The Mother Beneath the City: A Story from the Lviv Ghetto, 1943
In the dead of winter 1943, the Lviv Ghetto was no longer a neighborhood but a waiting room for death.
The air itself seemed to starve; windows were boarded, chimneys stopped smoking, and whole families vanished between one sunrise and the next.
In that frozen, stinking labyrinth of disease and fear lived Miriam Weiss, twenty-four years old, widow of a schoolteacher, mother of a baby barely six months old. By February, she weighed less than the child she held.
The German patrols had tightened their routes. Food deliveries had ended. Deportations came weekly now—each train eastward never to return.
Miriam had stopped counting the days since her husband, David, was taken during a sweep for “able-bodied men.”
She only knew that the milk in her breasts had dried up from hunger and that her infant, Isaac, cried less each night not because he was full but because he was giving up.
The whisper underground
Rumors circulated in the ghetto like thin smoke: a handful of Polish sewer workers had begun smuggling people out through the tunnels beneath the city.
They worked at night, guided by faith or guilt or both, crawling through waist-deep filth to lead strangers toward life. The name that passed from mouth to mouth was Jan Kowalski—a maintenance foreman who knew every brick beneath Lviv’s cobblestones.
Miriam met him once, in a warehouse near the perimeter wall. He smelled of damp leather and gasoline, spoke quietly, and kept looking at the door. “You cannot bring much,” he warned. “No crying. No light. If the baby makes noise, they will hear from the street.”
Her answer was simple. “Then I won’t come. Only him.”
Jan looked at her for a long time. “A baby alone in the tunnels?”
“He will not be alone,” she said. “You will carry him. Please.”
He hesitated. “If they catch me, they shoot me.”
“If you don’t help, he dies tonight.”
Jan finally nodded. “Tomorrow. After curfew.”
The last night
Snow fell hard that evening, the kind that muffled the world. Miriam wrapped Isaac in a shawl, tucked a note inside the folds—a scrap torn from her husband’s old notebook. It read only: Grow where I cannot.
She reached the manhole at the corner of Zamarstynowska Street as the city bells struck midnight. Jan and another worker were waiting with a rope and a metal bucket used for tools. “We take five tonight,” Jan whispered. “A family and… him.”
Miriam pressed her lips to her child’s forehead. The baby’s breath fogged the air between them. Then, with trembling fingers, she lowered the bucket until it vanished into the blackness below.
Jan caught it gently. “I have him.”
She leaned close to the opening, whispered, “Remember his name—Isaac Weiss.”
Then she closed the lid and walked back toward the ghetto, never once looking over her shoulder. She knew she would not see the dawn.
The world below
The tunnels were a kingdom of rot. Rats skittered along the walls; the air reeked of methane and mold. Jan held the child to his chest, moving through knee-deep sludge, the lantern light shaking with every step.
Beside him crawled his younger cousin Tomasz, hauling a bundle of food and a map scrawled on oil-paper.
“Why risk for them, Jan?” Tomasz whispered.
Jan didn’t answer. He only looked down at the baby, who stared back with wide, unblinking eyes. “Because,” he finally said, “someone must remember what mercy feels like.”
For hours they crept beneath the city, timing their progress with the patrol boots thudding overhead. Twice they froze as light poured through the grates above; once they nearly drowned when a surge of runoff filled the tunnel.
But by dawn, they emerged beyond the ghetto wall, near the riverbank where the sewers met open air.
Jan wrapped Isaac in a burlap sack to hide him from curious eyes and carried him to a safe house owned by a friend, Helena Nowak, a widow who lived alone above a bakery. “You bring me a miracle,” she said, taking the infant. “God help us if the Germans find out.”
Growing in shadows
The child stayed hidden in Helena’s attic for months. She fed him goat’s milk and boiled potatoes, sometimes whispering the Shema—the Hebrew prayer for protection—though she barely knew the words. To neighbors, she said the cries belonged to a niece visiting from Kraków.
When the war finally ended in 1945, the boy was two. The ghetto was gone, the Jewish population reduced to ghosts. Helena registered Isaac under her own surname to protect him from Soviet suspicion.
For years, he grew up believing she was his grandmother and that his parents had died in some far-off province.
But Lviv never fully buried its secrets.
Fragments of a name
In 1958, while repairing the foundation of the old bakery, Helena uncovered a tin box wrapped in tar cloth. Inside lay a photograph—Miriam Weiss holding an infant beside a window. On the back was written: For the day you find light again.
Helena hesitated for weeks before telling him. Isaac, now fifteen, sat at the kitchen table staring at the image. “She looks like me,” he whispered.
“She was your mother,” Helena said. “She saved you.”
“How?”
Helena told him everything—the bucket, the tunnels, the man who carried him. Isaac listened in silence, his hands trembling on the photo’s edges. When she finished, he asked only one question: “Where is she buried?”
Helena shook her head. “There are no graves for people like her. Only stories.”
The long forgetting
Years turned to decades. Isaac emigrated first to Israel, then to Canada, becoming an engineer who built bridges over rivers wider than any sewer tunnel.
He married, had children, avoided talking about the past. Yet every winter, when the air smelled of smoke and frost, he dreamed of dripping walls and unseen hands lifting him from darkness.
History, meanwhile, began to unearth itself. Trials were held. Documents declassified. Survivors spoke. Among them was a statement by Jan Kowalski, who before his death in 1966 gave testimony about “a woman who gave away her baby in Lwów.” His words:
“She had the courage of all mankind in her hands. I never learned her name. I only knew the child lived. That is enough.”
When Isaac read those lines in a Warsaw archive decades later, something in him broke and mended at once.
Return to Lviv
In the autumn of 2005, at seventy-two, Isaac Weiss returned to the city of his birth. The streets were brighter, the language different, but the air still carried echoes of the past.
A local historian guided him through what remained of the old ghetto—just a few foundations, a memorial plaque, and the outlines of walls long demolished.
Then they came to a quiet intersection where a rusted manhole cover sat beneath a chestnut tree. The historian stopped. “This,” he said, “is where the main sewer line ran. Many were saved here. Perhaps your mother stood right there.”
Isaac knelt, running his fingers across the cold iron. Around him, traffic moved, indifferent. He reached into his coat and drew out a single red rose. “She lowered me through this,” he murmured. “And I’ve spent my whole life climbing back to her.”
He laid the rose on the cover, closed his eyes, and whispered the words his mother had written: Grow where I cannot.
Echoes beneath the streets
Later that day, he visited the city archives. The clerk brought a brittle folder labeled Sewer Department, 1943.
Among the pages was a payroll ledger bearing Jan Kowalski’s signature and a note scrawled in the margin: Five souls passed—may the Lord forgive the smell.
Isaac smiled faintly. He knew that even the smallest traces of goodness could hide in ledgers and drains.
Before leaving, he stopped by the bakery site where Helena Nowak had once hidden him. It was now a café filled with students tapping on laptops.
He ordered tea, sat by the window, and thought of the chain of ordinary people who had risked everything for one crying child: the sewer worker, the baker, the mother who had no grave.
If heroism had a sound, he decided, it wasn’t gunfire or speeches. It was the quiet splash of a bucket lowered into darkness.
The city remembers
When local journalists heard of his visit, they asked for an interview. Isaac agreed on one condition: that the story center not on him, but on the nameless woman who saved him.
“I am only proof that she existed,” he said into the microphone. “That someone in the darkest place imaginable still believed life was worth protecting. You can destroy walls, burn cities, erase names—but you cannot erase that belief.”
The piece aired across Ukraine and Poland. Letters poured in—descendants of other survivors who had escaped through the same tunnels. Some even claimed relation to Jan Kowalski. Together they petitioned the city council to mark the site with a memorial.
In 2007, a small bronze plaque was placed beside the manhole. It reads in three languages:
“To the mothers who lowered their children into the darkness, and to the hands that lifted them toward the light.”
The meaning of light
That winter, Isaac returned alone for the unveiling. Snow drifted across the street as he stood among locals and schoolchildren. Someone handed him a candle. When the mayor asked if he wished to say a few words, he hesitated, then spoke softly:
“People ask how a child could survive such a place. I tell them: because love is stubborn. My mother gave me everything she had—the courage to breathe one more day. And every day since has been borrowed from her.”
When the ceremony ended, he remained until the candles burned low. Then he stepped aside, placed another rose on the plaque, and whispered, “For you, Mama.”
A gust of wind swept through the alley, rattling the lids of nearby drains. For an instant, he thought he heard a woman’s voice carried upward, faint and warm. Perhaps it was only the echo of moving air—or perhaps the city, remembering, exhaled.
Epilogue: The lesson beneath our feet
Long after Isaac’s death in 2015, visitors still come to that corner in Lviv. Some are tourists, others descendants of those once trapped behind the ghetto walls. They leave flowers, pebbles, sometimes small metal buckets painted red—the color of life returning from rust.
Historians now estimate that twenty-one Jews survived in Lviv’s sewers during 1943–44 thanks to Polish workers like Leopold Socha, Stefan Wroński, and others whose real stories mirror the fiction that gave them faces.
Their courage remained largely unrecognized until decades after the war.
Yet for every documented act of heroism, there were countless unnamed ones—the mothers who never left the tunnels, the children who never reached daylight.
The record books cannot hold their names, but the earth does. Beneath the paved streets and the tourist cafés lies a network of tunnels that once carried both filth and faith.
When spring rain floods the drains, the water hums through those same pipes, washing over stones that once felt human hands.
And if you stand quietly at the manhole on Zamarstynowska Street, you might imagine the faint cry of a baby traveling upward through the dark—proof that even in humanity’s worst hour, someone still believed in morning.
