Sometimes Sarah salved her conscience by thinking that the woman who had owned her sweater was a raging anti-Semite, and that it served her right for the sweater to pass to a Jew. But she had no way of knowing that. The Nazi big shots who ran Munster did everything they could to make life miserable for Jews, sure. So did some ordinary folk. Most people in the town, though, were just trying to get by from one day to the next and hoping their relatives in the Wehrmacht were all right. They didn’t have the time or the energy to run around screaming “The Jews are our misfortune!”
Sarah hoped her brother in the Wehrmacht was all right, too. That was all she could do. If anything did happen to Saul, she wouldn’t find out about it. He had-she hoped he still had-his assumed name and identity. Whatever happened to him, wherever he was, he was bound to be better off than he would have been had the authorities grabbed him after he smashed in that gang boss’s head when the vicious man hit him once too often for no reason.
Saul hardly ever got mentioned in the Goldman house. When he did, it was always in the past tense. Sarah and her mother and father never said a word about his hiding in plain sight of the National Socialist authorities.
Father didn’t always scavenge goodies when the RAF hit Munster. Sometimes nothing was left to scavenge: houses and shops and blocks of flats often went up in flames. Sometimes younger, sprier men beat him to the goodies. And sometimes the firemen and police who were also on duty kept laborers from grabbing the way they wanted to.
“I’d mind that less if they didn’t steal for themselves,” he said after being thwarted by a fireman. “But they do. I’ve watched them.”
“Not fair!” Sarah said in angry sympathy.
He smiled crookedly. “Yes? And so?” She had no comeback for that.
When his scrounging was bad, the luck she had shopping mattered more. That luck would never be good, of course. Jews were allowed in stores only just before closing time, after Aryan customers had picked over whatever happened to be available. But sometimes what she could get was truly awful, while sometimes it was only wretched. Like everything else, misery had its degrees.
Since the trams were also denied to those who wore the yellow star, she walked all over Munster trying to find this, that, or the other thing. She often thought she used as much energy getting food as she took in when she finally ate it. She didn’t know what she could do about that, either. She and her parents were all much thinner than they had been before the Nazis took over. She doubted there were any German Jews who weren’t.
Late one afternoon, she was coming home with a kilo and a half of flour she’d got across town. Despite the long trip, she was pleased with herself. For what you could get hold of these days, the flour looked pretty good. It had some peas and beans and dried potatoes ground into it, but everybody’s flour these days was like that. People old enough to remember did say the bread in the last war had been even worse, stretched with sawdust and maybe even clay. Sarah could hardly believe it, but there you were.
And here she was, coming up to the square that fronted on Munster’s Catholic cathedral. The square was about half full of people: women, boys, old men. Most of the men of military age were either wearing one uniform or another or working long hours in factories to give the Reich’s soldiers and flyers and sailors the murderous tools of their trade.
Some men wore police uniforms, not military ones. Some of them were in the square, too, between the crowd and the cathedral. They clutched truncheons. Two or three of them carried Schmeissers instead. They all looked nervous.
Sarah felt nervous. A crowd not organized by the state was astonishing in Hitler’s Germany. Sarah scuttled along the walls of the buildings on the far side of the square, as far from the crowd and the police as she could get. She felt like a mouse who’d walked into a gathering of cats by mistake. Maybe they wouldn’t notice her-or the yellow stars she wore.
The crowd began to move toward the cathedral, and toward the thin line of police in front of it. Voices rose: “Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!”
Archbishop von Galen had presumed to protest the way the Reich disposed of mental defectives (though he’d never said a word about the way the Reich treated its Jews). The Gestapo had grabbed him and hustled him off to prison or a concentration camp. And Munster’s Catholics had rioted. The authorities put them down and made more arrests. But that they’d risen once was a prodigy.
That they’d been put down and were rising again was whatever went two steps past a prodigy. And that I’m here right now is whatever’s two steps past a calamity, Sarah thought. She hurried along as fast as she could without running and drawing notice to herself.
“Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!” The crowd’s chant swelled ever louder.
A police official with a megaphone shouted through the chorus: “Disperse this criminal assembly, in the name of the Grossdeutsches Reich!”
“Give us back the archbishop, in the name of God!” The chant changed.
When Sarah heard the harsh crack of gunfire then, she could scarcely believe it. Some people in the crowd screamed and ran away. Some fell, injured or killed. And some roared and charged the police. They roared louder when they got their hands on a few of the uniformed men. Sarah made her escape. For once, no one paid any attention to a Jew.
Chapter 24
Arno Baatz had always wished the soldiers who served under him would like him better. But he’d always assumed it was their fault they didn’t. And, working from that assumption, he’d always wound up disappointed.
He’d always wished his superiors liked him better, too. Before the war started, he’d gone through the six-week training course that lifted him out of the teeming swarm of private soldiers and into the more glorious ranks of those with the authority to tell that teeming swarm what to do.
Even a corporal enjoyed such authority, and Arno enjoyed it as much as any Unteroffizier ever minted. He was official and officious. He knew the rules and regulations. He lived by them, and he made the men in his charge live by them as well.
He was a good soldier himself. He wore the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic. He wore his wound badge, too-wore it with pride. He’d been an Unteroffizier a devil of a long time. Since before the shooting started, in fact. None of the men set over him had shown the slightest inclination to promote him to sergeant so he could use his talents on a bigger group.
So I can give orders to more people, he thought. Yes, he knew what he wanted to do, all right.
That he didn’t get the chance he was sure he deserved only left him even more sour than he would have been otherwise. Combine that with the Wehrmacht’s failure to knock the Red Army out of the war, and Arno Baatz was a less happy man than he might have been.
These days, the Russians were in the driving seat on the Eastern Front. Germany had to respond to one Soviet thrust after another. Smolensk wouldn’t fall this campaigning season, either. Moscow? Moscow wasn’t even a pipe dream any more. As long as the Reich could hold on to Byelorussia and a chunk of the Ukraine, things … weren’t too bad.
He had no idea what the name of the collective farm his section was defending might have been. He didn’t even know whether it had ever enjoyed a name. Maybe the damn Jews who ran the Bolshevik state just tagged it with a number so they could more efficiently keep tabs on it.
He set up the new section MG-34 where it could rake the fields to the east with fire. If the Russians wanted to charge across those fields in the drunken mass attacks they loved so much, they were welcome to try.