"Then they're a pack of lying pigdogs," Hans-Ulrich answered hotly. "Nothing's wrong with Albert-not one single thing, you hear? If it weren't for him, I wouldn't have come back from a couple of missions. You want to listen to the Scheisse 'some people' come out with, you'd better haul me away, too."
He wondered if they would. Albert Dieselhorst loved Germany, but he didn't love the people who ran it these days. And he wasn't shy about saying so, which must have been why informers tipped these fellows off to him. If they had enough evidence, they'd know Rudel was protecting his sergeant. Then he and Dieselhorst would both catch it.
But the blackshirt said, "Take an even strain, buddy. We've got to check this stuff out, you know. It's our job. It's our duty." He nodded-he liked the sound of that better. It made him seem more like a soldier, less like the secret policeman he was.
"Take him back," the older SS man said. "He hasn't got anything good for us."
"Doesn't look that way," the fellow behind the wheel agreed. He started up the Kubelwagen, expertly turned around on the narrow road, and started east, toward the airstrip. Rudel couldn't let out the sigh of relief that wanted to explode from him. They might notice it and know it for what it was.
The older man did have the decency to say, "Good luck to you," when they dropped Hans-Ulrich off. The Kubelwagen chugged away. Groundcrew men and flyers stared at Rudel. If the SS arrested somebody right after this, he wouldn't be able to live it down. The gang would have to wait and see that everyone stayed safe before they trusted him again. Sooner or later, they would… he hoped. SARAH GOLDMAN WALKED through the streets of Munster toward the only bakery in town that still served Jews. It was late afternoon: the only time Jews were allowed to shop. They got whatever was left after all the Aryans bought what they needed. It wasn't fair, of course. Nothing had been fair since the Nazis took over, more than six years ago now.
She'd only been twelve then. She hadn't understood all the reasons why her parents and her older brother were so upset. Well, she did now. No one who lived in Germany, Jew or Aryan, could fail to understand these days.
British bombers-or maybe they were French-had come over a few nights before. Nothing fell very close to the Goldmans' house, for which Sarah thanked the God in Whom she was having more and more trouble believing.
A labor gang worked to fill in a crater one of the bombs had blown in the street. A gray-haired man with only one arm shouted at the men to work harder. He was probably a sergeant mutilated in the last war. Some of the men were petty criminals. Some were too old to worry about getting conscripted. None seemed inclined to work any harder than he had to.
"Put your backs into it, you lugs!" the gang boss growled. "If you don't, they'll put you to work in a camp."
That made his charges speed up, at least for a little while. It made Sarah shudder as she walked by. She didn't know what happened to people who went to places like Mauthausen and Dachau. All she knew was, it wasn't good. No-she also knew they didn't come out again. Her imagination took it from there: took it all kinds of unpleasant places. She shuddered again.
"Hey, sweetheart!" one of the guys in the gang called. He waved to her and rocked his hips forward and back. His buddies laughed.
Sarah's spine stiffened. She walked on with her nose in the air. That only made the laborers laugh harder. She ignored them as best she could. She hadn't wanted to look at them at all. She was afraid she'd see her father sweating through pick-and-shovel work. Samuel Goldman, wounded war veteran, holder of the Iron Cross Second Class, professor of classics and ancient history… street repairer. It was the only work the Nazis would let him have.
Her brother had worked in a labor gang for a while, too. Saul was a footballer of near-professional quality. He exulted in the physical, where his father grudgingly acknowledged it. And, when his gang boss rode him and hit him once too often for being a Jew, he'd smashed in the nasty little man's head with a shovel.
He'd got away afterwards, too. Sarah didn't know how, but he had. His athletic training must have let him outrun everyone who chased him. And the police and the SS were still looking for him. A slow smile spread across Sarah's face. He'd found a hiding place they'd never think of.
How many of the people on the street at this time of day were Jews intent on getting whatever the hateful authorities would let them have? You couldn't tell by looking, not most of the time. Worried expressions and threadbare clothes meant nothing. During wartime, plenty of impeccably Aryan Germans were worried and shabby, too. And Sarah couldn't recognize Jews from the synagogue, either. Her family was secular, with mostly gentile friends; she couldn't remember the last time she'd gone to shul.
Her father had told her he felt more Jewish now, with the Nazis persecuting him, than he ever had before. If that wasn't irony, what was?
A young man in a Wehrmacht uniform, his left arm in a sling, smiled at her as she walked past. She didn't smile back. She thought she might have if she were an Aryan; he was nice-looking. Up till Hitler took over, she'd always thought of herself as more German than Jewish. Even with everything that was going on, her father and brother had tried to join up when the war started. They still wanted to be Germans. The recruiters wouldn't let them. It was all so monstrously unfair.
The Jewish grocer's shop and bakery sat across the street from each other. Before the war started, brownshirts had amused themselves by swearing at Jewish women who went in and out. They'd chucked a rock through the grocer's window, too. Naturally, the police only yawned. Now most of the brownshirts were carrying rifles. Sarah hoped the French and the English-yes, and the Russians, too-would shoot them.
She got some sad potatoes and turnips, some wilting greens, and a couple of wizened apples at the grocer's. It all cost too much and too many ration points. When she grumbled, Josef Stein only shrugged. "It's not like I can do anything about it," the proprietor said.
"I know." Sarah sighed. "But it's not easy for my family, either."
"You want easy, what are you doing here?" Stein said.
She walked across the street to the bakery. The bread was what the ration book called war bread. It was baked from rye and barley and potato flour. It was black and chewy. The alarming thing was that people who remembered the last war said it was better than what they ate then. That bread had been eked out with ground corn and lupine seeds-and, some people insisted, with sawdust, too.
The baker's son stood behind the counter. Isidor Bruck was only a couple of years older than Sarah. He'd played football with her brother, though he wasn't in Saul's class (but then, who was?). No doubt his parents had named him Isidor to keep from calling him Isaak. That kind of thing amused Sarah's father, who'd told her Isidor meant gift of Isis-not the sort of name a Jew ought to wear. She didn't think the Brucks had given it to him because of what it meant, but even so…
"This is a pretty good batch," he said as he put the loaf in her cloth sack.
"You always say that," Sarah answered. "Or your father does, if he's back there instead."
"We always mean it, too. We do the best we can with what they let us have," Isidor said. "If they gave us more, we'd do better. You know what we were like before… before everything happened. We were the best bakery in town. Jews? Goyim? We were better than everybody."
"Sure, Isidor," Sarah said. As far as she could remember, he was right. Whenever the Goldmans wanted something special, they'd come to the Brucks' bakery. She remembered things as ordinary as white bread with a fond longing she wouldn't have imagined possible only a couple of years before.
She gave him money and more ration coupons. Just handling the coupons, printed with the Nazis' eagle holding a swastika in its claws, made her want to wash her hands. But she had to use them-she or her mother. If they didn't, the family wouldn't eat. It wouldn't eat well any which way. Aryans couldn't eat well under rationing, though they could keep body and soul together. Jews had trouble doing even that.