West and East

Chapter 26

Snow. Wind. Cold. Gloom. Sergei Yaroslavsky took them for granted in wintertime. He could think of very few Russians who didn't-the lucky handful who lived on the Crimean coast, perhaps. The bad weather was settling in earlier than usual, but even ordinary winters were long and hard.

By contrast, Anastas Mouradian gave forth with a melodramatic shiver. "Bozhemoi, this weather's beastly," he said in his accented Russian. He swigged from a bottle of vodka and passed it to Sergei. Nobody would fly today: not the Red Air Force, not the Poles, not the Luftwaffe. Nobody. By all the signs, nobody would get off the ground any time soon, either.

"It's winter, Stas," Sergei answered. "You got out of Armenia a while ago now. You know what winters are like once you come north."

"Like hell. Like Dante's hell in the Inferno," Mouradian said. "He put Satan in ice, not in fire."

"Either one would work, if I believed in God or Satan or hell." Mouradian tacked on the coda to keep the other officers sitting around there getting drunk because there was nothing more interesting to do from thinking him a believer. He wasn't, or not much of one. Believing in God and worshiping weren't illegal, but they wouldn't do your career any good.

Another bottle came by. Sergei swigged, then passed it on to Mouradian. The Armenian said, "What do you suppose the other ranks are doing now?"

Overhearing that, Colonel Borisov laughed raucously. Everybody'd put away a good deal by then. "Those motherfuckers? They're already under the table-you can bet your balls on it. When they settle in with the popskull, they don't dick around," the squadron commander said.

Maybe he'd poured down enough vodka to leave his tongue loose at both ends. Or maybe he was just using mat to tell the truth as he saw it. Either way, Yaroslavsky thought he was bound to be right. "I hope Sergeant Kuchkov doesn't get into a brawl," Sergei said. The liquor was making him fussily precise instead of careless and sloppy.

Even Mouradian smiled at the way he spoke. "The Chimp will do whatever he does," he said. "He proves Darwin was right-if we still have ape-men among us, we must have come from them a long time ago."

Kuchkov's reputation had spread through the whole squadron. "Better not let him hear you talk like that," a pilot warned. "He'd tear your head off and piss in the hole. He'd be sorry afterwards, but-"

"So would I," Mouradian broke in, and got a laugh.

"You bet you would be," the other officer said. "Wouldn't do you a kopek's worth of good, though."

One more drunken truth. "He's still a good man to have in the bomb bay," Sergei said.

"Sure he is," the other fellow agreed. "He's got more muscles in his cock than most guys have in their leg." That was an exaggeration. Sergei thought so, anyhow.

Colonel Borisov looked at his wristwatch. That made several other people, Sergei among them, do the same thing. It was three or four minutes before the top of the hour. Borisov stood up. A moment later, he involuntarily sat down again. Swearing, he tried again. He swayed this time, but stayed on his feet. Proud as a sozzled peacock, he shuffled over to the radio set and turned it on.

The tubes needed half a minute or so to warm up. When sound started coming out of the set, a children's chorus was singing of the glories of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Listening, Sergei suddenly understood how a fly had to feel while it was drowning in a saucer of sugar syrup. His face showed none of that. Even drunk, he had no trouble hiding what he thought. Few Soviet citizens had that kind of trouble; most of the surviving ones who did were in a gulag these days.

Mercifully, the chorus ended. An announcer spent a minute urging his listeners to buy war bonds. "Work like Stakhanovites, save like Stakhanovites!" he boomed. Then he too shut up and went away. Sergei wondered how many exhortations like that he'd heard. Thousands. It had to be thousands. And the radio was a new invention, too. He remembered the first time he'd ever listened to one. He'd been sure it was magic. What else could it be?

"Moscow speaking," a familiar voice said. You could set your watch by the hourly news bulletins. Sergei had, plenty of times. If he tried it now, he'd make a hash of it. Enough antifreeze coursed through his veins to make that a certainty.

"Moscow speaking," the newsreader repeated. "Fierce fighting continues east of Warsaw. Fascist claims to have driven the heroes of the Red Army back in headlong retreat are, of course, nothing but the usual lies that spew like vomit from the Hitlerite and Smigly-Ridz regimes. Advances by the forces of progress, however, have proved less rapid than our beloved General Secretary, Comrade Stalin, would have preferred. Changes in the command structure of Red Army units fighting in Poland are expected to improve matters in short order."

Someone whistled softly. Sergei didn't see who it was, but he shared the sentiment. How many generals who hadn't advanced fast enough to suit Stalin were advancing on Siberia right this minute? How many had died of 9mm heart failure? When you shot a man in the back of the head, his heart did stop beating. "Heart failure" made for a nice, neat death certificate.

"English, French, and Norwegian forces continue to retreat in Norway," the newsreader continued. "We must resign ourselves to the fact that the capitalist and imperialist forces cannot be relied upon to check the Nazis, and that another country is vanishing down the Hitlerite maw. If Norway falls, it will bring the German cannibals dangerously close to the Soviet Union's northwestern border-only a thin slice of Finnish territory separates Norway from the USSR. And Finland, under the reactionary rule of Marshal Mannerheim, cannot be relied upon the remain neutral."

What did that mean? Was Stalin thinking about taking Finland himself before the Nazis could? If he was, would he get away with it? The Soviet Union had had a tougher time in Poland than anyone expected. How tough were the Finns? Sergei had no idea, and wasn't eager to gain a firsthand education on the subject.

"In the Far East, fighting continues against the Japanese imperialists," the newsman said, and not another word on that score. The bald announcement could mean only one thing: the fighting wasn't going well for the Soviet Union.

Sergei had wondered if the squadron would be detached from the fighting in Poland and sent across the USSR to bomb the Japanese invaders. Since it hadn't happened yet, he doubted it would for a while: not till spring, at the earliest. Days of decent flying weather were so scarce in this season, it might be faster to disassemble the SB-2s and ship them and their crews by train, then put the machines back together again.

The trouble with that was, the planes couldn't go far enough by rail. Barring a miracle, Vladivostok would fall. And Marxist-Leninist doctrine had no room for miracles. Too bad, Sergei thought. The Motherland could really use one over there.

"On another front, Japan's intolerable aggression and oppression have reaped what the historical dialectic would predict," the newsreader continued. "Chinese guerrilla strikes against the brutal enemy continue in Shanghai, Peking, and other centers occupied by the invaders. Anything that damages Japan on one front cannot help but damage her on all fronts."

He was right… Sergei supposed. He also sounded like someone whistling in the dark to try to show he wasn't afraid. If Japan were fighting the United States in the Pacific, that might draw off enough energy to weaken her against the USSR. Chinese guerrillas weren't a big enough cause to create the same effect.

But the United States remained neutral. If Japan beat the USSR, that would be all right with the Americans. And if the Soviet Union finally beat Japan, that would be all right, too. Why not? Either way, each country would hurt the other badly, and the USA would end up facing a weakened foe.

The newsreader started bragging about aluminum production, hydroelectric plants, and kilometers of copper wire. Sergei stopped listening. Industrial output was important, but he couldn't do anything about it. The vodka bottle came round once more. He damn well could do something about that. He could, and he did. The bottle felt noticeably lighter when he passed it again. Outside, the wind raved on. CHRISTMAS WAS COMING AGAIN. Peggy Druce hadn't expected to spend one holiday season away from Herb, let alone two. She couldn't do anything about that. Before this latest trip to Europe, she'd always thought she was too important, or at least too clever, for anything bad to happen to her.

She knew better now. When the world went to hell around you, you discovered you weren't fireproof after all, no matter what you'd thought before. Well, I'm doing asbestos I can, she thought, and smiled and flinched at the same time. Herb would make that kind of horrible pun at any excuse or none.

Making it here wouldn't do her any good. A lot of Swedes, maybe even most of them, knew some English. But they wouldn't get the wordplay-which might be just as well.

Still, this was better than the joyless Christmas and New Year's she'd spent in Berlin the year before. The lights were on-no blackouts in Sweden. Food wasn't rationed. People here wore better clothes, and they went around looking happier than the Germans had. Why not? Sweden wasn't in the war. She wouldn't be, either, unless the Nazis dragged her in.

The Swedes were ready to fight if Germany tried it. You saw plenty of men in uniform in Stockholm. Sweden had stronger industries than either Denmark or Norway. She bought planes and tanks from other countries, but also built her own. She made her own artillery, too. Peggy didn't suppose Sweden could actually lick Germany, but she'd let Hitler know he'd been in a fight.

Didn't he already have enough on his plate? He seemed likely to win in Norway, and Germany and Poland were doing all right against Russia. Peggy was sure Hitler would happily fight Stalin to the last drop of Polish blood.

But things weren't going so well for the Nazi supermen in the west. And that was the key front… wasn't it? When the war first broke out, she would have been certain it was (with the exception that the German attack on Marianske Lazne almost killed her, and what could be more important than that?). She wasn't so sure any more. One way or another, the Russians would have their say. Peggy was no Red-Herb would have bopped her over the head with something had she leaned that way-but she could look at a map and make sense of what she saw. There was an awful lot of Russia, and there were an awful lot of Russians. Sooner or later, that had to count… unless, of course, it didn't.

Only one way to tell: wait and see. Peggy had just reached that brilliant conclusion when a knock on the door to her hotel room chased it out of her head. She opened the door without the least hesitation: certainly with less than she would have shown in a hotel back in the States. Stockholm wasn't the kind of place where a burglar was likely to cosh you and make off with whatever he could carry.

"Yes?" she said, and then, "Ja?" The word was the same in Swedish as in German, but she tried to make it sound different. Jut because she could speak some German didn't mean she wanted to.

"Hello. My name is Gunnar Landquist," the man standing in the hallway said in almost perfect English. "I am a reporter from the Handelstidningen, in Goteborg." That was Sweden's second-largest city, right across the Kattegat from Denmark. Landquist was about her own age, tall, with brown hair going gray, very fair skin, and blue eyes.

"Isn't that the newspaper the Germans don't like?" she said.

"One of them," Landquist answered with a small-boy grin that made him look much younger. No, the Nazis weren't happy about freedom of the press, and the freer the press was to call them the SOBs they were, the less happy they got. The Swede went on, "You have seen of the war more than most civilians, or so my friends tell me. Our readers, I am sure, would be interested in the views of an intelligent American traveler."

"That's nice," Peggy said. "Where do you think you'll find one?"

The Swede blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, it will be a pleasure to interview you!" he exclaimed. He was armed with a pencil and a spiral-bound notebook nearly identical to the ones reporters in the USA carried.

"I doubt it, but come on in anyway." Peggy stood aside so Landquist could. He laughed again. When he perched on a chair, Peggy sat on the edge of the bed. "Okay. What do you want to know?" she asked.

"How do you feel about the Germans and their war?" He poised pencil above paper, waiting.

Peggy was about to rip Hitler for all she was worth. Then she wondered what would happen if she did and German troops suddenly appeared in Stockholm, the way they had in Copenhagen. Nothing good, not to her-and not to Sweden, either. The Nazis had long memories when it came to slights: at least, to slights aimed at them.

And so she was more prudent than she might have been: "What I want to do most is get back to the United States. The German diplomats have done everything they could to give me a hand. Even Hitler himself cleared up some red tape for me once. But"-she gave Gunnar Landquist one of her crooked smiles-"they won't stop the shooting just to let me go back, darn it."

He scribbled. "You have been under attack by the Germans and by England and France, is it not so? Which is worse?"

Her smile grew more crooked yet. "The one that's going on right this minute is the worst attack ever. The one you lived through yesterday, you don't need to worry about any more."

"I see. Yes. That makes good sense." Landquist wrote some more.

"Sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again," Peggy said.

He blinked again. Peggy got the feeling he had to put it into Swedish inside his own head before he could realize it was meant for a joke. Once he figured it out, he didn't hold back. He had a big, booming guffaw that made you want to like him. "You are wicked!" he said, plainly meaning it for a compliment.

"Thank you," Peggy answered, deadpan, which produced another explosion of merriment from him.

"My, my," he said. "How am I to write a story when I am laughing so hard? Let me ask you a more serious question: with all the rationing she uses, how long can Germany go on fighting?"

That was serious, all right. Peggy gave it the best answer she could: "A long time, at least by what I saw. The food isn't so great, but there's enough of it. Nobody's going hungry. People can't get many new clothes, but they can manage with their old stuff. Most of what's new goes straight to the Wehrmacht. But I've heard there's rationing in England and France, too. You'd know better than I would, and more about how tight it is."

"I know it is there. Past that…" Landquist shrugged. "No one on either side seems happy to admit he has not got plenty of everything."

"You're bound to be right."

Landquist lit a cigarette: an American Chesterfield. Seeing Peggy's wistful stare, he offered her the pack. They hadn't been her brand back in the USA, but they came closer than any of the European blends she'd been smoking. She sighed with pleasure after he gave her a light. Then he said, "With the fighting to our west, not many more of these will come through."

"The war to the west is why I'm still here," Peggy answered, floating on clouds of tobacco-flavored nostalgia. "I mean, Sweden is a nice country and everything, but I'd still rather go home. I want to, but I can't."

"I am sorry." Unlike a lot of people who said that, Gunnar Landquist actually sounded as if he meant it. "If there were something I could do-"

That subjunctive was correct. Even so, most Americans would have said If there was. Sometimes you could tell foreigners because they spoke your language more accurately than you did.

"Since you cannot go, what will you do?" Landquist asked.

"Stay," Peggy said, which made him laugh yet again. She went on, "If I have to stay somewhere that isn't America, this is a nice place to be."

"I am glad to hear it. I shall write it down and quote you." Write it down he did. He tipped her a wink. "So you like us better than Germany, do you?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" Peggy blurted. Gunnar Landquist wrote that down, too. Peggy wondered if she ought to ask him not to. If-no, when-the Germans read it, it would only piss them off. She'd been trying to avoid that, even in this interview. Well, too goddamn bad this time, she thought. It was nothing but the truth. THEO HOSSBACH HADN'T MUCH ENJOYED spending a winter in the field in the Low Countries and France. By the way things were going, spending a winter in the field in Poland would be even less fun. He came from Breslau, not that far west of where he was now. Winters got pretty beastly there, too. Not so beastly as this, though. He didn't think so, anyhow.

Adi Stoss came from some lousy little town near Munster, way the hell over on the other side of Germany. He pissed and moaned about the cold and wind like you wouldn't believe. "This weather ought to be against the Geneva Convention," he said with an exaggerated shiver, huddling close to the fire the panzer crew had made of boards taken from a wrecked farmhouse. The peasant whose house it had been was in no position to complain; they'd found his body, and his wife's, and a little boy's, in the ruins.

"Screw the weather," Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander didn't get far from the fire, either, no matter what he said. He wasn't one of the people who could light a cigarette in any weather. Finally giving it up as a bad job, he went on, "What ought to be against the fucking Geneva Convention are the Russians."

A puff of fog escaped from Adi's mouth as he grunted. Theo made some kind of small noise, too, but the wind grabbed it and blew it away. Neither of his crewmates paid any attention. Chances were they wouldn't have even if they'd heard him. He didn't worry about that. It wasn't as if he wanted people paying attention to him, for God's sake.

Adi looked east. He pounded his mittened hands together to try to get some blood flowing in them. "You suppose it's true? What the damn foot soldiers were going on about, I mean?"

"That the Ivans cut the cocks off our guys in that patrol they caught? That they stuffed 'em in their mouths afterwards?" Gloomily, Witt nodded. "Yeah, I believe it. I went through basic with one of the guys who found 'em. I'm not saying Benno wouldn't tell a lie, but he wouldn't tell that kind of lie-know what I mean?"

"I only wish I didn't," the driver answered. He pounded his hands some more, staring down at the ground between his feet. When he looked up again, his face seemed ravaged and old. "Here's hoping our guys were dead before the Russkis went to work on 'em."

"Yeah. Here's hoping." Witt scowled. "If I thought they were going to do that to me, I'd shoot myself first."

"Christ, who wouldn't?" Stoss cupped his hands in front of his crotch. "Fun old war, ain't it?"

"Fun… Aber naturlich." The corners of the sergeant's mouth turned down even farther. "How the hell are you supposed to fight against people who do that kind of shit? They aren't people, not really. Nothing but savages."

"How do you fight 'em? You kill 'em, that's how. And you make goddamn sure they don't take you alive." Adi slapped his hip. "I never let loose of my pistol these days."

"Makes sense to me." Witt turned to-turned on-Theo. "How about you, Hossbach?"

"Huh?" Theo said in surprise. A blush heated his face. He couldn't leave it there. A few more words came out: "Adi usually makes sense."

"Fat lot of good it does him, too," Witt said. "Sorry son of a bitch is stuck in Poland just like the rest of us."

"Oh, there are worse places," Adi said lightly.

"Yeah?" Witt challenged. "Name two."

"Dachau. Belsen." All at once, Stoss' tone wasn't light any more. The names came off his tongue flat and hard as paving stones.

He didn't just kill the conversation; he shot it right behind the ear. Witt got very busy-almost theatrically busy-heating meat-and-barley stew in his mess tin. The cooks coyly declined to tell their customers what kind of meat it was. That made Theo suspect it would whinny if you poked it with a fork. He'd eaten horsemeat in the field before. This had the same strong flavor and gluey texture. He didn't worry about it. A full belly beat an empty one any day of the week.

Like Adalbert Stoss, he preferred Poland to a concentration camp inside the Reich. That didn't mean bad things couldn't happen to you here. The Russians announced that they weren't shutting down for the Christmas season by shelling the hell out of the position the Wehrmacht and the Poles were holding. Shouts of "Urra!" and the rumble of enemy panzers coming forward said they weren't kidding around, either.

As soon as the first shells burst, all the German panzer crewmen raced for their machine. Theo slammed his hatch shut behind him. A moment later, fragments clanged off the Panzer II's hull. Theo gave the interior wall a happy pat. He pitied ground-pounders.

"Why aren't you starting this lousy cocksucker?" Witt shouted at Adi.

"What the fuck do you think I'm trying to do?" the driver shouted back. Behind Theo, the starter motor clicked and whined. The main engine didn't want to catch. "It's cold outside," Stoss added.

"Well, the Ivans sure as shit have theirs going," Witt said. That wasn't good news, which was putting it mildly. Sitting in a panzer that didn't want to move made Theo stop envying the infantry.

"Fine, Sarge," Adi said with what sounded like patience stretched very thin. "You can go jump in a Russian panzer, if that makes you happy." He didn't say You can go jump in a lake, but if Theo could hear the words hanging in the air the panzer commander was bound to be able to hear them, too.

"If you don't get us started, we'd better bail out, because one of those assholes is heading our way." Witt's patience was also pretty frayed. "We don't want to be here when he starts shooting."

"Right," Adi said tightly, and then, to the Panzer II, "Come on, you-!" He hadn't been in the army very long, but he cussed like a twenty-year veteran. The starter motor ground once more-and then, with a coughing roar, the main engine caught.

"There you go!" Witt yelled. "Get us moving! Make for those bushes. And for God's sake step on it!"

Adi must have stepped on it, because the Panzer II jumped forward. Theo couldn't see what was going on outside. How far away was the Russian panzer the commander'd been having a fit about? How soon before it opened up? The Ivans weren't great gunners, but a hit from anything bigger than a machine-gun round would hole this thin armor.

The Panzer II's little turret traversed. The 20mm gun fired three rounds in quick succession. These Russian panzers weren't so tough, either. Unlike this one, their cannon could fire useful high-explosive shells and give foot soldiers something new to worry about, but the 20mm could get through their armor as easily as they could penetrate a German machine's.

"Ha!" Witt said. "Nailed that fucker, anyhow. Now go forward. We'll see what kind of friends were keeping him company."

"Forward," Adi agreed.

Forward they went. Theo's inner ears and the seat of his coveralls would have told him so much, even absent the order. So would the radio traffic dinning in his earphones. Through the voice tube, he told Witt, "Scads of Ivans. This looks like a big push."

"Happy day," the panzer commander said, and then, "Thanks, Theo." He sounded grateful that Theo was talking at all, even to relay the tactical situation. That he did announced that he was getting to know his radioman pretty well. A moment later, he told Adi, "Put us behind that stone fence. We can give them plenty of grief from there."

"Will do," Stoss said. The panzer stopped a few seconds later, so he'd presumably done it. The turret traversed. The main armament fired several rounds. Witt's exultant whoop said one or two of them had done what he wanted. Then the coaxial machine gun chattered. Witt knew how to handle the MG-34: he squeezed off one short burst after another, giving the barrel time to cool between them.

More urgent shouts in Theo's earphones. He said, "Sergeant, we're ordered to pull back. They're breaking through."

"My ass they are!" Witt said indignantly. "I've wrecked two of their panzers and scared off the foot soldiers. And we've got enough infantry of our own-well, Poles, too-to keep them from flanking us out."

"We're ordered," Theo repeated. "They've already torn a hole in our position south of here. We've got to retreat so we can organize the counterattack."

"All right. I'll do it. I'm only a fucking sergeant-I have to follow orders." Witt couldn't have sounded more disgusted. He added, "I sure wouldn't want to be the dipshit officer who gave those orders, though. When the Fuhrer finds out about it, that sorry sucker'll be lucky if he's still a corporal. Put it in reverse, Adi-somebody with embroidered shoulder straps has the vapors."

"I'm doing it," the panzer driver replied, and matched action to word. Theo knew what he thought of the Fuhrer's military judgment (among other things). He would have been very surprised if Adi Stoss didn't share his views: Adi probably had stronger reasons for such opinions than he did himself.

None of which would matter if the Ivans set this perambulating coffin on fire. As it did so often, the local got in the way of the general. Once they freed themselves from this mess, Theo could worry about other things. Once they did… If they did… He wished the damned panzer would go faster. SARAH GOLDMAN HAD GOT USED to the Gestapo and the rest of the SS in Munster. Even when the blackshirts weren't harassing her or her family, she had a feel for how often she'd see them. They'd become a familiar if unwelcome part of the local fauna, like rats or cockroaches. The comparison wasn't hers: it came from her father in a low voice when they were both out on the street and away from any likely microphones. Once she heard it, she couldn't get it out of her mind; it fit too well.

When she started noticing far more SS uniforms than usual, alarm filled her. One possible-even probable-reason for a swarm of SS men was a pogrom.

To her surprise, Father didn't seem especially worried. "You may be right, of course," Samuel Goldman said, "but they already had more people than they needed if that's what they've got in mind. Importing more would be like running over a kitten with a panzer."

Checkpoints sprang up on every other street corner. "Your papers!" a blackshirt barked at Sarah, holding out his hand.

Gulping, she gave them to him. "Here-here you are."

He looked them over, then returned them. His lip curled; that seemed a job requirement when Sarah dealt with blackshirts. But she'd heard plenty of his colleagues who sounded nastier than he did when he asked, "You are a native of Munster? You have lived here your whole life?"

"Yes, that's right," she answered.

"All right, then. We don't expect trouble tonight from your kind. Pass on," the SS man said. He glowered at the gray-haired man behind her. "Your papers!"

Pass on Sarah did. She wanted to scratch her head. Only the fear that the SS men at the checkpoint would find the gesture suspicious made her hold back. She hurried home to help her mother peel potatoes and turnips… and to pass on the curious news.

"They could have given you a worse time, but they didn't?" Hanna Goldman sounded as if she had trouble believing her ears. Sarah understood that. If her mother had told her the same thing, she too would have had trouble believing it. After a long pause for thought, Mother went on, "I wonder what they're up to."

"Beats me," Sarah said. Noise from the usually quiet street in front of the house made them both stop peeling and hurry out to the living room to see what was going on. Teams of horses drew two enormous antiaircraft guns down the street. The men who served the guns followed in a horse-drawn wagon (but one with modern rubber tires, or it would have been much noisier). Like the fellows in charge of the gun teams, they wore SS black.

"Well, I don't know what's going on, either," Hanna Goldman said. "I wonder whether anyone does these days." That made more sense to Sarah than anything she'd heard outside the house lately.

When Father got home, he had no doubts. He seldom did. He wasn't always right, but he was almost always sure. "Somebody important must be making a speech tonight," he declared. "Goring? Goebbels? Hess? Any one of them is possible, but my money's on Hitler."

"Ah," Sarah said. She didn't know if he had things straight, but her money was that he did. His explanation cleared up why Munster was full of blackshirts: they were here to protect Somebody Important from the Wehrmacht… and, perhaps incidentally, from the British and French. She told her father about the antiaircraft guns and their SS crews.

He nodded. "Yes, that makes sense. If Somebody Important starts talking in Berlin or Dresden or Breslau, the Western democracies can't do anything about it-even if the Russians might. But here? Once they know a big Bonz is talking, they can put planes in the air and drop their bombs before he's finished." He gave her a lopsided grin. "That's what you get for letting your speeches run long. An abrupt way to edit, but no doubt sincere."

Sarah kissed him on his stubbly cheek. "You're quite mad," she said affectionately.

"Well, I do try." Father looked pleased with himself.

He turned on the radio. The music that poured out of it would have needed to be more interesting to sound boring. Sarah thought the orchestra must have been dripped in treacle. When the tune ended, an announcer spoke in awed tones: "Tonight, the Fuhrer addresses the German Volk and the German Reich from Munster!"

Father looked even more pleased with himself, almost indecently so. He'd not only figured out what was going on, he'd had the timing down to a T. Even a clever man, which Samuel Goldman was, didn't get to seem so clever very often. Sarah imagined airmen in flight suits jumping into airplanes with roundels of blue-white-red or red-white-blue and roaring off into the night toward her home town.

Stormy applause greeted the Fuhrer. She wondered where exactly he was. Did Nazi bigwigs fill the concert hall? Or was he speaking at the stadium? Sudden tears stung her eyes. Saul had played there. He'd won cheers for his skill, if not cheers like these. What good did it do him? She only hoped he was still alive.

"People of Germany!" That hot, familiar, hatefully exciting voice roared out of the radio. "People of Germany, I came here to tell you that the Reich can never be defeated!" More applause: waves of sound climbing up and falling back. Hitler went on, "Foreign foes cannot beat us! And neither can our own traitors! They tried their best to stab us in the back again, the way the Jews stabbed us at the end of the last war, but their best was not good enough."

Samuel Goldman made a rude noise. If the Gestapo did have a microphone hidden in the house, their technicians might take it for a burst of static. What they'd make of Sarah's giggle right afterwards…

Hitler, of course, wasn't finished. "We will hang the traitors!" he thundered. "We will hang them all, small and great together. For we have no right to hang the small ones while leaving the great ones fat and safe at home!" Oh, the listening Nazis cheered! Sarah wondered how they, or anyone, could take him seriously. Those savage sentiments mixed with that sticky-sweet Austrian accent!

"Year ago, the Socialists told me, 'Turn back, Adolf Hitler!' I was only a newly discharged veteran, a nobody, but I never turned back once," the Fuhrer declared. "I never have. I never will. The Reich goes forward-forward to victory!"

"Sieg heil!" the Party faithful cried.

"Sieg heil!" Hitler echoed. "And we must go on to victory, for one year of Bolshevism would ruin Germany. The richest, most beautiful civilization in the history of the world would fall into madness and destruction. The Reds would spare nothing, not even our morals and our faith. And I tell you this, Volk of the Reich: I shall not spare their backers inside Germany, and I shall not spare the godless Jewish masters in Moscow!"

"Sieg heil!" the audience shouted again. "Heil Hitler!"

"There will be no peace in our country until we smash Bolshevism and treason of every kind," Hitler said. "I put my whole life into this struggle every day, and so must everyone who has joined me in it. I have attacked the traitors and murderers here. With my own hand I have shot them dead. And now the Wehrmacht, at last purified from the stupid struggles of internal politics, will show its thanks through devotion and loyalty and victory. For Germany is pledged to victory: to victory over our foolish Western foes, and to a final solution for the Bolshevik-Jewish Russian monster! We shall not falter. We shall not fail. Like St. George, we will slay the dragon, and he will never rise again!"

"Sieg heil! Heil Hitler!" the listening Nazis roared. Hitler thumped a fist down on the lectern to show he'd finished. They cheered and cheered.

Two and a half hours later, Munster's air-raid sirens wailed a warning. Flak guns bellowed. Bombs whistled down out of the heartless sky. Banned from any proper shelter, Sarah and her parents huddled under the dining-room table and hoped the house wouldn't come down on top of it.

"I knew they'd show up late." Her father might have been talking about a student who hadn't turned his paper in on time. "They might have nailed him if only they'd hustled, but he's bound to be gone by now."

"He's bound to be gone," Sarah agreed, "and the war's bound to go on." Right that minute, she could think of nothing worse to say.