If you believed Dr. Goebbels’ radio, Stalin was scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to manpower and machinery. If you believed the radio, he’d scraped the bottom of the barrel so many times, he must have scraped clean through it by now.
Of course, if you believed the radio and the newspapers, you were a bigger Dummkopf than Sarah Bruck hoped she was. She knew lies when she heard them. The only thing that kept her from hoping for a total collapse in the East was the thought that Saul was probably there. He was if he hadn’t got killed by now, anyhow.
Sarah walked near the Rathaus. She carried a small cloth bag. The bag had woolen cloth inside it: some of a Jewish family’s pathetically small ration of woven goods. It was going to be used to patch the shabby clothes she and her mother and father were already wearing, not to make anything new. Unless you were going to turn out a cap for a pinheaded baby, you didn’t get enough to make anything new. Oh, that exaggerated, but not by a great deal.
She threw the Münster city hall a black look as she scurried by. The Party dignitaries who ran the town from there enjoyed making things as tough on Jews as they could. They were good at it, too.
An SS man strode past her, hobnailed boots clumping on the sidewalk. He scowled at her, but didn’t ask-no, tell-her to stop and show her papers. She wore yellow stars in all the places Nazi regulations demanded.
“Stinking blackshirt!”
The cry made the SS man freeze for a moment with one foot off the ground, as if he were a frame in a newsreel. Then he whirled, amazement and fury warring on his hatchet face. “Who said that?” he shouted, an angry flush rising up from his collar, higher at every word.
He couldn’t blame Sarah: the yell had come from a man. Several Aryans in worn clothes were possibilities. A couple of them looked to be fighting smiles. They were all past conscription age, but seemed in better shape than what they had on.
Then the SS man did round on Sarah. “Who said that, Jew?” he growled. “You must have seen. Tell me!”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I wasn’t paying any attention,” she said.
“Leave her alone, you lousy pigdog!” a woman yelled. Now that the SS man had turned, he couldn’t tell for sure who she was, either.
He whirled again. He would have been a terror on a basketball court. “You are all under arrest! Every single one of you!” he bellowed. The back of his neck was even redder than his face. “Come with me to the Rathaus immediately-immediately, I say!”
“Lick my ass, peckerhead!” called one of the not-so-young men. The others laughed.
Sarah thought the laughter provoked the SS man more than the insult. He yanked a truncheon off his belt and walked purposefully toward the men.
One of them bent down and grabbed a beer bottle out of the gutter. With an economical motion that told of some practice, he broke the end on the edge of the curb. Sharp shards glittered there as he hung on to the handle. “Sure-come on,” he said with a wolfish smile. “See how you like it.”
By the way the blackshirt eyed the end of the broken bottle, he didn’t like it at all. Instead of going on with his advance, he drew up a whistle that he wore on a string around his neck and blew a long, shrill blast. More SS men trotted out of the Rathaus.
But the whistle also made more ordinary people come hurrying up to see what was going on. They jeered and hissed at the SS men and shouted for them to go away. “Haven’t you fuckers done enough to us?” a man yelled.
“You’d better clear out, you noisy old fool, or you’ll really get what’s coming to you!” the blackshirt closest to Sarah shouted.
She thought that was a great idea, and sidled away from the building dustup. If a Jew got caught anywhere near trouble, he-or she-would catch the blame for it. And Himmler’s goons would be three times as rough on him-or her-as on an Aryan. She didn’t want to give the SS men the least possible excuse to grab her.
Some of the Germans in the swelling crowd were too fed up to worry about such things. Half a brick arced through the air. Whoever threw it must have had plenty of practice during the last war, putting grenades right where he wanted them. It caught the first blackshirt a couple of centimeters in front of his right ear. He crumpled like a sheet of wastepaper. His truncheon clattered on the paving stones.
A great cheer rose from the crowd. They rushed toward the SS men who’d emerged from the Rathaus. More bricks and rocks and bottles flew. One of those SS men went down with a shriek, his hands clutched to his face and blood running out between his fingers.
The crowd let out another cheer. “Kill the bastards!” somebody cried, and in an instant they were all baying it together: “Kill the bastards!” Men, women, it didn’t matter. As soon as that one fellow put it into words for them, they knew what they wanted to do.
Some of the SS men had pistols. They started shooting into the crowd, but they’d waited too long. They knocked down a few of the people in the lead, but by then the rest were on them. They screamed as they were overrun, but not for long.
By that time, Sarah had got around a corner, with a solid brick building shielding her from stray gunfire. More people were coming the other way. “What’s going on?” a woman called to Sarah. If she noticed the Stars of David on Sarah’s clothes, she didn’t care about them.
“There’s a mob by the Rathaus, and they’re going after the SS,” Sarah answered: just the facts, with no comments.
If any of them were convinced Nazis, they were liable to grab her for the blackshirts. Instead, they all clapped their hands and pumped their fists in the air. “Let’s go help them!” the woman caroled, and they all did. Some paused to snatch up makeshift weapons. Interestingly, a mechanic was already carrying a stout spanner, while a man who wore the leather apron of a butcher or sausage-maker clutched a cleaver.
More pistol shots rang out from the direction of the Rathaus. Sarah wished she had the nerve to join the people going after their Nazi oppressors at last. But she didn’t. They risked themselves, perhaps their families. She was too conscious that anything one Jew did endangered every Jew in the Reich. She didn’t dare do anything but go home.
Somehow, news of the trouble had got there ahead of her. “Thank goodness you made it in one piece!” her mother exclaimed when she walked through the door. “They’re shooting at people downtown!”
“I know. I was there when it started. How did you know?” Sarah said.
Hanna Goldman gestured vaguely. “You hear things.”
“I guess you do.” Could Mother have heard the gunfire from here? She might have been able to. With so little motor noise in the streets, sounds like that carried a long way.
Half an hour later, and closer to home, first one machine gun and then another opened up. Sarah had no trouble at all hearing them. More faintly, she also heard screams.
She breathed a sigh of relief when her father came in. Samuel Goldman was earlier than usual. His eyes snapped with excitement. “They’ve put the whole town under curfew,” he said. “Münster’s bubbling like a pot of stew somebody forgot on the fire. Who knows? Maybe the whole country will start bubbling, too.”
“I don’t believe it,” Sarah said, both for the benefit of any hidden microphones and because, wish as she would, she truly didn’t believe Germany would rise against the Nazis.
The Royal Navy hadn’t tried to sneak a convoy from the British Isles to Murmansk or Archangelsk all through the long, light nights of far northern summer. The Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe had convinced them such efforts were only an expensive form of suicide at that season of the year. U-boats, destroyers, FW-200 long-range reconnaissance bombers … The odds were stacked against freighters, even escorted freighters.