Hitler's War (38 page)

“I’m sure it’s fine, Samuel. Who knows your work better than I do, after all?” Lauterbach paused for a moment. “Here—let me give you this.” As he always did, he sounded embarrassed about having to do business this way.

Another pause followed, a longer one. Sarah had to strain to hear her father’s next words, for his voice dropped almost to a whisper: “But this is too much. This is much too much, twice as much as I could have expected for—”

“I’m giving you what I can,” Lauterbach said. “There won’t be any more, I’m afraid, not from me. I got my call-up papers yesterday. That’s why I have to do my typing in a hurry.”

“Oh,” Samuel Goldman said, and then, “Stay safe. I would be with you if I could.”

“You did what you had to do the last time around,” the younger man said. “I know that—you could hardly walk when I studied with you.”

“That isn’t what’s keeping me out now,” Sarah’s father said pointedly.

“And I know that,” Lauterbach answered. “I think it’s…unfortunate. But what can I do about it? I am only one man, and not a very brave one.”

“As long as you don’t tell the Tommies and the
poilus
, they won’t know,” Sarah’s father said with a wry chuckle. “If I could fool them, so can you. You’ll do fine. I’m sure of it.”

“That makes one of us,” Lauterbach said with a dry laugh of his own. “I’d better go, I’m afraid.”

“True,” Sarah’s father agreed. “If they can prove you’re friends with a Jew, that may be more dangerous than going up to the front.”

“If things were different…” Lauterbach sighed. “But they aren’t, and they aren’t likely to be. Still, you’ve got a pretty daughter.” Three or four footsteps took him to the door. It closed behind him.

He was, Sarah remembered, single. Did he mean…? She shrugged. What he meant didn’t matter, because things weren’t different, and they sure weren’t likely to be. He was dead right about that.

She went out into the front room. Her father stood there, holding the banknotes with the eagles and swastikas. Even the money proclaimed that things weren’t going to be different. Samuel Goldman looked up. “You were listening?” he asked.

“Ja.”
Sarah nodded. “Wasn’t I supposed to?”

“It’s all right.” He grimaced. “I don’t know what we’ll do for cash when this runs out, though.”

“Isn’t there anyone else who will let you write for him?” Sarah asked.

“Maybe.” Her father looked—and sounded—dubious. “The others have always been more nervous about it than Friedrich…and who can blame them?” His mouth twisted. “They never paid as well, either. But we do what we can, not what we want to, eh?”

“Ja,”
Sarah said again. What else was there to say? She did her best to find something: “Saul brings in a little money.”

“As a laborer.” It wasn’t quite as if her father said,
As a pimp
, but it was close. He went on, “He has a brain. He should use it. He should have the chance to use it. Or he should be a soldier. He’d make a better one than Friedrich Lauterbach, and you can bet on that.”

“He doesn’t mind so much. Honest, Papa, he doesn’t.” Sarah knew she was right about that. Her big brother had always exulted in his strength on the soccer pitch. Working with his body instead of his brain didn’t humiliate him the way it would have their father.

“Why God decided to give me a water buffalo for a son, only He knows,” Samuel Goldman said, and let it go at that.

The other worry was that, even though the Goldmans had money, they couldn’t buy much. Nobody in wartime Germany could buy a great deal, but Jews suffered worse than ordinary Germans. They could
buy only from shops run by their fellow Jews, and those shops always had less to sell than others. Food got worse and worse. Sarah’s mother was a good cook, but disguise could go only so far.

Noodles flavored with nasty cheese didn’t make much of a supper. Sarah picked at hers. So did her father. Saul shoveled in everything in front of him and looked around to see what else he could get.

“You can have mine if you want,” Sarah said. “I’m not really hungry.” The last part of that wasn’t true, but she didn’t feel like eating the mess in front of her.

“Thanks!” Saul said. As Sarah passed him her plate, her mother gave her a dirty look. Hanna Goldman wanted everybody to eat a lot all the time. Maybe the noodles and cheese could have been worse, but they could have been a lot better, too. As far as Sarah was concerned, Saul was welcome to them if he wanted them so much.

And he did. By the way he glanced up after he made them disappear, he could have put away another couple of helpings. But there were no more. He sighed and said, “The coffee will be ersatz, won’t it?”

“Aber natürlich,”
Mother answered. “Burnt barley, with a little chicory if we’re lucky.”

“Some luck,” Father said.

“Oh, well.” Saul shrugged his broad shoulders. “The Army isn’t getting much better?”

“How do you know that?” Samuel Goldman always looked for evidence. In better times, Sarah had admired that. Now she wondered whether it made any difference at all. Evidence? What did the Nazis care about that? But they had the guns and the goons. With those, they made evidence of their own.

What could you do if you’d lived by reason your whole life long but reason suddenly didn’t count any more? Could you do anything at all, or were you just supposed to lie down and die?

That was what the Nazis wanted German Jews to do. That the Nazis wanted it was the best reason not to do it, as far as Sarah was concerned.
She wished her family had got out of Germany while escape was still possible. But her father clung too fiercely to his Germanness to see the need. He could see it now. Easy enough, when it was too late.

Instead of explaining how he knew, Saul said, “Maybe the British will send planes over tonight.”

“How can you sound so cheerful about it?” Sarah asked him. “They’re liable to blow us up.” With Jews having to shelter in their homes, enemy bombers were more likely to blow them up than anybody else.

Her brother only shrugged again. “They haven’t yet. And the more Nazis they send to the Devil, the better I’ll like it. If I had a gun…”

“Saul,” Samuel Goldman said sharply. “That will be enough of that.”

“Should I turn the other cheek?” Saul retorted. “I don’t see what for. I’m no Christian. They keep reminding me of that, in case I’m not smart enough to figure it out for myself.”

“They’re no Christians, either,” Father said. “Pagans. Barbarians.” He looked disgusted. “And they’re proud of it, too.” A Roman noble talking about wandering Ostrogoths could have packed no more scorn into his voice.

He would have silenced Sarah. Saul still felt like locking horns. “What about the German Christians?” he said. “Their preachers wear Nazi uniforms. Even the Catholics have swastikas in their churches. The students at their universities give the Nazi salute.” His right arm shot out.

“They can call themselves whatever they want. The name is not the thing,” Father insisted. “Trying to make you believe it is—that’s only one more lie.”

“Maybe so,” Saul said. “But we both tried to join the
Wehrmacht
anyway, didn’t we? And if they’d only let us, we’d be braying
‘Heil
Hitler!’ like all the other donkeys in the
Reich
, wouldn’t we?”

Samuel Goldman opened his mouth, then closed it again. At last, he said, “I have no answer for that, because we would. If they’d let
us be Germans, Germans we would have been. Since they make us into something else…” He left the table sooner than he might have.

No one else had much to say after that, either.

British bombers didn’t visit Münster. They didn’t drop anything close by, either. Especially in nighttime quiet, the sound of bombs going off carried a long, long way.

Saul went off to work early the next morning. Father looked lost, bewildered. He had nothing to do—nothing that would yield a Reichsmark, anyway. He started to fill his pipe, then thought better of it. The tobacco ration was miserably small. What he got smelled like burning overshoes, too.

Sarah went out shopping with her mother. When she was small, she remembered, she’d really enjoyed that. When she was small, they could walk into any shop in Münster and buy whatever they wanted. Shopkeepers fawned on them, as they fawned on any other customers.

Everything changed after the Nazis took over. Brownshirts stuck big signs—
GERMANS! DON’T BUY FROM JEWS!
—on the windows of Jewish-owned stores. And Jews were no longer welcome in shops run by Aryans. Some of the German shopkeepers seemed embarrassed about it. They did what they had to do to get along, no more. Others, though…Others gloated. Those were the scary ones.

Only a handful of shops Jews could go into were left now. The war’d just made things worse—not only for Jews, but for everybody. And the British air raids added to the burden of fear. The people across the street—Aryans—never stopped complaining about how their favorite bakery was gone. “Like someone yanked a tooth. It’s not there any more,”
Frau
Breisach would grumble.

She didn’t know when she was well off.
Of course she doesn’t—she’s an Aryan
, Sarah thought. The one bakery in Münster that Jews could still use was way over on the far side of town. It wasn’t open very
often, and didn’t have much when it was. But when the choice lay between not much and nothing at all…you went over to the far side of town.

They had a little wire basket with wheels. Sarah pulled it along behind her. It felt like nothing now. On the way back, it would be heavier. She hoped it would, anyhow. Sometimes the bakery didn’t open, or it was sold out, or…
I won’t think about any of that
, Sarah told herself fiercely.

A gang of laborers was repairing a bomb crater in the middle of the street. And there was Saul, as deft with a shovel as Father was with Greek irregular verbs. He turned the Nazi slogan on its head: he drew joy through strength.

The gang overseer was a wizened little man in his forties. The left sleeve of his shirt was pinned-up and empty.
Maimed in the war
, Sarah thought.
Maimed in the last war
, she amended. How many would get maimed in this one? Too many—that seemed sure.

Maimed or not, he carried a swagger stick in his right hand. He also had a foul mouth, and didn’t care if women heard him use it. “Work harder, you lazy prick!” he yelled, and lightly swatted a laborer on the behind.

“Ja, ja,”
the fellow muttered, and went on working the same way he had before.

That didn’t make the overseer any happier. “And you, too, you fucking kike!” he bellowed. When he hit Saul in the back with the swagger stick, it was no tap. The whack echoed like a gunshot. Sarah thought it would have knocked her over.

It barely staggered her big brother. Saul Goldman responded with what had to be instinct, as he might have on the soccer pitch. He’d been hit. He had a weapon in his hands. He used it. The flat of the shovel blade crashed into the side of the overseer’s head.

The man went down as if he’d stopped an artillery shell. His skull
was all caved in and bloody. Sarah and her mother let out identical shrieks of horror—anyone could see that the overseer would never get up again.

Saul stared at the man he’d killed. He stared at his mother and his sister—all that in maybe a second and a half. Then he threw down the gore-spattered shovel. It clattered on the cobbles. He turned and ran as if a million demons were at his heels.

“After him!” one of the other laborers shouted. Chasing a Jew was more fun than fixing a bomb crater any day of the week. The gang pounded after Saul, some of them still brandishing their spades.

Sarah and her mother looked at each other, each mirroring the other’s anguish. As if on cue, they both burst into tears.

A FRENCH PRIVATE FIRST CLASS
wore a little brown hash mark on his sleeve to distinguish him from an ordinary private. Luc Harcourt was less than delighted when the indestructible Sergeant Demange told him he’d been promoted. “I’d’ve had more fun getting the clap,” he said.

Demange’s Gitane twitched as he chuckled. “Think of it as congratulations for living this long,” he said.

Luc did. Suddenly, being a private first class looked a lot better. He said so, adding, “After all the shit I’ve gone through to get this, I’ll be a general by the time the war finally ends.”

“France is in trouble, yes. I hope to Christ France isn’t in that much trouble,” Demange said.

“Kiss my ass,” Luc said. The sergeant only laughed. Luc had earned the right to swear at him. He did remember that he had to pick his spots with care.

“Anyway, sew that stupid thing on,” Sergeant Demange told him. “You could be leading a squad at five minutes’ notice. Hell, a couple of lucky German shell bursts and you could be leading a platoon.”

He wasn’t kidding. Luc had seen how fast casualties could chew a unit to pieces. He and Demange were two of not very many men who’d been with the company since before the German blow fell on the Low Countries. The rest were replacements, or replacements of replacements, or sometimes.…

Luc didn’t want to command a squad, much less a platoon. All he wanted to do was hunker down tight, live through the war, and get on with his life. Not that anyone from Sergeant Demange on up cared what he wanted, of course.

“See? I told you France was in trouble,” the veteran underofficer said. “And you will be, too, if you don’t get cracking.”

“Right.” Luc knew better than to argue. Somewhere in his pack he had a little housewife with needle and thread. He dug it out and sewed on the hash mark. He would never put a seamstress out of business. He’d sewn up a couple of rips in his uniform. His stitches were large and dark and ugly, like the ones that held together the pieces of the Frankenstein monster in the American film.

French 75s threw shells at the Germans on the other side of the Aisne. Luc’s company was dug in a couple of kilometers west of Soissons. The town had taken a beating in the Franco-Prussian War and again in the Great War. Now it was catching hell one more time. Luc had come through it on the way to this position. Bombs and shells had wrecked the cathedral; bits of thirteenth-century stained glass lay shattered in the streets. A priest stood by the ruins with tears running down his face. Luc had no tears left for people, let alone things.