The Woman with the Blue Star

Name: The Woman with the Blue Star
ISBN: 9780778389385

A Novel

Pam Jenoff

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of unfathomable sacrifice and unlikely friendship during World War II.

1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of 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 sewers 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. Scorned by her friends and longing for her fiancé, who has gone off to war, Ella wanders Kraków restlessly. 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 harrowing true stories, The Woman with the Blue Star is an emotional testament to the power of friendship and the extraordinary strength of the human will to survive.

“Jenoff weaves an intriguing and intelligent story with a delicacy that is captivating.” —Kate Furnivall, author of The Russian Concubine

“A bittersweet story of loves old and new, of men and women trying to survive in perilous times.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Opens a provocative window onto the continuing effort to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, and the complexities involved in making legal and moral judgments decades later. . . . At once a historical mystery, a legal thriller, and a romance.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Provocative. . . . A story of human emotion, physical necessity, love and hate. The author conveys the pain of a period none can forget, and the feelings we have that can be all too painful.” —The Baltimore Jewish Times

“A skillfully rendered tale of undying love, unthinkable loss and the relentless grip of the past on the present.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Has undeniable intrigue.” —The Jewish Chronicle

About the Author

Pam Jenoff is the New York Times bestselling author of historical novels centered on the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her fiction gives voice to Jewish survivors, rescuers, and resisters, and to the quieter, often overlooked stories of women in wartime Europe.

Her work draws on a distinctive background. She earned degrees from George Washington University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon, and she later worked for the U.S. Consulate in Kraków, Poland, on Jewish communal and heritage issues. That experience shaped her debut, The Kommandant’s Girl, and her many novels set in occupied Poland and beyond.

Her books return to themes central to Jewish memory: hiding and rescue, the fragile bonds of family and chosen family, the moral complexity of survival, and the long aftermath of loss. The Winter Guest follows Polish sisters sheltering a Jewish American soldier. The Orphan’s Tale centers on a Jewish infant, a circus troupe, and the women who protect him. The Woman with the Blue Star tells of Jews hiding in the Kraków sewers. The Lost Girls of Paris traces women of the Allied resistance.

Jenoff lives near Philadelphia with her family and teaches law at Rutgers Law School.