Hitler's war

Chapter Fifteen

For more than two years, the war in Spain had electrified the world. Everybody could see it foretold what would happen when Fascism squared off against Marxism. Both sides threw what they could into the struggle. Italian troops, German planes, Russian tanks…Most of the bodies, on both sides, stayed Spanish.

Not all. Chaim Weinberg wouldn’t have left New York City without a strong feeling that something had to be done to stop Fascism before it exploded all over Europe. He wasn’t the only one: the International Brigades were proof of that. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Republic remained a going concern despite everything Marshal Sanjurjo could do to crush it.

And then, when the Internationals were about to get pulled from the line, the big war did break out in Europe. Spain’s fight was suddenly Britain and France’s fight, too. Materiel flooded south across the Pyrenees as the French border opened up. It seemed too good to be true.

It was. As soon as Hitler turned his troops on the Low Countries and France rather than Czechoslovakia, the flood didn’t go back to being a trickle. It dried up altogether. Everything the French could make, they shipped northeast to shoot at the Boches.

Germany and Italy had already pretty much forgotten about Spain. With the French and English navies in the war, the Fascists had a much harder time getting through than they’d had before. And they needed their toys to use against the Western democracies.

So Spain went from being the cockpit of world attention to the war that everybody forgot. Everybody, that is, except the poor, sorry bastards still stuck fighting it.

Lately, Sanjurjo’s men on an outpost a few hundred meters away had found themselves a new weapon: a loudspeaker system. It crackled to life now: “Come over to the winning side!” a Spaniard shouted, and the loudspeaker gave him something close to the voice of God. “Come over to us, and we’ll feed you what we eat ourselves. It’s lovely chicken stew tonight! Don’t miss it!”

“Ha!” Chaim said, and turned to Mike Carroll. “You know how to make Sanjurjo’s chicken stew?”

“First, you steal a chicken,” Carroll answered wearily. “That’s an old one. Got a smoke?”

“Yeah.” Chaim gave him a Gauloise.

“Lovely chicken stew!” the Nationalist boomed again.

“Thanks. Tastes like shit, but thanks.” Carroll puffed happily. Chaim agreed with him-the French tobacco did taste like shit. But Gauloises and Gitanes were better than no cigarettes at all-and better than roll-your-owns made from other people’s (and your own) butts.

“Chicken stew-with dumplings!”

“Lying cocksucker,” Chaim said without much rancor. Every so often, guys from the other side deserted. From what they said, the Nationalists were just as hungry, just as miserable, as the Republicans.

“Maybe their officers have chicken stew,” Carroll said.

“Now you’re talking,” Chaim said. Republican officers ate and lived no better than the men they led. It was an article of faith on this side that the enemy’s officers exploited their soldiers-they were fighting for class distinctions, after all. Some of what the deserters said supported that: some, but not all. The Republicans mostly discounted anything that disagreed with what they’d thought before.

“Wonderful chicken stew! All you can eat!”

Somebody in the Republican lines fired at the loudspeaker. If you were hungry and cold and miserable, talk of food could drive you nuts. And you had to be nuts to shoot like that. At long range, with the crappy rifles and cheap ammo most Republicans carried, how likely were you to hit what you aimed at? Even if you did, what kind of damage could you do? And besides…

Chaim pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. It was very well made; he’d taken it off a dead Italian. He started digging. “That stupid asshole’s gonna bring some hate down on our heads.”

“Tell me about it.” Carroll’s entrenching tool consisted of some scrap iron a smith had beaten flat and then bolted to a stick. But it moved dirt, too. He deepened his foxhole and added dirt to the parapet in front of it and the parados behind.

Sure as hell, the shot woke up the Nationalist artillery. Sanjurjo’s men had more guns and better guns than the Republicans. Hitler and Mussolini had been lavish in supplying their Spanish friends till they got distracted. Nobody on the Republican side had ever been lavish with anything, not till the Czech fight started and not for long enough then.

Fragments wined and snarled overhead. Chaim dug like a mole, trying to make what vets of the last war called a bombproof. He should have done that a long time ago. He knew as much, but nobody liked to dig without need. Now the need was here.

Mike Carroll made dirt fly, too. They both stopped about the same time. Somebody not far away had been wounded, and was making a godawful racket. “I’d better go get him,” Chaim said, though he could think of few things he wanted to do less. As if to convince himself, he added, “God knows I’d want somebody to pick me up if I got hit.”

“Yeah.” Carroll also scrambled out of his hole, even if he’d just improved it. Not being by himself above ground made Chaim a little less lonely. It also made him wonder if he’d have to try to make pickup for two. Well, if he stopped something himself, somebody was out there to make pickup on him.

He scuttled along like a pair of ragged claws-some damn poem picking the exact wrong moment to bounce around in his head. Like a snake would have been closer, because his belly hugged the ground every second. Off to his left, Mike also looked flattened by a steamroller.

To add to the joy, a couple of Nationalists started shooting at them with rifles. Luckily, none of the rounds came close. Spaniards, whether Nationalists or Republicans, made piss-poor riflemen. Chaim didn’t know why that was true, but it sure seemed to be. The bullets got close enough to scare him cracking past, but no closer than that.

He crawled past some trench a shell hit had caved in and flopped down into the earthwork beyond with a sigh of relief. Mike Carroll made it, too. There lay the wounded guy, trying to clutch his chest and his leg at the same time and howling like a banshee. Two other men from the International Brigades were nothing but raw meat and blood-no blaming them for not helping their buddy, because nobody could ever help them again.

“Fuck,” Carroll said hoarsely. “See who it is?”

Chaim hadn’t noticed-one injured fighter sounded much like another, no matter which language he’d grown up speaking. Now he took a look. “Fuck,” he echoed. “It’s Milt.”

Milton Wolff- El Lobo to the Spaniards on both sides-had led the Abraham Lincoln Battalion since Robert Merriman was lost the spring before. He’d kept them in the line no matter what Sanjurjo’s goons threw at them. He wasn’t just their heart; he was also a big part of their backbone.

And he was badly hurt. Fragments had shredded his left calf and thigh and laid open the left side of his chest. “Jesus,” Chaim muttered. His stomach tried to turn over. He wouldn’t let it.

“What do we do?” Carroll sounded as lost and horrified as Chaim felt. If you saw your father like that…“What can we do?”

“Try and patch him up. Try and get him back to the docs. Maybe they can pour some blood into him,” Chaim answered. Republican doctors could do more with transfusions than just about anybody. That was one of the few places where the Republic worked well-if the crack mobile unit was anywhere within a few kilometers, anyhow.

They used their wound dressings. They used strips of cloth from their uniforms and from those of the dead men, who didn’t care any more. One of the corpses had a miraculously unbroken syringe in a belt pouch. Chaim jabbed Wolff with it-it was the only painkiller he was likely to get.

Wolff was a big man-six-two, easy-which only made things worse. Manhandling him over to a communications trench that went back was no fun for Chaim or Mike Carroll or the wounded Abe Lincoln officer. Hauling him across bare, broken ground and praying the snipers didn’t get lucky would have been even worse…Chaim supposed.

They were heading back instead of sideways when Wolff stopped screaming and asked, “Will I die?” He sounded amazingly calm. The morphine must have hit him all at once.

“I don’t think so, Milt,” Chaim answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying. “We’ll get you patched up.”

“You bet,” Mike agreed.

A Red Cross flag flew over an aid tent. In his bad Spanish, Chaim asked, “Is the blood truck close?”

“?Quien sabe?” a harried-looking male nurse answered. He sounded like a fruit, but that was the least of Chaim’s worries. And he did gasp when he found out who the wounded Abe Lincoln was. “?El Lobo? ?Madre de Dios!” He crossed himself.

By the way people went dashing out of the aid tent, Chaim got the idea they’d track down the blood truck as fast as they could. He wondered whether they would have done the same if he came in wounded. Actually, he didn’t wonder: he knew damn well they wouldn’t.

And he had a hard time getting pissed off about it. He was just a soldado. He had his uses, but their were plenty more like him. Milton Wolff was El Lobo. If he stayed out of action long, the Lincolns wouldn’t be the same. And, while the rest of the world might have forgotten the Spanish Civil War, it remained brutally real to the people who went on fighting it.

* * *

Hans-ulrich Rudel was getting sick of huddling in muddy slit trenches. This one was in western Belgium. It was two in the morning, and British bombers were overhead again. By the roar of their engines, they weren’t very far overhead, either. RAF Whitleys and Hampdens couldn’t fly very high no matter how much their pilots might wish they could.

And, at night, it hardly mattered. Luftwaffe night fighters found enemy planes more by luck than any other way. When German bombers struck England under cover of darkness, the RAF’s night fighters had the same problem.

Bombs whistled down. Some of them landed close enough for the bursts to make Rudel’s ears hurt. Blast could do horrible things to you even when fragments and flame didn’t. He buried his face against the trench wall. He’d come out looking like the end man in a minstrel show, but he didn’t care. As long as he came out.

More explosions, and the rending crash of something metal going to smithereens all at once. “Goddamn flying suitcases!” somebody a couple of meters away said.

“Ja!” Hans-Ulrich nodded, smelling mold and damp. Hampdens were a lot like Luftwaffe bombers, though more slab-sided than any of them-hence the nickname. Whitleys were bigger, slower, and clumsier, but carried more bombs. They could take a lot of punishment…and needed to, because they got it. Rudel wouldn’t have wanted to fly one in the daytime. The British had tried that, but not for long.

Well, the Luftwaffe wasn’t sending Stukas over England any more, either. Some things cost more than they were worth. Even biplane Gladiators were dangerous to the German dive-bombers. As for Hurricanes and the newer Spitfires…!

The real trouble was, Hurricanes and Spitfires chewed up Bf-110s almost as easily as they mulched Stukas. Bf-109s held their own against the top RAF fighters, but they had short range and couldn’t linger long over England. And, when they had to escort the 110s as well as the bombers, they couldn’t mix it up with the enemy the way they should.

From everything Rudel had heard, nobody in the Luftwaffe higher-ups had dreamt the 110 would show such weaknesses. War gave all kinds of surprises-including the nasty ones.

A few more bombs fell. Then things eased off; the drone of enemy engines faded in the west. Hans-Ulrich spat to get the taste of loam out of his mouth. “Well,” he said brightly, “that was fun.”

Several people in the trench told him what he could do with his fun. Somebody who knew his classics quoted Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichen: “Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lechen.” Even if it was poetry, Lick my ass got the point across.

He climbed out of the trench. Something was burning: a Stuka in a half-blasted revetment. The orange flames sent a dim, flickering light across the airstrip. “Got to put that out,” a flyer said. “If the damned Englishmen see it, they’re liable to come back.”

Groundcrew men started playing a hose in the Ju-87. That would take a while to do any good. Gasoline and oil liked to keep burning. And the ammo in the Stuka’s machine guns started cooking off. The popping seemed absurdly cheerful. “Hope none of those rounds hits anybody,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“Jesus Maria!” somebody said-a Catholic, by the oath. “That’d be all we need.”

Somebody else was exhausted, relentlessly pragmatic, or both: “Only thing I hope is, I can get back to sleep.”

“Amen!” the Catholic said. Sure enough, he sounded like a Bavarian.

The burning dive-bomber gave just enough light to let Hans-Ulrich have an easy time going back to his tent. He lay down on the cot-and then remembered his face was muddy. If he hadn’t been a minister’s son, he might have quoted Gotz von Berlichen himself. Being one, he knew that thinking the words was as bad as saying them. He sometimes swore in the heat of action, but never in cold blood-and he always regretted it afterwards.

When he got up and came out the next morning, the fellow in the next tent greeted him with, “Who’s the nigger?”

“Funny, Manfred. Fun- ny,” Hans-Ulrich said. “You should take it to the movies.”

“Go drink some milk, preacher’s son,” Manfred jeered. “You’ll feel better.”

Hans-Ulrich’s hands balled into fists. He took a step toward the other flyer. “Enough, both of you,” a more senior officer said. “Do you want to get tossed in the clink? Save that Scheisse for the enemy, hear me?”

Reluctantly, Manfred nodded. Even more reluctantly, so did Hans-Ulrich. He was sick of being the white crow in the squadron. He couldn’t even say that: somebody would have told him he was the white crow because he drank so much milk.

If he’d changed his ways and drunk schnapps, everybody would have liked him. The notion didn’t cross his mind.

Other people razzed him about his dirty face, but not so viciously as Manfred had. Some other pilots and rear gunners had also got muddy, though none quite so muddy as Rudel. While they ate, a grunting bulldozer repaired damage to the airstrip.

German bombers-Spades and Flying Pencils-droned past overhead, bound for England. Bf-109s would protect the Heinkels and Dorniers from RAF fighters, and they could protect themselves better than Stukas. All the same, Hans-Ulrich wondered how much longer the Luftwaffe would go over the enemy island by day. Nighttime bombing was less accurate, but also much less expensive.

He wasn’t sorry not to cross the North Sea again. He counted himself lucky to have made it back the times he’d tried it. Maybe the twin-engine bombers would have better luck. Maybe.

His own mission lay to the southwest. The French were bringing materiel up from Paris to the front that still shielded their capital from the Wehrmacht ’ s onslaught. If the Luftwaffe could smash up those trucks and trains, enemy troops would get less of what they needed to keep up the fight.

“Ready?” he asked Sergeant Dieselhorst.

The man in the rear seat looked at him. “Nah. I’ll bug out as soon as we get airborne.”

Rudel’s ears heated. “Me and my big mouth. Let’s go get ‘em.”

“Now you’re talking,” Dieselhorst said.

Bombed up, gassed up, their Stuka rumbled down the runway. Hans-Ulrich pulled back on the stick. The Stuka’s nose lifted. The plane would never be pretty. Though the design was fairly new, plenty of aircraft looked more modern: the nonretractable landing gear made the Ju-87 seem older than it was. But the beast got the job done. Next to that, what were looks?

A few black puffs of smoke appeared in the sky as the Stuka squadron crossed over the front line, but only a few. This wasn’t the kind of barrage that would have greeted the Germans over England-nowhere close. The French didn’t seem as serious about the war as the British. But they hadn’t rolled belly-up yet, either. We just have to keep thumping them till they do, Hans-Ulrich thought.

Was that river glittering in the sun the Marne? Hans-Ulrich thought so: the farthest the Kaiser’s armies reached in the last war. The Wehrmacht was almost there, too, though it had started rolling in dead of winter and had to take out Holland as well as Belgium.

Silver sausages gleamed above Paris: barrage balloons. The English used them over their towns, too. They didn’t keep places from getting bombed. They did keep dive-bombers from stooping on targets. Hans-Ulrich shuddered, imagining what would happen if he tore off the Stuka’s wing against a mooring cable. He’d feel like an idiot…but not for long.

Well, he didn’t have to worry about that, anyhow-not yet. The squadron’s targets lay in front of Paris. Captain Mehler’s voice filled his earphones. “I think that’s what we want down below,” the new squadron leader said. “Let’s hit ‘em.”

“Here we go,” Hans-Ulrich said into the speaking tube, warning Sergeant Dieselhorst.

“Jawohl,” the gunner and radioman said. “I was listening, too.”

Hans-Ulrich tipped the Ju-87 over into a dive. Acceleration slammed him back in his seat. It would be trying to tear Dieselhorst out of his. Hans-Ulrich had never heard of a rear gunner’s straps and harness failing-a good thing, too. That wasn’t pretty to think about.

Down below, the highway swelled. Yes, that was a truck convoy. As the shriek from the Stukas’ sirens mounted, soldiers started bailing out and running like ants. Too late, fools. Too late.

Everything had a red tinge. Rudel was right on the edge of blacking out. He pulled the bomb-release lever, then yanked back on the stick as hard as he could to bring the Stuka out of its deadly plunge. Behind him, the poilus would just have discovered hell on earth.

“You all right?” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice said he wasn’t sure about himself, let alone Rudel.

“I-think so.” Hans-Ulrich made himself nod. As they usually did after a steep dive, his thoughts needed a few seconds to come back to normal. He muzzily recalled the Stukas in Spain that had crashed before the Luftwaffe installed that gadget to pull out of dives if pilots didn’t.

He fought for altitude. He’d got up to 2,500 meters when Dieselhorst’s machine gun started chattering. “Dodge!” the gunner yelled. “French fighter!”

Hans-Ulrich threw the big, clumsy Ju-87 around the sky in ways the manufacturer never intended. An open-cockpit Dewoitine monoplane zoomed past-obsolescent, but flying. A 109 could have hacked it out of the air with the greatest of ease. It still outclassed a Stuka, though.

Here it came for another pass. Hans-Ulrich saw the skeleton with a harrow painted on its dark green flank. The machine guns firing through the Grim Reaper’s propeller disk blazed. Rudel jinked again-right into the stream of bullets.

His engine coughed and quit and started smoking. A round punched through both sides of the cockpit in front of him before he had time to blink. “We’ve got to get out!” he yelled to Dieselhorst, praying the sergeant would answer.

“I was hoping you’d be here to tell me that,” Dieselhorst said. “Sounds good to me. Are we still inside French territory, or did we make it back to our own lines?”

“Only one way to find out.” Rudel eyed the gauges. “Don’t waste time, either-we’re losing altitude.”

He yanked back on the canopy. The Stuka’s glasshouse had two movable parts: one for the pilot, the other for the gunner-radioman. Hans-Ulrich hoped the bullet that almost nailed him hadn’t messed up the track along which his part slid. He breathed a sigh of relief when it retracted smoothly enough.

Wind tore at him. It didn’t want to let him get out. He fought his way clear of the cockpit. A quick glance told him Sergeant Dieselhorst was already gone. Rudel threw himself into space.

He missed smashing himself against the Stuka’s upthrust tail: the first risk every pilot bailing out took. Then he counted down from ten and yanked the ripcord. Wham! The blow he took when the chute opened made him gray out for a second, the same as dive-bombing would have done. He came to faster than he would have pulling out of a dive, though.

He looked around. There was another canopy, below him and to the left. Dieselhorst hadn’t hit the tail, either. Good.

Back in the last war, pilots hadn’t worn parachutes. The powers that be thought having them would turn men into cowards. Soldiers had gone into that war without steel helmets, too. They’d learned better there sooner than they had with chutes.

The Luftwaffe model still left something to be desired. Hans-Ulrich dropped faster than he would have liked-but not nearly so fast as if the chute hadn’t opened! He couldn’t steer very well, either.

He bent his legs and tried to relax as the ground rushed up at him. He sprained an ankle anyway, but didn’t think he broke it. He used his belt knife to cut away the canopy before it dragged him into some trees. He couldn’t see where Sergeant Dieselhorst had come down.

“Hold it right there, shithead, or you’re fucking dead meat!” somebody yelled. Hans-Ulrich needed a moment to realize he understood the obscenity-laced command. It was in German. He’d landed among friends.

Happily, he raised his hands. “I’m a Stuka pilot!” he shouted back. “My number two’s around here somewhere.”

Three men in field-gray cautiously emerged from those trees. “Get under cover, you Dummkopf” one of them said. “There’s Frenchies only a few hundred meters from here.”

Hans-Ulrich tried to stand. His ankle didn’t want to let him. “My leg-” he said.

One of the soldiers had a machine pistol. He covered the other two, who were riflemen. They trotted forward and each got one of Rudel’s arms over his shoulder. “We’ll take you to an aid station,” one of them said. They lugged him back to the woods.

* * *

A knock on the door. Up till now, Sarah Goldman hadn’t known something so ordinary could be so terrifying. The ordinary police thumped. The Gestapo pounded. She could guess who was there from the different knocks, and she proved right most of the time. If only proving right would have done her the least bit of good!

This knock didn’t seem quite so frightening. So Sarah told herself, anyway, as she went to the door. Maybe she was trying to find hope whether it was really there or not. She braced herself to face some scowling SS man all in black.

But no. “Oh! Frau Breisach!” she exclaimed in glad surprise. Even if Wilhelmina Breisach liked to grumble about every little thing, the people across the street had always got on well with the Goldmans till the Nazis started making things tough on Jews. And, naturally, no one from the neighborhood seemed eager to stop by after Saul did…what he did. Better to pretend you didn’t have any idea who those people were than to have to explain why you wanted anything to do with them. So Sarah hesitated before asking, “Won’t you come in?”

“No, thank you. Please excuse me, but I’d better not.” Frau Breisach shook her head. She was a plump, reasonably pretty blond a few years younger than Sarah’s mother. Now she thrust an envelope into Sarah’s hand. “This was addressed to us, but I think it may be for you.” She didn’t wait for any answer from Sarah, but scurried away as if hoping no one had seen her come. She probably was hoping exactly that, too.

“Thank you,” Sarah said, but she was talking to Frau Breisach’s back.

She closed the door, scratching her head. “What was that all about?” her father asked.

“I don’t know.” Then Sarah looked down at the envelope, and she did. Ice and fire rippled through her, fractions of a heartbeat apart. She recognized the handwriting on the address. “I think maybe you’d better have a look at this. Mother, you, too.”

Samuel and Hanna Goldman came out to see why she was fussing. Without a word, she handed her father the envelope. Behind his glasses, his eyes widened. So did those of Sarah’s mother. Neither of them said much. They didn’t know the Gestapo had put microphones in their house, but they also didn’t know it hadn’t. In Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1939, they didn’t want to take any foolish chances.

Sarah’s father took the letter out of the envelope. Sarah and her mother crowded close to read it with him. Hello, Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin Elisabeth, it said. Just a note to let you know basic training is going well. Don’t listen to the rubbish you hear from some people. We get plenty to eat. The work is hard and we are often tired, but this is no Strength through Joy cruise. We are getting ready for war. I may end up in panzers. The drill sergeants say I have the knack for them. I hope so. They hurt the Reich ’s enemies more than anything else does, I think. I must go now-more drills. Stay well. Heil Hitler! The scrawled signature was Adalbert.

Sarah and her father and mother all eyed one another. That was Saul’s handwriting. “How in the world did he-?” Sarah began, and left it right there.

“He must have got some identity papers,” Samuel Goldman whispered. “And when he did…” The professor’s chuckle was most unprofessorial. “Well, who would guess to look for him there?”

When Sarah thought of it like that, she started to laugh. The Nazis wouldn’t believe Saul had joined the Wehrmacht, even if he and Father both tried to do it right after the war broke out. To the thugs who ruled Germany, Jews were nothing but a pack of cowards. And so, chances were, they’d go on combing through the sad, shabby civilian world, simply because they couldn’t imagine a Jew would deliberately expose himself to danger.

Mother plucked the letter and the envelope from Father’s fingers. She carried the papers off to the fireplace in the front room. No matter what the Gestapo said, they weren’t going to report this. No, indeed! Jews got only cheap, smoky brown coal for their heating and cooking needs, and precious little of that. The fire on the grate was more a token gesture than anything else. Even so, the envelope and letter flamed for a moment, then curled to gray ash.

“There.” Mother sounded pleased with herself. “That’s taken care of, anyhow.”

“So it is.” Father nodded. “I wonder how he managed to…” His voice trailed away again.

Several pictures formed in Sarah’s mind. Maybe one of the fellows on Saul’s football club had connections and got him papers. Maybe, after he fled Munster, he went drinking with somebody named Adalbert and stole the identity documents he needed. Or maybe he ran into this Adalbert walking along a country road and knocked him over the head.

That would make Saul a real criminal, not just somebody who’d snapped because a gang boss wouldn’t treat him like a human being. The thought should have horrified Sarah. Somehow, it didn’t. Her brother never would have done anything like that if the Nazis hadn’t pushed him over the line. Never.

“I hope he’ll be all right,” Mother said worriedly. “You can tell he’s not an ordinary German, after all.”

Father followed that faster than Sarah did. “Jews aren’t the only ones who get circumcised,” he said. “Sometimes it’s medically necessary. What I wonder is how Frau Breisach knew that letter was really for us.”

“Somebody must have recognized the handwriting.” Sarah had no trouble figuring that out. “Saul used to go over there all the time to help the Breisach kids with their homework-back when you could without getting into too much trouble, I mean. I think he was sweet on Hildegarde Breisach for a while, but…” She didn’t go on.

“Yes. But,” her father said heavily. “I wouldn’t have minded intermarriage very much. The all-wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful State”-you could hear the stress he gave the word-“is a different story. And Hildegarde would have been insane to take the chance.”

“If the State really were all-wise and all-powerful, Frau Breisach would have taken Saul’s letter straight to the Gestapo,” Mother said. “Some people still remember what human decency means.”

“Never mind human decency. The Breisachs know us,” Father said. “That counts for more, I’d say. I wouldn’t bet a pfenning that they’d help some strange Jew. But we’ve lived across the street from them since the last war. We aren’t strangers-we’re neighbors. People first, Jews second, you might say. All over Germany, gentiles are probably going, ‘Well, I don’t have a good word to say about most Jews, but Abraham down the street? He’s all right.’”

“I wonder how much good it will do,” Sarah said.

“Some, anyhow.” Father nodded toward the now anonymous ashes in the fireplace. “And I’m jealous of your brother.”

“For heaven’s sake, why?” Mother got that out before Sarah could.

“He made it into the Wehrmacht,” Father answered. “I fought for Germany before. I would have done it again. I am a German, dammit, whether the Nazis want to let me be one or not.”

“Isn’t getting shot once enough for Germany?” Mother asked pointedly.

“If I hadn’t, the goons would have treated us even worse than they did,” Father said. “Hitler says Jews haven’t got any guts-but he can’t say that about front-line soldiers from the last war. So we have it better than most Jews-not good, but better.”

“Oh, joy,” Sarah said in a hollow voice. “If this is better, I don’t want worse.”

Father nodded solemnly. “You’d better not. The difference between bad and worse is much bigger than the difference between good and better. So when you think about the difference between better and worse…”

He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. Chances were he did. What had life in the trenches been like? Sarah had read All Quiet on the Western Front -who hadn’t? She’d seen the movie, too. But her father had really gone through all those things, and maybe more besides. It was probably like the difference between reading about kissing and kissing, only more so.

Mother started to laugh. “What’s funny?” Sarah asked. She sure didn’t see anything.

Still in a low voice to foil the microphones that might not be there at all, her mother answered, “Our only son’s just gone into the Wehrmacht. And I’m happy! Happy! He has a better chance of staying safe there than he would if he were still running around the countryside somewhere.”

Sarah laughed, too. When you put it that way, it was funny. Her father put things in perspective, the way he usually did: “If you have to go that far for a laugh, you’ve got more tsuris than you need.”

He hardly ever dropped a Yiddish word into his German. It would have made him seem less German, more openly Jewish. It might even have made him seem that way to himself. Sarah stared at him now. She understood tsuris, of course-understood what the word meant and, these days, also understood the thing.

“We do have more tsuris than we need,” Mother said. Neither Sarah nor Samuel Goldman tried to tell her she was wrong.

It could have been worse, though. If the Gestapo caught up with Saul after he clouted that work boss…What would they have done to him? Whatever it was, Sarah made herself think about something else.

“Do you suppose the British bombers will come over tonight?” she said. That was something else, all right, but not a better something else.

“Let them.” Her father sounded almost gay. “Bombs don’t care if we’re Jews. Bombs can fall on Gestapo headquarters, too… alevai.” Two Yiddish words from him in two minutes. What was the world coming to?

“Of course, the Gestapo men can run into a shelter,” Sarah said.

“So what? Even that doesn’t always help,” Father said. And he was right. Sarah felt like a German, too, if not so strongly as Father did. But she had trouble believing any German would cry if a bunch of Gestapo men got blown up.