The War That Came Early: West and East (5 page)

A GROUNDCREW MAN WALKED UP
to Hans-Ulrich Rudel at what had been a French airstrip till the
Wehrmacht
overran it. These days, Stukas flew out of it to pummel the former owners and their English allies. “Excuse me, Lieutenant …” the enlisted man said, and stood there waiting.

“What’s up, Franz?” Rudel asked. The mechanic had served in the trenches in the last war. He still recalled the strict and formal discipline of the Kaiser’s army, which made him seem out of place in Germany’s new, more easygoing military.

“Colonel Steinbrenner wants to see you right away, sir,” Franz said.

“What kind of trouble am I in?” Hans-Ulrich assumed he was in one kind or another. He was a white crow in the squadron: a teetotaling minister’s son didn’t mix well with most of the hard-drinking, hard-wenching pilots. They teased him, and he shot back. There hadn’t been any brawls yet, but it was bound to be only a matter of time. Even his rear gunner thought him a queer duck.

But Franz only shrugged. “Sir, you think a colonel tells me anything like that?”

Hans-Ulrich didn’t. He walked over to the colonel’s tent. Everything all
around was green. The air was soft and sweet and mild with spring … if you didn’t notice the faint death-reek that lay under the sweetness. Rudel’s nose was used to it, so most of the time he didn’t. This morning, for some reason, he did.

An unfamiliar
Kübelwagen
was parked next to the tent. The little utility vehicle was built on a
Volkswagen
chassis. Production of passenger cars, naturally, was on hold for the duration. A
Kübelwagen
could take four people almost anywhere, and carry a machine gun, too. If you didn’t need armor plate or a cannon, what more could you want?

He ducked into the tent. “Rudel, sir, reporting as ordered.”

“Yes, yes.” Colonel Steinbrenner nodded to the two men standing next to the folding table that served as his desk. “These gentlemen have some questions they want to ask you.”

The gentlemen in question didn’t wear
Luftwaffe
blue-gray. Instead, their uniforms were somber black, with SS runs on one collar tab. The older SS man said, “So you’re Rudel, are you?”

“That’s right,” Hans-Ulrich answered automatically.

“Good. Come with us,” the blackshirt said.

“What’s going on?” That was also an automatic yelp.

“Just come. We’ll talk about it later,” the SS man answered.

Numbly, Rudel went. Was this what Russian officers felt when somebody from the NKVD came for them? He didn’t know; he’d never been a Russian. He did know people at the airstrip stared as he climbed into the
Kübelwagen
with Himmler’s hounds. The younger one started up the machine. As it rolled away, Hans-Ulrich wondered if he’d ever come back.

After a little more than a kilometer, the driver pulled off the narrow, winding road and stopped. Everything was very quiet. A couple of black cows grazed in an emerald meadow. Off in the distance, a French farmer guided a horse-drawn plow. He probably would have used a tractor before the war, but where would he get gas for it now? The plow might have been sitting in the barn since his father put it there. But you did what you could with what you had.

What were the SS men going to do with him? The older one lit an Overstolz from a pack he took out of his breast pocket. When he held out
the pack, Hans-Ulrich shook his head. “That’s right,” the blackshirt said, as if reminding himself. “You don’t drink, either, do you?”

“What if I don’t?” Rudel said. “Were you going to give me a cigarette before you put one between my eyes?”

The two big men in black looked at each other. Then, as if on cue, they threw back their heads and laughed like loons. A jackdaw flew out of a nearby tree, chattering in annoyance.
“That’s
not what we brought you out here for,” the younger one said. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He dabbed at them with his sleeve before dissolving in giggles again. “Oh, dear!” He couldn’t stop laughing—he was helpless as a baby.

And his partner wasn’t in much better shape. Had Rudel needed to, he thought he could have disarmed them both without breaking a sweat. Evidently, though, he didn’t need to. What he didn’t understand was why he didn’t need to. “Well, what
did
you bring me out here for?” he asked irritably.

“Nice to know our reputation goes ahead of us,” the older one said. Did he mean it? Hans-Ulrich, already at sea, had trouble telling. The SS man gathered himself. He finally went on, “As a matter of fact, Rudel, we wanted to talk to you because you’re known to be loyal.”

“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich knew the uncouth noise made him sound like a moron, but it was what came out of his mouth.

“Because you’re known to be loyal,” the SS man repeated patiently. Maybe he had a small child at home, and didn’t mind saying the same thing over and over again. Or maybe—since he didn’t wear a wedding ring—he’d just done a devil of a lot of interrogations. “We want to root out disloyalty wherever we find it. People whose loyalty we trust can help us do that. This colonel in charge of your squadron, for instance … Has he ever done anything or said anything to make you think he’s not doing all he can for the
Reich
and the
Führer?”

“Colonel Steinbrenner? Never,” Rudel said at once. Telling the truth was easy, and came as a relief.

“He’s replacing somebody who wasn’t reliable,” the younger SS man said, tactfully reminding his superior of something he might have forgotten.

“Ja, ja,”
the other blackshirt said, not so patiently this time. If he had forgotten, he wasn’t about to admit it. “But so what? That doesn’t mean he walks on water himself, not by a long shot.”

“As far as I know, he’s a good National Socialist,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“Wunderbar
. Maybe he does walk on water, then. What about the other people in your squadron?” the older man persisted. “Anybody saying rude things about the
Führer
because the offensive’s slowed down a little bit?”

The offensive in France hadn’t slowed down. It had stopped. No matter how German radio tried to disguise that, it was obvious to anyone who spent time at, or over, the front. The
Wehrmacht
hadn’t taken Paris. It hadn’t wheeled around behind the city from the north: the goal in 1914 and now again a generation later. It was scrambling to try to cover its long, weak southern flank against French counterattacks. It wasn’t trench warfare of the sort that had murdered so many of the Kaiser’s soldiers, but German troops weren’t storming forward to glory right this minute, either.

Cautiously, Hans-Ulrich answered, “Nobody’s very happy about it. I’m not very happy about it myself.”

That last sentence made the older SS man close his mouth on a question. Rudel could guess what it was. He would have wanted to know exactly who was unhappy, and what the unhappy people had said. Easy to put a noose around someone’s neck with testimony like that. But the blackshirt had to see Rudel wouldn’t say anything worth hearing, not if he admitted he wished the war were going better.

“What about your crewmate, Sergeant What’s-his-name … Dieselhorst?” the younger SS man said. “Some people have told us funny stuff about him.”

“Then they’re a pack of lying pigdogs,” Hans-Ulrich answered hotly. “Nothing’s wrong with Albert—not one single thing, you hear? If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have come back from a couple of missions. You want to listen to the
Scheisse
‘some people’ come out with, you’d better haul me away, too.”

He wondered if they would. Albert Dieselhorst loved Germany, but he didn’t love the people who ran it these days. And he wasn’t shy about saying
so, which must have been why informers tipped these fellows off to him. If they had enough evidence, they’d know Rudel was protecting his sergeant. Then he and Dieselhorst would both catch it.

But the blackshirt said, “Take an even strain, buddy. We’ve got to check this stuff out, you know. It’s our job. It’s our duty.” He nodded—he liked the sound of that better. It made him seem more like a soldier, less like the secret policeman he was.

“Take him back,” the older SS man said. “He hasn’t got anything good for us.”

“Doesn’t look that way,” the fellow behind the wheel agreed. He started up the
Kübelwagen
, expertly turned around on the narrow road, and started east, toward the airstrip. Rudel couldn’t let out the sigh of relief that wanted to explode from him. They might notice it and know it for what it was.

The older man did have the decency to say, “Good luck to you,” when they dropped Hans-Ulrich off. The
Kübelwagen
chugged away. Groundcrew men and flyers stared at Rudel. If the SS arrested somebody right after this, he wouldn’t be able to live it down. The gang would have to wait and see that everyone stayed safe before they trusted him again. Sooner or later, they would … he hoped.

SARAH GOLDMAN WALKED
through the streets of Münster toward the only bakery in town that still served Jews. It was late afternoon: the only time Jews were allowed to shop. They got whatever was left after all the Aryans bought what
they
needed. It wasn’t fair, of course. Nothing had been fair since the Nazis took over, more than six years ago now.

She’d only been twelve then. She hadn’t understood all the reasons why her parents and her older brother were so upset. Well, she did now. No one who lived in Germany, Jew or Aryan, could fail to understand these days.

British bombers—or maybe they were French—had come over a few nights before. Nothing fell very close to the Goldmans’ house, for which Sarah thanked the God in Whom she was having more and more trouble believing.

A labor gang worked to fill in a crater one of the bombs had blown in the street. A gray-haired man with only one arm shouted at the men to work harder. He was probably a sergeant mutilated in the last war. Some of the men were petty criminals. Some were too old to worry about getting conscripted. None seemed inclined to work any harder than he had to.

“Put your backs into it, you lugs!” the gang boss growled. “If you don’t, they’ll put you to work in a camp.”

That made his charges speed up, at least for a little while. It made Sarah shudder as she walked by. She didn’t know what happened to people who went to places like Mauthausen and Dachau. All she knew was, it wasn’t good. No—she also knew they didn’t come out again. Her imagination took it from there: took it all kinds of unpleasant places. She shuddered again.

“Hey, sweetheart!” one of the guys in the gang called. He waved to her and rocked his hips forward and back. His buddies laughed.

Sarah’s spine stiffened. She walked on with her nose in the air. That only made the laborers laugh harder. She ignored them as best she could. She hadn’t wanted to look at them at all. She was afraid she’d see her father sweating through pick-and-shovel work. Samuel Goldman, wounded war veteran, holder of the Iron Cross Second Class, professor of classics and ancient history … street repairer. It was the only work the Nazis would let him have.

Her brother had worked in a labor gang for a while, too. Saul was a footballer of near-professional quality. He exulted in the physical, where his father grudgingly acknowledged it. And, when his gang boss rode him and hit him once too often for being a Jew, he’d smashed in the nasty little man’s head with a shovel.

He’d got away afterwards, too. Sarah didn’t know how, but he had. His athletic training must have let him outrun everyone who chased him. And the police and the SS were still looking for him. A slow smile spread across Sarah’s face. He’d found a hiding place they’d never think of.

How many of the people on the street at this time of day were Jews intent on getting whatever the hateful authorities would let them have? You couldn’t tell by looking, not most of the time. Worried expressions and
threadbare clothes meant nothing. During wartime, plenty of impeccably Aryan Germans were worried and shabby, too. And Sarah couldn’t recognize Jews from the synagogue, either. Her family was secular, with mostly gentile friends; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to
shul
.

Her father had told her he felt more Jewish now, with the Nazis persecuting him, than he ever had before. If that wasn’t irony, what was?

A young man in a
Wehrmacht
uniform, his left arm in a sling, smiled at her as she walked past. She didn’t smile back. She thought she might have if she were an Aryan; he was nice-looking. Up till Hitler took over, she’d always thought of herself as more German than Jewish. Even with everything that was going on, her father and brother had tried to join up when the war started. They still wanted to be Germans. The recruiters wouldn’t let them. It was all so monstrously unfair.

The Jewish grocer’s shop and bakery sat across the street from each other. Before the war started, brownshirts had amused themselves by swearing at Jewish women who went in and out. They’d chucked a rock through the grocer’s window, too. Naturally, the police only yawned. Now most of the brownshirts were carrying rifles. Sarah hoped the French and the English—yes, and the Russians, too—would shoot them.

She got some sad potatoes and turnips, some wilting greens, and a couple of wizened apples at the grocer’s. It all cost too much and too many ration points. When she grumbled, Josef Stein only shrugged. “It’s not like I can do anything about it,” the proprietor said.

“I know.” Sarah sighed. “But it’s not easy for my family, either.”

“You want easy, what are you doing here?” Stein said.

She walked across the street to the bakery. The bread was what the ration book called war bread. It was baked from rye and barley and potato flour. It was black and chewy. The alarming thing was that people who remembered the last war said it was better than what they ate then. That bread had been eked out with ground corn and lupine seeds—and, some people insisted, with sawdust, too.

The baker’s son stood behind the counter. Isidor Bruck was only a couple of years older than Sarah. He’d played football with her brother, though he wasn’t in Saul’s class (but then, who was?). No doubt his parents
had named him Isidor to keep from calling him Isaak. That kind of thing amused Sarah’s father, who’d told her
Isidor
meant
gift of Isis
—not the sort of name a Jew ought to wear. She didn’t think the Brucks had given it to him because of what it meant, but even so.…