“What will happen now?” Sarah asked.
“They’ll keep him in jail, or else they’ll kill him,” Father said. “I don’t think they’ll kill him right away. They have other ways to put the screws to him. He has a brother-Franz, I think his name is. The Gestapo ’s already grabbed other priests from the diocese.”
“Did they hope Bishop von Galen would take a hint?” Sarah inquired.
Samuel Goldman beamed at her. He might be tired, but he was also proud. “How did you get so grown-up when I wasn’t looking?” he said. Sarah made a rude noise. Her father laughed but went on, “Yes, I’m sure they did hope he’d do that. But if he were the kind of man who took those hints, he wouldn’t be the kind of man who preached those sermons.”
That made sense to Sarah. Father usually made sense to her, except for his hopeless, unrequited love affair with being a real German. She found the only question she could think of that really mattered: “What happens next? Do people let the Nazis get away with it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either,” he said slowly. “But I’ll tell you this: we heard they’d arrested von Galen about an hour before quitting time, and the whole labor gang was furious. Not just Catholics. Everyone. The men were cussing out the Gestapo like you wouldn’t believe. When I was walking home”-Jews couldn’t use buses or trams-“I heard more people up in arms about it, too.”
“What will they do? Rally in front of the Rathaus?” Sarah laughed at the idea. “That would just give the blackshirts the chance to arrest all of them at once.”
“You might be surprised,” her father said. “The Catholic Church still has some clout, and it’s always been more leery of the Nazis than most Protestant churches were. No ‘German Christians’ among the Catholics, or not many, anyhow.” He screwed up his face.
So did Sarah. So-called German Christians believed Nazi ideals were compatible with those of Jesus. As far as she could see, that was well on the way toward being like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who made a habit of believing two impossible things every day before breakfast. But German Christians dominated most Protestant denominations these days. Didn’t you also believe in impossibilities if you thought you could tell the Nazis no and get away with it?
“Where’s your mother?” Samuel Goldman asked. “Now I’ll have to tell the story twice.”
“She’s out shopping.” Sarah’s voice was sour. Jews could only do it at the very end of the day, when everyone else had already had the chance to pick over the little in the stores. Sarah added, “I was peeling potatoes when I heard you come in.”
Her father sighed. “Bad food, and not enough of it.” He flipped his hand up and down. “It’s not your fault. I know it’s not. You and mother do everything anyone could with what the Reich lets us have.”
“That’s not enough, either.”
“If it were, the Reich wouldn’t let us have it,” Father said.
He paused then. Sarah could read his mind. He was looking for the best-or worst-way to make a pun about how the Reich really wanted to let them have it. He did things like that. But before he could this time, the front door opened behind him. He looked absurdly affronted as he half turned on his good leg, as if Mother had squashed his line on purpose.
Hanna Goldman hadn’t, of course. Her little two-wheeled collapsible wire shopping cart was almost as empty as it had been when she set out. Some sorry turnips, some insect-nibbled greens… That kind of stuff might have done for fattening hogs. People just got thinner on it, as Sarah had sad reason to know.
But Mother’s jade-green eyes snapped with excitement. “They’ve arrested Bishop von Galen!” she exclaimed.
“We knew that.” By the deflationary way Father said it, he was miffed he hadn’t got to make his horrible pun.
Mother refused to be deflated. “Did you know there’s a great big crowd out in front of the cathedral? Did you know they’re yelling at the police and the blackshirts, and throwing things at them, too?”
“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Father burst out. Sarah felt the same way. Germans mostly didn’t do such things. She’d heard that, when machine guns opened up on demonstrators in the mad Berlin of 1919, the crowd fled across a park to escape the deadly fire-but people obeyed the KEEP OFF THE GRASS! signs while they ran for their lives.
“It’s true. I saw the edges of it. I got away from there as fast as I could afterward,” Mother said. “I didn’t want to wait till the blackshirts started shooting-and I didn’t want to give them any reason to arrest a Jew, either.”
“If each of us would have tried to take one of those pigdogs with him when they came for him…” For a moment, Father looked and sounded young and ferocious, the way he would have in the trenches in the last war. But then he sighed and shook his head and went back to his familiar self. “The Nazis wouldn’t care. They’d thank us for handing them an excuse to murder us all.”
“They can’t murder everyone out by the cathedral,” Mother said.
Distant gunfire seemed to give her the lie. Even more faintly, Sarah heard screams and shrieks and shouts. She supposed they’d been going on before, but she hadn’t been able to make them out. She could now. People made more noise when bullets snarled past-or when they struck home.
“They’ll blame the Communists for this,” Father predicted.
“There aren’t many Catholic Communists,” Sarah pointed out.
“They won’t care,” Samuel Goldman said. “Outside agitators, they’ll call them, and they’ll say von Galen was working with them.” He spread his callused hands. “I mean, otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what are the odds of that?”
Chapter 6
Coming back into port should have been a relief for Julius Lemp and the rest of the U-30’s crew. Most of the time, it was. Coming back meant they’d made it through another patrol. RAF bombs wouldn’t sink them. Russian shells wouldn’t tear through the U-boat’s thin steel hide and send it to the bottom. Slow-crawling crabs wouldn’t pick out Lemp’s bulging dead eyes with their claws… this time.
The men could shave their beards. They could take proper showers. They could eat food that didn’t come out of tins. They could go into town and drink and pick up barmaids and brawl. They could walk off by themselves, without someone else always at their elbow. Or they could lie on real mattresses and sleep and sleep.
It was wonderful. Most of the time.
Every once in a while, politics got in the way. And politics, in the Reich, turned bloody in a hurry. They’d just come back in to Wilhelmshaven when the generals tried to topple the Fuhrer. You didn’t want to hear machine-gun fire at the edge of the base, especially when you weren’t sure who was shooting at whom or why.
Now they were in Kiel-at the edge of the Baltic rather than the North Sea-and politics was rearing its ugly head again. Everyone should have been proud of them for sinking the destroyer and two Soviet freighters on their latest patrol. If Lemp’s superiors were, they had a gift for hiding their enthusiasm.
“ Ja, ja. Well done, I am sure,” said the graying Kapitan zur See who heard Lemp’s first report. The bare bulb above the senior officer’s desk gleamed off the four gold stripes on his cuffs. He scribbled a note or two, but only a note or two. “No doubt your log gives the full details.”
If he wasn’t a distracted man, Lemp had never seen one. “Yes, sir,” he said.
The captain looked up and seemed surprised to find him still there. “Do you require something else, uh, Lemp?” He had to remind himself who the squirt in front of him was. Considering some of the things that had happened to Lemp, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed-for better and for worse, he hadn’t had the kind of career that lent itself to obscurity.
“Require? No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Lemp lied with great sincerity, as a junior sometimes had to do with a superior. “But if it’s not too much trouble, sir, I would like to have some idea of what’s going on.”