Hitler's War (12 page)

No. It was the way the Germans grinned when they did it. Peggy had had the misfortune to watch several SS men surround a plump, dignified, bearded, middle-aged Jew. The Jew wore ghetto attire: black trousers, long black coat, broad-brimmed black hat. In color, his clothes matched the Nazis’ uniforms.

Which did him less than no good at all. One of the Blackshirts grabbed his hat and scaled it. He might have been a nasty kid on a schoolyard flinging another boy’s cap. He might have been, yes, if he and his buddies didn’t carry pistols and have the might of a mechanized army behind them. A schoolboy could punch another schoolboy in the nose. The Jew would have been committing suicide if he tried.

He just stood there, hoping they’d go away now that they’d had their sport. No such luck. A different SS man pulled out a big pair of pinking
shears. He went to work on the Jew’s beard. If he got some cheek or nose or ear while he did his barbering, that was part of the fun.

And the Jew just went on standing there. The look in his eyes was a million years old. It said his ancestors had been through this before, again and again. It said he hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but deserving had nothing to do with anything. It said…It said
Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do
. Yes, that was from the New Testament, but so what? After all, what was Jesus to the Romans? Just another goddamn Jew.

Later, Peggy wondered why she didn’t charge the SS bastards.
I should have
, she thought bitterly. Most of the time, she was somebody who went ahead first and worried about it later. Here, she only stood and watched. Maybe horror froze her. Maybe it was sheer disbelief. Could this really be happening right here before her eyes, here in Europe, cradle and beacon of civilization, here near the middle of the twentieth century?

It could. It was.

The Jew didn’t say a word as he was shorn. He didn’t flinch—much—whenever the shears drew blood. He just…looked at the SS men with those ancient, pain-filled eyes. And that didn’t do him any good, either. When the barber was satisfied with his handiwork, he hauled off and slapped the Jew, hard enough to turn his head around. Another Nazi kicked the man in the ass. That got a groan from him and doubled him over.

“Enough for now,” said the SS noncom with the shears.

“
Ja
. Let’s find a fresh kike,” another Blackshirt replied.

Peggy didn’t speak a lot of German—her French was much better. She understood them, though. Off they went, laughing and joking. The worst of it was, they didn’t act like men who’d just done something evil and cruel. As far as they were concerned, this was what they’d come to Czechoslovakia to do, the same way she’d come here to take the waters.

God help them
, she thought.
God help us all
. But God didn’t seem to
be listening. Maybe He was out taking the waters somewhere Himself, or maybe He was off playing golf in Florida. He could do whatever He pleased. His Chosen People didn’t look to be so lucky.

Even after the SS men went away, Peggy’d needed all of her nerve to go up to the poor Jew they’d abused. “Can I help you?” she’d asked hesitantly—in French, thinking more German was the last thing the man would want to hear then.

He’d straightened when she spoke to him. She remembered that, and the way he’d reached up to touch the brim of his hat, only to discover it wasn’t there. Where blood running down his face and dripping from one ear didn’t, the missing hat made him grimace.

Sadly, he’d answered,
“Madame
, do you truly imagine anyone could help me now?” His French was gutturally accented, but at least as fluent as hers.

She hadn’t answered him. What could she have said?
Yes
would have been a lie,
no
too bitter to bear. She’d turned away instead.

And then, poor devil, he’d tried to comfort
her
. “When you are of my folk,
Madame
, you learn to expect such things now and again,” he’d said.

Again, she hadn’t answered. If he was right, that only made things worse. If he was wrong…But he wasn’t wrong, dammit. You didn’t have to like Jews—and Peggy didn’t, not especially—to know they’d been getting the shitty end of the stick for the past 2,000 years. Had they ever got so much of it as the Nazis seemed to want to dish out, though?

People here in this camp claimed the
Luftwaffe
made a point of pounding Jewish districts in Prague and Brno and other Czech cities. Others said that was a bunch of hooey—nothing but stale propaganda. Peggy didn’t know for sure; she hadn’t been in any of those places while German bombers flew overhead. But she had no doubts at all about which way she’d bet.

One day, a uniformed German official—was there any other kind
these days?—assembled the interned neutrals and harangued them in his language. Even though Peggy spoke some German, she couldn’t follow word one. The big, beefy fellow had an accent she’d never heard before and hoped she never heard again.

“He has to come from somewhere near the Swiss border,” a man standing near Peggy said to his wife. Peggy had guessed they were Belgians, but maybe they were from the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

Then the official switched to French. He had a devil of an accent there, too, but Peggy could understand him: he slowed down to speak a language foreign to him. “Now that the fighting is over, we are arranging transport to neutral destinations for you all. There will be railroad service into Romania in the near future, as soon as lines through Slovakia are repaired.”

Quite a few people looked happy: Romanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Greeks. A lot of wealthy Balkans types came up to Czechoslovakia for the waters. It was the kind of thing their parents would have done in 1914. Some of those parents would have been citizens of Austria-Hungary Even the ones who weren’t, even the ones who hated it, would have been cultural satellites of the Hapsburg empire. That ramshackle state was twenty years dead now, carved up like a Christmas goose. But its influence lingered even though it was gone.

The Nazi official started over one more time, in what he fondly imagined to be English. Peggy raised her hand, then waved it. “Question, please!” she called in French.

“Yes?” The German didn’t looked pleased at being interrupted.

“Suppose we don’t want to go to Romania?”

“It is being arranged that you should go there,” he replied, as if her desires were as distant and unimportant as the canals of Mars.

“But I don’t want to.” Peggy never liked it when anybody tried to arrange her life for her. One reason she loved her husband was that he
had sense enough to stay out of her way. She went on, “I’m an American. I want to go up to Poland or Sweden or Norway, where it’s easier to find a ship for the United States.”

“If the
Führer
’
s
government has arranged that you should go to Romania, to Romania you will go.” The German official might have said,
Sunrise tomorrow is at half past seven
. He would have sounded no more certain about that.

Which only proved he’d never had anything to do with Peggy Druce. “No,” she said.

Had he worn a monocle, it would have fallen out. His eyes opened that wide. “Who do you think you are, to challenge the carefully arranged”—he liked that word—“plans of the
Reich
?”

“I’m an American citizen,” Peggy said. St. Paul could have sounded no prouder proclaiming that he was a citizen of Rome. If the Germans didn’t worry about doughboys coming Over There—well, Over Here—they’d forgotten about 1918.

Maybe Mr. Beefy had. “You are not in America now,” he reminded her. “We are obliged to repatriate you as we can. We are not obliged to be convenient for you.” By the way he said it, he would drive fifty miles out of his way to be inconvenient for her.

“You won’t even let me buy a train ticket for somewhere I want to go? You won’t even let me spend my own money?” Peggy had trouble believing that. People always wanted you to spend your money. That had been her experience for as long as she’d had money to spend.

But the Nazi’s nasty smile said he was going to tell her no. It also made Peggy give back an even nastier smile: the bastard had some of the worst teeth she’d ever seen. “You will go where we want you to go when we want you to go there. We will tell you how to go. This is to prevent espionage, you understand. We are at war.”

“Certainement,”
Peggy replied. “If I told you where to go and how to get there, you would need to pack for a mighty warm climate. You can count on that.”

The German official looked puzzled. So did her fellow internees. None of the handful of other Americans seemed to speak French well enough to understand what she’d just told him. The Europeans, most of whom knew French at least as well as she did, didn’t get the American idiom. Bound to be just as well.

Romania! She threw up her hands. If she’d wanted to visit Romania, she would have gone there. Or she’d thought so, anyhow. Now she looked to be on her way whether she wanted to go or not.

BACK IN THE USSR. SERGEI YAROSLAVSKY
didn’t realize how lucky he was to have got out of Czechoslovakia in one piece till he found out how many aircrews and bombers hadn’t. The Nazis had far better planes, and far more of them, than they’d shown in Spain.

Even trying to learn what had happened to the fellows you didn’t see at the airstrip near Kamenets-Podolsk was risky. Ask too many questions, or the wrong questions, or even the right questions of the wrong people, and you’d end up in a camp. Over the past couple of years, generals—marshals!—had disappeared or been shot for treason after show trials. The NKVD wouldn’t blink at gobbling up a junior officer.

The Fascists could kill you. So could your own side. With the Fascists, it wasn’t personal. You were just an enemy. To your own side, you were a traitor. They’d put you over a slow fire and make you suffer.

Most of what Sergei knew about the missing crews, he knew because of Anastas Mouradian. Sergei still didn’t like people from the Caucasus for beans, but they had their uses. In a Soviet Union dominated by Russians
(and by Jews
, Yaroslavsky added to himself), the southern peoples had to stick together to survive, much less get ahead. They had their own built-in underground, so to speak.

And so the copilot knew to whom he could talk and how much he could say. He had reasonable confidence what he said wouldn’t go past the person he said it to. And Armenians and Georgians and such folk
were like Jews: they…knew things. You never could tell how they knew, but they did.

One bomber had crash-landed in Poland. The pilot saved his crew, though the Poles interned them. Had the story ended there, Sergei would have been glad to hear it. If your plane had battle damage or mechanical failure, you just hoped you could walk away from the landing. But things took an ugly turn.

In a low voice, Mouradian said, “The families…” and shook his head.

Sergei needed no more than that to understand what was going on. “Camps?” he asked, dismally sure he knew the answer.

“Da.”
Anastas Mouradian looked faintly pained that the pilot even needed to say the word. To Russians, Armenians and Georgians seemed sneaky, subtle, devious bastards. You never could trust them. Till now, Sergei had never wondered how he might seem to Anastas. Like a dim backwoods bumpkin? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

He wasn’t surprised to hear the aircrew’s families had been seized, either. If you didn’t come back to the
Rodina
—the motherland—the NKVD would figure you didn’t want to. Battle damage? Mechanical failure? The secret police wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. They’d scent treason whether it was there or not. And everybody knew treason was contagious. Whether the bomber crew caught it from their families or spread it to them, the families would have to be cauterized.

NKVD men got paid to think like that. Ordinary Soviet citizens had to, if they wanted to stay…well, not safe—nobody was safe—but somewhere close, anyhow.

“Bozhemoi,”
Sergei muttered. “You’re sure?”

Mouradian’s dark, bushy eyebrows leapt reproachfully. “If I say something happened, it happened.” His voice went hard and flat.
“Yob tvoyu mat’,”
he added—literally,
I fuck your mother
. As always, tone and emphasis were everything when you said something like that. Said another
way, it would have started a fight. But he meant something more like
I shit you not
.

“All right, all right. I believe you,” Yaroslavsky said. “It just…gets to you sometimes, you know?”

“Nichevo,”
Anastas answered. Everybody in the USSR, Russian or not, used and understood that word.
What can you do?
or
It can’t be helped
fit too many Soviet scenarios, as it had in the days of the Tsars. Somebody once said Russian peasants ran on cabbage, vodka, and
nichevo
.

At a pinch, Sergei supposed you could do without cabbage.

As he had before, Mouradian looked around again. His voice dropped again: “You don’t want to tell this to the Chimp. He used to drink with the bombardier on the plane that went down.”

“He drank with everybody,” Sergei said. Sure as hell, Ivan Kuchkov ran on vodka.

“Just keep quiet. He may find out about it anyway, but better he doesn’t find out from you,” Anastas Mouradian said.

“Right.” Sergei nodded. If Ivan found out his drinking buddy was interned and the man’s family off to the gulag, he’d want to break something…or somebody. He’d get drunk, which wouldn’t make him any cheerier. And he’d babble about where he got the news. All of that could easily add up to trouble. Maybe changing the subject was a good idea: “Hear anything about when we’ll start flying again?”

“Not supposed to be too long,” the copilot said. “But who knows what that means?”

“Right,” Yaroslavsky repeated. Like old Russia, the new USSR always ran late. Five-Year Plans were trying to drag the Soviet Union into a consciousness of time like that in the West. Clocks sprouted everywhere, like toadstools. But with a language where the verb
to be
had no present tense, how far could the apparatchiks go with their changes?