing, for the first time, the lack of food, the destruction, the fear, and the Germans' brutality, even as Ana Lucia welcomes it into their home. Once she does see Sadie, she is changed forever. She is at first wary. "Keep your head low, that was the lesson I had learned from the war. . . . Stay out of everyone's way and you might have a chance of coming out on the other side." Ellla knows that if she begins helping Sadie, she will somehow become responsible for her. But she is unable to turn away from the girl in the sewer and resolves to do whatever it takes to help her, proving herself braver than she ever knew she could be.
The Woman with the Blue Star is a mesmerizing, towering work of historical fiction that should be read by every fan of the genre. Jenoff meticulously and believably creates the world in which Sadie and the others are forced to abide, as well as the world above -- a city under siege. Her characters are endearing and sympathetic, their plights intriguing and gut-wrenching, and their friendship unforgettable and inspiring. She says that the message she hopes readers will take from the story is that it is possible for people to transcend their differences and connect with each other. Indeed, despite all of the heartbreak, loss, and adversity depicted in the story, Jenoff has artfully crafted a story that is ultimately uplifting and hopeful. The book is an outstanding choice for book clubs because of the themes and plot twists that lend themselves to discussion.
Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.
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