“Is that our blessing or our curse?” Walsh asked.
“Probably.” Bobbity Cranford could sound cheerful and foolish about anything. Walsh had taken a while to realize that just because he sounded that way didn’t mean that was how he felt.
“We went to war to keep Hitler from killing swarms of Czechs and other folks he didn’t care for,” Walsh said. “So much for that.”
“So much for that,” Ronald Cartland agreed. “But then again, Hitler went to war to conquer all of Europe-the whole world, for all I know. So much for that, too. And so much for Hitler with it. When you try to put the pieces back together again, you shouldn’t be amazed if no one comes away with everything he might have wanted.”
“Mm.” Walsh stared down into his mug of bitter. He hadn’t looked at things from that angle. “You’ve got a point, sir. But it seems like a devil of a cost to leave everybody unhappy walking out of the play.”
“You’re right. It does,” Cartland said. “Of course, I’ve also heard diplomacy called the art of leaving everyone dissatisfied.” Walsh hadn’t heard that. He wasn’t sure he liked it, either. Like it or not, though, it seemed to be what the world had.
These days, Sarah Bruck was never sure what she’d get when she turned on the radio. The Salvation Committee didn’t run things nearly so smoothly as Dr. Goebbels had. Goebbels, these days, was holed up in the Italian embassy in Berlin. Sarah wondered how long that would last. Mussolini was having trouble of his own hanging on to the reins. If he got shot down like Hitler or had to run for his life, the new government might well throw Goebbels to the wolves.
News certainly sounded different now. Broadcasters quoted foreign reports, sometimes even when they said unkind things about Germany. There were also stories about the crimes and cruelty of the SS and the SD. Of course, it was in the Salvation Committee’s interest to let people know how foully the Nazis had behaved while they held power. Then the people would be less likely to want the bastards back.
The civil war was almost over. A day or two could go by without Sarah’s hearing gunfire. Diehards still held out in the Bavarian mountains and in a few places in Austria, but even they were starting to see it was a losing fight.
Bit by bit, the country was starting to seem as if it might remember what peace was like. They’d started printing new banknotes and postage stamps without the swastika on them. Old ones still circulated-there were too many to get rid of them all. But one of these days the hooked cross might go back to being just a decoration.
The Salvation Committee quietly went about dismantling other Nazi excesses, too. Toward the end of a newscast, an announcer said, “It has been decided that the Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935, is no longer in effect. Persons whose status changed from citizen to resident under the provisions of that law are restored to full citizenship so long as, in the interim, they have not been convicted of a crime that would entail the loss of that right. All marks of distinction formerly required of such persons, whether on their identity documents or on their daily attire, are abolished from this time forward.”
He went on to talk about something else. Sarah stared at the radio. If she hadn’t been paying attention, she would have had no idea what he’d meant. That might have been part of the idea. He’d gabbled on like a bureaucrat. He hadn’t mentioned Jews once, not in so many words. Plenty of listeners might not have noticed what he said. The Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 didn’t matter to them.
It did to Sarah. She ran into the kitchen, where her mother was peeling potatoes. “They’ve canceled the law!” she exclaimed. “We can be people again!”
Hanna Goldman needed a moment to understand what that meant, but only a moment: certainly less time than anyone not a Jew would have. “That’s so good!” she said. “Does that mean we can take the stars off our clothes?”
“It sure does,” Sarah answered. “I want to do it right now and burn them.”
“I want to take them off and save them,” her mother said. “If you ever meet someone new and have children of your own, they should see what happened to us.”
Sarah frowned, then nodded. “Well, you’re right. Father would say you have a better sense of history than I do.”
“Father … Did the radio say whether the Jews whose jobs the Nazis stole would get them back again?”
“It didn’t say one way or the other,” Sarah replied. Samuel Goldman wasn’t the only one of those, of course. They ran into the tens of thousands. Professors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, civil servants … Sarah wondered how many of them were even still alive. Because he was a wounded veteran of the last war, Father’d had it easier than most, and so had his family. Not easy, never easy, but easier.
Mother’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Chances are that means no. Well, what can you do? We’re all still here, thank God. Even Saul’s here! I wish he’d come back again.”
“He’s not the same as he was-or else he’s more the way he was than ever,” Sarah said. “He doesn’t fit in with us very well any more … except with Father. Father may not get along with him, but he understands him.”
“They’ve both been through the war,” Mother said. “Father used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night once or twice a month. He hardly ever does any more, but he used to. Do you remember?”
“Not really. I never thought about it,” Sarah said.
“You were little. It was just something that happened, and it didn’t worry you. It worried me-I’ll tell you that!” Hanna Goldman said.
“Do you suppose Saul wakes up like that these days?” Sarah asked, adding, “I hope he doesn’t.”
“I hope he doesn’t, too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did,” Mother said. “Do you want to grate some horseradish for me?”
“Sure.” Sarah scraped the long, pale root over the grater. Mother didn’t want to talk any more about people she loved waking up screaming, and who could blame her for that? Sarah didn’t even want to think about it. The more she tried not to, though, the more she did.
When Father came home, he was practically hopping up and down, he was so excited. “They’ve decided we’re Germans after all!” he said, and then, “Well, they’ve decided that, since the Nazis said we weren’t and the Nazis were wrong about everything, we have to be. That’s almost as good. It’s good enough! I’m going to burn my yellow stars.”
“I said the same thing,” Sarah told him. “Mother said we should save them so we can show them to the ones who come after us.”
“Did she?” Samuel Goldman’s eyes swung toward his wife. “Did you? That’s a good notion, dear. The things we most want to forget are the ones we most need to remember. Sometimes, anyhow.”
Was that why he’d woken up screaming? Because he couldn’t forget? It looked that way to Sarah. She didn’t ask him. She didn’t want to make him remember anew. Instead, she said, “You should go over to the university and pay people a call.”
He laughed. “That would scare them, wouldn’t it?” But then his gaze sharpened in a different way. “You know, I just might visit them. I’d like to find out if Friedrich came through in one piece.”
Friedrich Lauterbach had studied under Father. After he got his own academic position, and after Hitler made it impossible for Jews to teach any more, Lauterbach had bought articles from Father and published them under his own name. It was as much as anyone could safely do for a Jew, and far more than most would have done. But then he’d gone into the Wehrmacht, so that had dried up.
Of itself, Sarah’s hand fluffed at her hair. Friedrich Lauterbach was reasonably young and reasonably personable. Before he put on Feldgrau, he’d as much as said he might have been interested in her if she weren’t a Jewess. She didn’t know that she would have been interested in him that way, but she didn’t know that she wouldn’t have, either. Once upon a time, Germans and Jews had often intermarried, and no one except the Nazis and a few extremely Orthodox Jews got upset about it.