“You stinking Jews!” the SS man shouted after Sarah. “This trouble is all your fault!”
She wanted to argue with him. Himmler had got Münster up in arms against him by seizing the Catholic prelate, Cardinal von Galen. The cardinal hadn’t said a word about Jews; all the signs were that he couldn’t have cared less about what happened to them. He’d protested the “mercy killings” of mental defectives. Other people sick of the way the government was botching the war joined the anti-Nazi movement and swelled its ranks. Jews had nothing to do with any of that, either.
But talking back to an SS man was stupid for any German, and suicidally stupid for a Jew. As she had with the soldiers, Sarah kept walking. As long as the blackshirt stuck to talk, she wouldn’t worry. Talk was even cheaper and more worthless than kale, which was really saying something.
He sent a parting shot after her: “After we beat the Americans, we’ll give all the Hebes over there what-for, too!”
Again, Sarah kept her mouth shut. She had to bite down hard on the inside of her lower lip to manage it, but she did. The Reich hadn’t been able to beat England and France and torment their Jews, though horrible things were supposed to have happened to the ones they’d caught in Russia. The SS man must have pulled his vision of triumph over the United States out of an opium pipe. Or maybe you needed to smoke something stronger than opium to get that kind of hallucination.
She managed to escape. No one was shooting around here right this minute. But a rifle or machine-gun bullet could fly a couple of kilometers and kill somebody who chanced to be in the wrong place at the wrong instant. There hadn’t been any funerals like that on the block where her parents’ house stood, but the next block over had seen one, and a little girl in the hospital with a hole in her leg. Bad luck? God’s will? Sarah had no idea. She wasn’t even sure there was a difference.
A cigar butt lay on the sidewalk: three centimeters or so of stepped-on tobacco, soggy at one end. As casually as if she’d been doing it all her life, she bent and picked it up. She had no use for it herself-she’d never got the smoking habit. But her father would mix it in with his own scroungings. Jews got no tobacco rations. If Father was going to smoke, he had to make do with other people’s leavings.
Or, sometimes, he managed to steal unsmoked cigarettes he found in bombed-out houses-another kind of scrounging. He’d even got American cigarettes that way, from the home of a Party Bonz whose connections let him latch on to things ordinary people couldn’t even dream of. Those connections, though, hadn’t kept his fancy place from getting blown to smithereens … or a Jew from enjoying things for which he had no further use.
When Sarah came home at last, her mother asked, “How did it go?”
“Could have been worse.” Sarah displayed the produce in her stringbag. “And I found part of a cigar for Father.”
“That’s good. He’ll be happy,” Hanna Goldman said. “What have you got there? Mustard? When was the last time they had any?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while. If only we had some meat to put it on,” Sarah said.
“Well, it won’t go bad,” her mother said-they didn’t. All you could do was try to get by and hope the war ended before you did. Did America’s entry into the European fight make that more likely or less? Sarah didn’t know. Like everyone else, she could only wait and find out.
Arno Baatz puffed out his chest. The Unteroffizier knew something most people didn’t. He’d heard it from a Gestapo officer. The secret policeman hadn’t been talking to him, and might not have talked at all had he known Arno was eavesdropping. But that had nothing to do with anything. Arno had heard. He knew. He felt proud. He felt important. He liked feeling important.
Part of the fun of knowing something other people didn’t was getting the chance to tell them. Then they knew, too, of course, but they also knew you’d known before they did. That was how you scored points with your fellow men.
And so Baatz gathered his squad together and said, “Listen, you clowns, you’d better behave yourselves and keep all your gear better than new for the next few days, or else you’ll catch hell.”
“Since when did they appoint you God?” Adam Pfaff inquired.
“Might’ve known you’d be the one to piss and moan. But it won’t have anything to do with me. You’ll catch hell from everybody,” Arno said loftily.
“Oh, yeah? How come?” the Obergefreiter asked.
“How come? I’ll tell you how come. Because the Führer’s coming to Münster to make a big speech, that’s how come.” There. It was out. What Arno knew, he’d spread. Whether it was something he was supposed to spread, he simply didn’t worry about. He could no more keep it quiet than he could do without eating or drinking or breathing.
Some of the soldiers gaped at him. He hadn’t convinced all of them, though. Speaking for the unconvinced, Pfaff said, “Sure he is. And when he decided he would, the very first person he phoned up to tell him was Unteroffizier Arno Baatz. In your dreams!”
“No, of course the Führer didn’t phone me,” Baatz snapped. “Don’t be a bigger Dummkopf than you can help.”
“So how do you know, then?” Pfaff said. “Or are you just talking to hear yourself talk-again?”
“Doubt all you want. You’ll find out,” Baatz answered. “And when you get your ass in a sling, don’t come crying to me and say I didn’t warn you. Us and the SS guys, we’ve got to make sure the Führer stays safe while he’s in town and the rebels don’t kick up any fuss.” By the way he said it, the forces protecting Adolf Hitler would include Himmler’s police and prison guards and praetorians … and this one squad of Landsers.
“You really believe this shit, don’t you?” Pfaff sounded less skeptical himself now.
“I believe it because it’s true,” Arno said. “And I want to see you clean yourself up-all of you, in fact! You look like pig sties in marching boots. Oh, and Pfaff, when we line up for the Führer’s inspection, you’d damn well better be toting a rifle with a varnished stock, you hear me?”
The Obergefreiter unslung his gray-painted Mauser. Arno Baatz had hated that nonregulation piece since the second he set eyes on it. Pfaff started to say something, then had second thoughts. At last, he answered, “If the Führer inspects us, I’ll do it. But he was a Frontschwein himself. I bet he’d understand.”
“He’d understand what a square peg you are, that’s what he’d understand,” Baatz retorted. Adam Pfaff clung to a wounded, dignified silence.
For the next couple of days, nothing out of the ordinary happened. The soldiers began to give Arno funny looks when they didn’t think he could catch them doing it. But he had what might as well have been a radio antenna to pick up such things. He noticed, all right.
He noticed, and he worried. What if he’d heard wrong? What if the Gestapo officer had been talking through his high-crowned cap? Arno knew he would never live it down if he’d made a mistake. The men didn’t respect him enough as it was (they would have had to treat him like a field marshal to give him the respect he felt he deserved). They wouldn’t respect him at all if the Führer didn’t show.
But then things started tightening up. Parties of soldiers and labor gangs full of convicts and Jews went to work cleaning up Münster. The city hadn’t taken as much of a beating as some Russian town that went back and forth between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army three or four times, but it wasn’t in what anybody would call great shape.