Sarah had no trouble translating her father’s opaque phrases. He’d been talking with someone who listened to the BBC, or possibly to Radio Paris. That was, of course, against the law, and the Germans jammed enemy stations as hard as they could. People tuned in to them anyhow. The Goldmans would have, even if it was doubly risky for Jews. But, with Saul still on the run from what the Nazis called justice, it was ten times doubly risky for them. If they got caught, they’d go straight to a concentration camp, and so they abstained.
Treacly music came out of the radio set once it warmed up. It was still ten minutes in front of the hour. Father shrugged and made a wry face. “I wish it were a classical program,” he said. “Bach, Beethoven…”
“Wagner?” Sarah suggested.
His mouth twisted even tighter. “Well, maybe not.”
Mother came out of the kitchen to listen, too. They endured the music, and the advertisements for things they weren’t allowed to buy (most of which Aryan Germans couldn’t really get their hands on these days, either), and the exhortations to turn in scrap metal and purchase war bonds.
At last, the announcer said, “And now, the news.” He paused importantly, as if certain everyone was hanging on the sound of his voice. He might not have been so far wrong, either. “In the east, the Wehrmacht and the Reich ’s Polish allies continue to punish the Jew-Bolshevik Red Army. The Asiatic hordes who follow the Soviet red star cannot hope to stand against our brave, well-disciplined troops.”
“He’ll have us in Moscow in a couple of weeks,” Father said dryly.
Nothing much was happening in the west. In what was happening there, the front line was moving toward the German border, not away from it. Unless you listened with an atlas in hand, you’d never know it from what the newsreader said. By the way he made things sound, panzers would roll through Paris any minute now-maybe even ahead of the ones rolling through Moscow.
He claimed enormous numbers of English and French terror bombers-they were always terror bombers-shot down the day before. No alarms had sounded over Munster. Had the other side’s bombers not come here? Or was the newsreader making things up? How could you tell? You couldn’t. He went on to claim even more enormous numbers of Russian terror bombers destroyed in the east. And he gloated about the dreadful things German bombers were doing to military targets-only to military targets, of course-in London and Paris and half a dozen Russian cities, some of which he had trouble pronouncing.
Wasn’t he trying to have things both ways? It seemed so to Sarah. By her father’s ironic eyebrow, it seemed so to him, too.
The announcer also bragged about Japanese raids in Siberia, and about the signing of a new German-Swedish economic agreement. “Thus we preserve Sweden’s neutrality, as we preserved Denmark’s and Norway’s,” he declared. He sounded perfectly serious about it. Father’s eyebrow quirked again anyhow.
Then the fellow went on to condemn an economic agreement between France and the United States. The enemy sought to drag America into their unjust war-at least if you listened to him. Sarah thought her father’s eyebrow would jump right off his forehead. It was only radio, so she couldn’t see the newsreader’s face. How could he possibly hold it straight? But even if he was grinning, he sounded as if he meant what he said.
“I now turn to the occupied regions of Bohemia and Moravia,” he went on in portentous tones. That was what German authorities were calling the conquered part of Czechoslovakia, the part that hadn’t turned into the puppet state of Slovakia. “Despite all warnings, Jews in these regions have continued in their anti-German activities. As a result of their vicious folly, the Fuhrer and the Reichsfuhrer -SS see that they have no choice but to implement appropriate countermeasures.”
Sarah and her father and mother all stared straight at the radio. What did that mean? Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound good. What had Hitler and Himmler come up with?
The newsreader proceeded to spell things out: “The Jewish bacillus in the occupied territories of Bohemia and Moravia must be quarantined. Accordingly, the Fuhrer has ordered all Jews in the aforementioned occupied territories to be transferred to the town of Teriesenstadt, where they may be concentrated, observed, and guarded against. Personnel under the command of the Reichsfuhrer -SS will facilitate the transfer and supervise the just distribution of any property abandoned in the process.”
Father’s eyebrow didn’t quirk this time. Both brows came down and together in a frown that might have suited Jove’s awesome visage. “It’s a ghetto, that’s what it is,” he said heavily. “A hundred years after we got out of them, they’re shoving us back in again. Western civilization!” He made the words into a curse.
“He talked about abandoned property,” Mother added. “What do they give the Jews? One suitcase apiece?”
“Or maybe just the clothes on their backs,” Father said.
“How many Jews in Czechoslovakia?” Sarah asked.
Her mother and father looked at each other. She shrugged. He spread his hands. “Not as many as there are in Poland-that’s all I can tell you for sure,” he said. “The ones there are lucky their government is on the Nazis’ side, or they’d get the same or worse.”
“Some luck,” Sarah said.
“It is,” Father insisted. “Poland has millions of Jews-I know that. I’ve never had much use for Ostjuden. Sometimes they seem almost as backward and barbarous to me as they do to Hitler. They’d sooner pray than think, if you know what I mean. But when push comes to shove, they’re my people. The Nazis have said so all along, and they’ve finally convinced me they’re right.”
“What can we do to help the Czech Jews?” Sarah asked.
Her father spread his hands again. “Nothing I can think of, not unless you want the SS visiting us again. We can hope the Germans don’t decide to throw us into ghettos, too.” He hesitated. When he spoke again, he sounded surprised at himself: “We can pray they don’t decide to do that. I always thought the Ostjuden prayed too much. Could it be we don’t pray enough?” Hearing that from such a secular man as Father told Sarah more clearly than anything else how much the times had changed.
Chapter 10
As a Welshman, Alistair Walsh did not have a high opinion of eastern Scotland. The terrain was low and flat and full of Scots. Dundee couldn’t have been duller if it rehearsed. Walsh said so in several pubs. He couldn’t even get into a good fight. Too many of the other soldiers stranded in those parts agreed with him.
But, all things considered, he could have been worse off. The Germans might have sunk the ship that plucked him out of Namsos. He might not have got out, in which case he would be languishing inside barbed wire in a POW camp. Yes, there were all kinds of interesting and unpleasant possibilities.
And he was on leave, while the great military bureaucracy tried to figure out what to do with him and his fellow survivors. He tried to pick up barmaids. The Scots girls were pretty, but they seemed depressingly chaste. He hired a bicycle and rode out into the countryside. Going someplace where no one was trying to kill you or even give you orders had its points.
The only thing better than traveling in a place like this by himself would have been traveling in the company of a friendly young lady. Since he wasn’t having much luck on that score, he went alone. Soldiers he saw too often anyhow. Getting away from them was more fun than going out with them would have been.
He’d had almost two decades of peacetime service between the wars. A year and a half of the genuine article was enough-no, far more than enough-to make all that seem to belong to another, and very distant, lifetime. The hired bicycle creaked and squeaked under him. He didn’t care. All he heard except for the bike were the wind, an occasional crow’s caw, and the even more occasional rattle of a passing auto. Not many motorcars were on the roads, not with petrol so savagely rationed.