The War That Came Early: West and East (56 page)

“Jesus H. Christ!” Peggy exploded.

“Military leaders, dissatisfied with the course the war has taken, are said to have attempted to overthrow the
Führer,”
the suave, Oxford-inflected voice continued. “Whether the coup has succeeded is unknown outside the
Reich
, as are Hitler’s whereabouts and fate. Nor does anyone but the disaffected generals as yet have the faintest notion of how, or whether, they will continue the war in the event they do succeed in overthrowing the German dictator.”

“Son of a bitch!” Peggy added, in case her first exclamation hadn’t been heartfelt enough.

“In the meanwhile, the fight continues,” the BBC man continued. “Anglo-French forces have made new gains against the
Wehrmacht
north of Paris, while French sources indicate that their armies also continue their drive to the northeast that began east of the capital city. In the fighting in Poland, the two sides’ claims and counterclaims appear irreconcilable. The situation there, accordingly, remains in doubt.”

Peggy knew what that meant. The Russians were lying just as hard as the Germans and the Poles. “And they said it couldn’t be done!” she said. She was mad at the Reds for losing their grip on Vladivostok. One more thing that conspired against her going home.

As if reading her thoughts, the newsreader went on, “Fighting in the Far East is similarly confused. The only things that can be stated with certainty are that the Trans-Siberian Railway remains cut in eastern Siberia, and that Vladivostok is still in Soviet hands. His Majesty’s government has offered to mediate in this conflict, but the Empire of Japan unfortunately declined.”

Of course England wanted to mediate. If the Russians weren’t fighting Japan, they could throw their full weight against Germany. But London couldn’t insist. How long would Hong Kong and Malaya last if Japan went to war against England? People said Singapore was the greatest fortress in the world, but people said all kinds of things that turned out not to be true.

Then there were the Dutch East Indies, which had to be upside down and inside out now that Germany had occupied Holland. And how much attention could France give to Indochina with a war right in her lap? England
had excellent reasons for not wanting to antagonize the Japs. The only question was, would Japan head south regardless of what England did?

If Japan chose to jump that way, what would America do? There were the Philippines, way the hell out in the western Pacific. Could U.S. forces there make life difficult for the little yellow men? Peggy thought so. What was the point of holding on to land like that if you weren’t going to use it?

“In British news, Prime Minister Chamberlain has named Winston Churchill the new Minister of War,” the broadcaster said. “The P.M. praised Churchill’s dedication and steadfastness. Churchill himself said, ‘Let the Hun do his worst. We shall do our best, and God defend the right.’”

“Wow!” Peggy said. Chamberlain didn’t talk like that—he talked like a greengrocer with too much education. If England had had somebody who talked like that from the minute Hitler started getting cute, maybe the war never would have got off the ground. She hoped it would go better now.

CABBAGE
. Potatoes. Turnips. A little sour cheese. A Jewish supper in Münster: no damn good, and not enough, either. Sarah Goldman was ashamed of the way she gobbled up her portion. She knew how bad it was, but that didn’t seem to matter. Her body demanded fuel. If poor fuel was all it could get, she’d make the most of that.

Her father got more than she did. He worked harder than she did, too. There wasn’t much between his skin and his bones these days, but what there was was all gristle and tough, stringy muscle. He was somewhere between the best shape of his life and starvation.

He inhaled his supper. Afterwards, he rolled a cigarette from the tobacco in his pouch. It was tobacco scavenged from fag ends picked up on the street. Before the war, only poor people would have scrounged like that. Now the ones who did were mostly Jews, because the Nazis had cut off their tobacco rations.

Samuel Goldman didn’t seem to mind. After a couple of puffs, he remarked,
“My gang was fixing a bomb crater just fifty meters or so down the street from
Wehrkreis
headquarters this afternoon.”

“And?” Sarah asked. He wouldn’t have used a gambit like that for no reason—he had a story to tell.

“And part of me was wishing the bomb would have come down on the headquarters,” he said. The recruiters there wouldn’t let him and Saul join the
Wehrmacht
. They’d been embarrassed to refuse, but they’d done it, all right. No wonder he despised the place.

“Only part?” Hanna Goldman said.

Sarah’s father nodded to her mother. “Yes, only part. Some of the fellows there, they’re not so bad. They have to do what their bosses tell them, or else they get it themselves. The army’s not as nasty as the Party—nowhere near.”

“Well, all right,” Sarah said. “So what happened while you were filling in this crater?” Not long before, she would have been humiliated beyond words at her father’s doing such menial work. So would he—he was an academic to the tips of his toes. He took hard labor for granted these days. As with gravedigging in
Hamlet
, familiarity lent it a quality of easiness.

“We’d just about got things fixed when we heard motors coming up the street towards us—and toward
Wehrkreis
headquarters,” Samuel answered.

That was enough to make Sarah sit up and take notice. Horses and donkeys—and sweating men—hauled goods through Münster’s streets these days. Gasoline and motor oil went straight to the front. Except for ambulances, doctors’ cars, and fire engines, the city might have fallen back into the nineteenth century. All of Germany might have.

“What were they?” Mother asked, as she was surely meant to do. “Was it connected to.… to the trouble on the radio?”

There was a safer way to talk about things than Sarah could have come up with. Any time the announcer told you to follow duly constituted authority, you started wondering what duly constituted authority was and why you should follow it. That was the opposite of what the announcer had in mind—but that was his worry, not yours.

Father nodded impressively. “You’d best believe it was. There were four
trucks, and shepherding them along fore and aft were brand new half-tracked armored personnel carriers. Very nasty machines to be on the wrong end of.” He spoke with a veteran’s trained judgment.

“What did they do?” By the way Mother looked at her, Sarah got the question out first by no more than a split second.

“What did they do? I’ll tell you what,” Father said. “They stopped right in front of the recruiting headquarters, and SS men started jumping out of them and running inside.”

“The
Gestapo
?” Mother’s voice quavered. You didn’t have to be a Jew in Germany to quaver at the thought of the secret police—although it sure didn’t hurt.

But this time Samuel Goldman shook his head. “No. These fellows belonged to the
Waffen
-SS—the fighting part. Hitler’s personal bodyguards, I guess you could call them. Much as I hate to say it, they were very impressive men.” Again, he delivered the verdict with the air of a man who knew what he was talking about.

“There were regular soldiers at the headquarters, right? What did they do? Did they shoot these
Waffen
-SS men?” Sarah hoped the answer would be yes. She thought shooting was too good for the SS, but it would do in a pinch.

Her father shook his head again, though. “No. The SS took them by surprise. The regular soldiers never had a chance to fight. They don’t keep many weapons at the headquarters, anyhow. The SS men stormed in with rifles and machine pistols. They came out again a few minutes later. Colonel Ziegler—the head of the
Wehrkreis
—came out with them, with his hands high. They seized a couple of his aides, too. They threw all of them into one of the personnel carriers, and then they drove away.”

“What will they do with them? To them?” Mother asked.

“Nothing good.” Father had smoked the hand-rolled cigarette down to a tiny butt. He stubbed it out and put the little bit of leftover tobacco back into the leather pouch. It wouldn’t go to waste. Once he’d finished, he looked up again. “No, nothing good,” he repeated. “You don’t grab someone that way to pin the
Ritterkreuz
on him. Ziegler must have been involved in the plot against the
Führer
—or the SS must have thought he was.”

“It doesn’t seemed to have worked, does it?” Sarah said. Her father pointed to corners of the room. For a second, that meant nothing to her. Then she remembered the house still might have hidden microphones. If she talked about Hitler’s overthrow, she shouldn’t sound disappointed because it hadn’t happened. She fluttered her fingers to show she got it.

When Samuel Goldman said, “I don’t think so. We would have heard by now if it had,” he sounded glad the
Führer
remained in power. Whether he was might be a different story, but he sounded that way.

Mother found a different question—or rather, the same one she’d asked before, but on a larger scale: “What will the Party do to the officers who violated their oath to strike at the
Führer?”

“It won’t be pretty.” Again, Father spoke with what seemed like grim satisfaction. “To do such a thing in wartime …” He shook his head like a judge passing sentence. That really might have affronted him. His desire to be German sometimes showed in peculiar ways.

“Would the officers have tried to make peace?” Sarah wondered.

Her father’s chuckle was desert-dry. “You might have done better to ask Colonel Ziegler. I have no idea whether those people wanted to end the war or to fight it better than the
Führer
was doing. It isn’t likely to matter now.”

“What did the other men in your labor gang think of—of what you saw?” Mother asked.

“Most of them were all for it. They’re loyal Germans, after all.” Yes, Father was speaking for the benefit of the microphones that might not be there. After a small pause, he went on, “But there were a couple who wanted to take their shovels and clout the SS men. They were behind me, so I couldn’t see who they were.”

That last sentence, surely, was also for the benefit of the hypothetical microphones. Sarah would have bet Father knew just who’d hooted the
Waffen
-SS. She also would have bet more than a couple of laborers wanted to go after the men in black with their shovels. Backing the Nazis was easy when Hitler led the
Reich
from one triumph to another. But when he took the country into a war that wasn’t going so well, wouldn’t the
“Sieg heil!
”s start to ring hollow?

She also wondered whether Father was smart to mention the carpers
at all. If the
Gestapo
was listening, its minions were also liable to decide he knew more than he was letting on. That wouldn’t be good—for him or for any of the Goldmans.

Sarah wasn’t used to worrying that her father might have missed a trick. He didn’t miss many, and she was sure she hadn’t noticed most of the ones he had missed. But she’d noticed this one. Realizing your parents could make mistakes—realizing they were as human as anybody else—was part of growing up. All the same, it was a part she could have done without right now.

She didn’t get a choice, not on things like that. Any Jew in Germany after the Nazis took over, young or old, could have given chapter and verse on not getting choices. You had to go on, and to hope you could go on going on.

VACLAV JEZEK HAD FORGOTTEN
just how heavy his antitank rifle was. On the march, the damn thing was ponderous as hell. It wasn’t as if he weren’t lugging another tonne and a half of soldierly equipment. In the trenches, where the front wasn’t moving and where he could set the piece down whenever he felt like it, it wasn’t so bad. With the Allied armies advancing, he couldn’t do that.

But he
was
advancing. That made the antitank rifle seem lighter—when he wasn’t too tired, anyway. Advancing against the
Wehrmacht
! Ever since the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, he’d dreamt of the moment when he could do that. Now it was here.

It was here, and he was scared. The trenches were pretty safe, as far as war went. He was out in the open, vulnerable to bullets and fragments and potato-masher grenades and all the other tools German ingenuity had crafted for maiming other human beings. (And, if his luck went bad, French ingenuity could do him in, too.)

He didn’t hurry. Everything he was carrying made sure he couldn’t very well hurry, but he wouldn’t have even if he could. The Germans might be falling back. They hadn’t given up. They rarely did. They skirmished, yielded a few hundred meters, set up their mortars and machine
guns, and skirmished some more. Vaclav had no doubt that they dealt out more casualties than they took.

Whenever one of their MG-34s started firing, he hit the dirt. He might have been a dog, salivating at the sound of a bell. But he wasn’t the only one who did. The Germans who manned those vicious machine guns might have thought they worked even more slaughter than they did in truth. They didn’t even have to point their weapon at a man to get him to fall over. But if they didn’t, he was liable to get up again and go on trying to kill them.

“Yes, you just can’t trust us, can you?” Sergeant Halévy said when Vaclav remarked on that as they sprawled in a shell hole. “We do keep fighting.”

“Every now and then. When we can.” Vaclav remembered his dreary weeks in the Polish internment camp. If he’d stayed there, he would have ended up a German prisoner of war after Marshal Smigly-Ridz jumped into bed with Hitler.

“Enough to make the German generals sick of us,” Halévy said. “That’s how it looks to me, anyhow.”

“Too bad they didn’t do what they set out to do,” Vaclav answered. “Trust a German to do things right most of the time and fuck it up when it really matters.”

“True. No Nazis in Paris,” the Jew agreed.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know. It’s still true, though.”