The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (13 page)

When you had to make do with old turnips and wilted cabbage and potatoes with black spots while other people ate veal and mutton, you felt it. When everybody stewed up turnips and cabbage and potatoes, so what if yours weren’t quite so fine to start with as those of the Germans across the street? Sarah missed fresh milk, but so did the rest of the
Reich
. The only people who got any were small children and pregnant women.

One phrase seemed to be on everyone’s lips: “To hell with the Russians.” As soon as the fight in the east started, things on the home front got worse. It was as if the government had shaken itself and at last realized the war wouldn’t be quickly won. And if it wouldn’t, everything had to stretch as far as it would go.

People the age of Sarah’s parents didn’t just curse the Russians. They also said, “It was like this the last time, too.” Sarah had heard about the terrible Turnip Winter of 1917 as long as she’d been alive. Now she heard the one finally passing mentioned in the same breath.

As proof the winter was finally passing, rain poured down from a dirty-wool sky in place of snow. Sarah’s umbrella leaked. She had no rubber overshoes. No one did, not any more; the state had collected
them to reuse for the precious war effort. If she didn’t come home with pneumonia, it wouldn’t be for lack of effort.

If she didn’t come home with bread, pneumonia might not matter. She and her parents were liable to starve before disease could carry them off. That thought wasn’t the only one to make her smile as she walked into the Bruck bakery.

Isidor Bruck, the baker’s son, was her boyfriend. For a professor’s daughter, that kind of boyfriend was a long step down—or would have been, before things went sour for German Jews. Now no one sneered if you found little bits of happiness wherever you could.

And having someone in Isidor’s line of work had advantages it wouldn’t have before rationing began to bite. The first time he gave Sarah an unofficial extra loaf, she felt guilty about taking it. But her stomach, and the thought of her parents’ stomachs, had a logic of their own. Take the bread she did, and she never said a word afterwards except
Thank you
. Too bad Isidor couldn’t get away with it more often; the Nazis closely monitored the flour the Jewish bakers used.

When Sarah walked in this afternoon, she was disappointed not to see Isidor behind the counter. His father stood there instead. David Bruck wasn’t so plump as he had been before times got hard. He didn’t look so happy as he had back in what Sarah increasingly thought of as the good old days, either.

He did manage a smile of sorts for her. “How are you today?” he asked.

“
I’m
fine.” Sarah asked the question that could have so many horrible answers: “But how’s Isidor?”

David Bruck didn’t take offense at not being asked how he was himself. Sarah realized she should have done that the way people usually realize such things: just too late. The baker waved her words aside when she started to stammer out the polite question. “Isidor’s fine,” he answered. “But they’ve got him on a labor gang—repairing bomb damage.”

“Oh, like my father,” Sarah said. David Bruck nodded. She went on, “I thought they weren’t supposed to take people who make food.”

“Supposed to? Supposed to, they’re not,” Bruck said. “When they come in here with papers and with guns, though, are we going to tell
them no? If they’d said I had to go out there, too, I would have gone.” He wouldn’t have been much use at shifting rubble. That wouldn’t have stopped the Nazis. They laughed when they put Jews to work at things that were far from their proper trades.

“Tell him I was here, will you? Tell him … Tell him I’m thinking about him,” Sarah said.

“I’ll do that,” Isidor’s father promised. He cocked his head to one side. “And did you come in for bread, too? Or did you walk all that way in the rain just to tell me you’re thinking about Isidor?”

“Bread might be nice.” Sarah wasn’t about to show him he could embarrass her. When you did that with a grown-up, you lost the game right there. And he’d spend the next six weeks doing everything he could to make you turn red again.

The baker raised a bushy eyebrow. “Well, all right. You have something to carry it in so it won’t turn to mush by the time you get home?”

“I sure do.” Sarah reached into her handbag and took out a much-folded, permanently creased piece of dusty, field-gray canvas.

David Bruck laughed out loud. “A shelter half! I had one of those in the trenches, too. So your old man kept his, did he? Yeah, that’ll do the job, all right. It’s waterproof—more or less.”

“Mother found it at the back of the closet,” Sarah answered. “She said the same thing—and that she wished she could wash it.”

“Cooties are bound to be dead by now. Eggs, too, I’d think.”

Sarah started to squeal in disgust. She caught herself in the nick of time—that was just what the baker was waiting for. Unfolding the oddly shaped piece of material—two of them, fastened together, would make a small tent—she said, “Put the bread in here, please.”

“I’ll do that,” he said, and he did. It was war bread, black as coffee, but it wouldn’t taste too bad. The older generation did agree it was better than what they’d endured in the last war … for the time being, anyhow. This was only the second winter of the fight, not the fourth. Bruck went on, “Now I need your ration book. Nothing’s official till it gets put down there.”

“Oh, yes. I know.” Sarah handed it to him. He did what he had to do. When she got it back, she saw he hadn’t deducted nearly enough points for the amount of bread he’d given her. “Wait. This isn’t—” she began.

“You hush,” he told her. “Some things may not be official, but they happen anyway.”

His son did things like that for her, but his son had motives he didn’t—or Sarah hoped he didn’t. The way things were, she wouldn’t say no. She told him what she’d told Isidor: “Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome. And keep your eyes open. I’m not kidding. A lot of the time, going around the rules does you more good than going through them.”

Her brother was in the
Wehrmacht
. That broke every rule the
Reich
had. Sarah still didn’t know how Saul had managed it. Had he killed someone for his papers? That struck her as most likely. He was already on the run for smashing a labor gang boss’s head after the bastard beat him.

Sarah said not a word about that. It was her secret, hers and her mother’s and father’s. Telling anybody else, anybody at all, put Saul in desperate danger. Come to that, it put all the Goldmans in that same danger. If the
Gestapo
found out what her big brother was doing, everyone would pay a price for it. The blackshirts would think all the Goldmans had known about it ever since he got away.

And they wouldn’t be so far wrong, either. So many things they didn’t need to learn. So many things nobody needed to learn. Sarah hadn’t said anything about Saul to Isidor. She didn’t say anything about him now, or even hint that she knew more about evading the rules than she let on.

All she did was look as wide-eyed and innocent as she could and say, “I’ll have to remember that,” as if it had never occurred to her before.

“See that you do,” David Bruck said. “You might turn up some galoshes that way, or at least shoe leather so your feet don’t soak.”

“I’ll be all right,” Sarah said. It hadn’t stopped raining while she got the bread. With the leaky umbrella, her feet wouldn’t be the only wet parts of her. As she left the bakery, she raised it anyhow. It was—a little—better than nothing.

ost German officers and enlisted men stationed in Poland went into the towns there to drink and to get their ashes hauled. So far, Hans-Ulrich Rudel had resisted temptation. He didn’t drink anything they sold in a Polish tavern. Women … Going to an officers’ brothel was always a way to let off steam, as it had been in the Low Countries and France. Up till now, he’d stayed away here.

“It’s not bad,” another pilot from his squadron told him. “Yeah, you feel like you’re back around 1910, but it’s not bad. A lot of Poles speak German. When you can’t find one who does, there’s always some Jew who’ll translate for you. Yiddish sounds awful, but the Hebes follow regular
Deutsch
, too.”

“Millions of them here!” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. “I mean, millions! How can we put them in their place inside the
Reich
and ally with them here?” By the way he said it, he might have been talking about a sexual perversion. Fair enough: that was how he felt about it.

His comrade, a captain named Ernst Lau, was a couple of years older and far more worldly-wise. “How? Diplomacy, that’s how. Every Ivan a
Polish Jew kills is one we don’t have to worry about ourselves. And every Jew a Russian shoots … Well, there’s a bullet that doesn’t hit one of us.”

“But it’s crazy,” Rudel said. “How can we trust them, with so many Jews in Moscow running things for the Russians?”

“Here’s how. Listen, now,” Lau said. “If somebody invades you, he’s the enemy. Doesn’t matter if he’s got the same religion. He’s still the enemy, ’cause he’s trying to kill your wife and take your house away from you. Anybody who helps you throw him out is the good guy in the movie. That’s the way it looks to me, anyhow.”

It didn’t look that way to Hans-Ulrich. He would have bet it didn’t look that way to the
Führer
, either. He also would have bet Hitler had hardly more use for Poles than for Jews. The way things were these days, for Captain Lau to say anything else could be seen as disloyalty to the
Reich
. Rudel had no trouble seeing it that way—none at all. He was sure the SS and the SD wouldn’t, either.

Then again, Lau was a brave flyer. Hans-Ulrich had seen as much, and would have been convinced of it even without the Iron Cross First Class on the other pilot’s left breast pocket. Reporting him would cost Germany a man who could do the Russians—or any other enemy of the
Reich
—a lot of harm.

More than a few men fought bravely for the
Vaterland
while disliking the National Socialists who led the country. The paradox perplexed Hans-Ulrich, but he’d seen it before. Which came first, the country’s needs or the Party’s? Most of the time, Rudel would have said they were one and the same. Most of the time, but not always. Not here, for instance.

He wouldn’t report Ernst Lau. Back in France, before this fight with the Russians heated up, he might have. But Germany was plainly going to need every man she could get her hands on. After the Ivans learned their lesson … That would be the time for Lau to learn his.

Rudel had thought they would fly more as the weather began to warm up at last. Instead, they found themselves stuck on the ground—literally. Poland’s unpaved airstrips (smoothed-over lines in fields, basically) turned into swamps as the snow that had lain on them for months melted and soaked in. The same thing happened in France, but it wasn’t so bad there, and there were more strips with concrete runways to help
the combatants get around it. Hans-Ulrich gathered this was bad even by Polish standards, which was saying something—something unpleasant.

Panzers stuck in the mud, too. Germany had perfected the art of striking like lightning. It overwhelmed Czechoslovakia. It drove the Low Countries into quick surrender. It almost—what a painful word!—extinguished France. It did take the Channel ports and partly sever France’s lifeline to England: a better showing than the Kaiser’s army made a generation earlier.

And, here in Poland facing the Russians, it stopped with a wet squelch. When tracked vehicles got stuck, when horses and infantrymen went into muck up to their bellies, neither side could move fast. As often as not, neither side could move at all.

No wonder the pilots and groundcrew men who drank drank a lot, then. And no wonder the handful who didn’t, like Hans-Ulrich, looked for something, anything, else to do. He finally decided to go into Bialystok with Lau and some of the other officers. Even looking around seemed appealing. He didn’t have to carouse. He didn’t intend to, either, even if they tried to inveigle him into it. Odds were they would, too. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen that before.