If you couldn’t count on the men you led … If you couldn’t count on them, you were screwed. Your country was screwed. After the stab in the back, the Kaiser couldn’t count on his men to keep order any more. And that was why the Kaiser-well, it would be his son now, wouldn’t it? — wasn’t running Germany any more. So it seemed to Arno, anyhow.
He glanced over at Adam Pfaff again. Pfaff didn’t say boo. He was too sly a barracks lawyer to lay his neck on the chopping block. What a shame, Arno thought. Pfaff was good enough in the field. Baatz still wished he weren’t stuck with a troublemaker like him.
The squad moved out again the next morning to check people’s papers and generally keep a lid on things. As they tramped toward the couple of blocks they could call their own, Pfaff remarked, “Boy, the RAF has knocked the snot out of this place, hasn’t it? You don’t see ruins like this farther east.”
Baatz wanted to come down on him for that. It sounded too much like defeatism. But how could he, when every word was the plain and simple truth? Münster had been bombed halfway back to the Stone Age, and you didn’t see so much damage where enemy bombers had to fly farther to strike.
Then Bruno Gadermann said, “No wonder people around here aren’t happy with the government. I wouldn’t be, either, if it let me get clobbered like this.”
“That will be enough of that, Gadermann,” Arno snapped. He rounded on Adam Pfaff. “You see what you’re doing? You’re encouraging him to think disloyal thoughts. That’s a military offense.”
“It would be if I were doing it,” Pfaff said. “But you’re really reaching today, aren’t you? If I bitched about the weather and then Bruno complained it was raining, too, you’d blame that on me.”
“The weather is fine today,” Baatz said. And it was-it was chilly, only a degree or two one side or the other of freezing, but the sun was out and just a few clouds scudded across the sky.
He waited for Pfaff to accuse him of missing the point on purpose (which he was) or of being an idiot. Either way, he could jump on the Obergefreiter’s corns. But Pfaff kept quiet. How were you supposed to hang a man when he wouldn’t give you any rope?
A labor gang cleared rubble from the streets with push brooms and spades. Several of the men in it wore the yellow Star of David. One of them, a gray-haired little guy with a limp, came to attention when the Wehrmacht troops tramped by.
“Look at the sheeny, pretending to be a soldier,” Arno said scornfully.
“I bet he was, in the last war. He’s got the look,” Adam Pfaff said. “They took Jews then. They took everything that could walk on two legs and wasn’t a chicken.” He chuckled. “The soldiers took all the chickens.”
“Funny. Funny like a truss,” Baatz said. “Even if they did stick a uniform on him, odds are he found some cushy slot away from the trenches, the way kikes always like to do.”
“Where’d he hurt his leg, then? Catching a packet’s the easiest way to do that,” Pfaff replied.
Arno almost asked the laborer. But how could you trust a Jew’s answer? And he had the uneasy feeling the old bastard might show he was wrong. Now staying quiet served his purpose, so he did it.
“Go fight the Russians, you stinking sacks of shit!” someone shouted from one upstairs window or another. “Go fight the Russians, and leave us alone!”
Had Baatz carried a Schmeisser or a Russian PPD instead of his rifle, he might have hosed down the whole block of flats. Things were out of hand, sure as hell!
Someone had painted FREE THE BISHOP! and HIMMLER TO DACHAU! on a wall. The corporal stared in astonished outrage. The nerve of these people! He pointed at the graffiti. “Why don’t they have a cleanup crew getting rid of those?” he demanded.
Worse was yet to come, right around the corner. He found himself gaping at PEACE! and THE TRUE CROSS, NOT THE HOOKED CROSS! Hakenkreuz was German for swastika.
“I don’t think the Catholics here like the Party much,” Adam Pfaff remarked. Once more, Baatz would have come down on him if only he could have. Was Pfaff a mackerel-snapper himself? Arno couldn’t remember. Have to find out, he thought.
Getting to the checkpoint was nothing but a relief. He could browbeat civilians, which was almost as much fun as browbeating soldiers. If he hadn’t been so angry with the Catholics in Münster, he would have given a pretty young Jewish woman a harder time. Her papers were in order, but he might have felt her up anyway, just for the fun of it. As things were, he let her go with no more than a growl. Only after she’d got half a block away did he wonder if he was going soft.
Sarah Bruck didn’t need long to decide she liked German soldiers better than blackshirts. Oh, the corporal who checked her papers had a mean face and piggy eyes, but you couldn’t blame a man-too much-for the way he looked. He examined her documents and handed them back with no worse than, “Well, all right, get the hell out of here.”
For once, the Nazis in Münster weren’t shrieking about the Jews. The Jews here weren’t up in arms against the government. There weren’t enough of them, and they knew too well what the SS would do to them if they did have the nerve to rise.
There were lots of Catholics in Münster, lots and lots. They had the sort of safety numbers gave. Not even the Nazis could snuff out a whole German city, no matter how much they might want to. Himmler had to find other ways to scare the locals into submission. No doubt he had spies planted among them. But Sarah would have bet the Catholics had spies in the SS and the SD, too. Not everybody put the Führer ahead of the Savior.
None of which should have had anything to do with her, since she couldn’t stand the Führer and didn’t believe Jesus was the Savior. But Jews could get caught in the crossfire like anybody else. Regardless of her likes or beliefs, she also had to worry about other people’s: an ancient lesson for Jews.
She came to another checkpoint a few blocks later. Again, she presented her papers. Again, they passed muster. But as she went on, one of the Wehrmacht men patted her on the behind.
She kept walking, her back stiff. Anything else would have been worse. This way, they just laughed. If she provoked them … She didn’t want to find out what would happen if she provoked them. All at once, though, she didn’t like ordinary soldiers so much.
Only a couple of pharmacies still let Jews buy, even during the restricted hours they could use for shopping. She’d never imagined getting a bottle of aspirins could turn into an adventure. Of course, she’d never imagined all kinds of things that had happened since the war started.
Marrying a baker’s son? Being widowed a few months later? Being widowed by bombs from England, which was Hitler’s enemy and should have been the German Jews’ friend? More mystery in any of those than in the familiar bottle with the white tablets with the familiar BAYER stamped on them crosswise.
Had the Nazis pressed the Bayer company to change the shape of their stamp to a swastika? Sarah supposed they wouldn’t have. They made noises about tolerating Christianity … as long as the people who professed it did what the regime told them to. German Christians, so called, seemed eager to blend their beliefs with Nazi ideology.
Catholics went along less readily. Some of them conformed where they could. Others, not so much. If they’d conformed more readily, Münster wouldn’t lie under martial law now.
A rifle cracked, once, twice, back in the direction from which she’d come. A moment later, a machine gun snarled an angry reply. Someone screamed, a voice faint in the distance. The shrieks went on and on. Sarah wanted to stick her forefingers in her ears to block them. A badly wounded human sounded too much like a big dog hit by a car.