After a little while, though, he realized how much he missed her clever tartness. He had no trouble understanding these girls, no, but what difference did it make if they had nothing interesting to say? And, after her sharp, angular features, the German girls seemed doughy.
When they went off to minister to another crew, he said as much to Dieselhorst. The older man’s smile was bittersweet. “Ah, sonny, you really did have it bad, didn’t you?” he said.
“No.” Hans-Ulrich shook his head. “I had it good. I didn’t know how good I had it.”
Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “That’s what I said.” Hans-Ulrich only frowned.
They flew across the Reich. As they got farther west, they flew over towns the RAF had bombed. The devastation in the Vaterland shocked Rudel. He’d visited the same kind of devastation on Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France, and Russia, but that wasn’t the same, not to him it wasn’t. Those were foreign countries, enemy lands. They weren’t Germany.
The squadron’s new home in Belgium was outside of Philippeville, a small town south of Charleroi, which had been the scene of a thunderous battle in the last war’s opening round. The people spoke French. The black-on-white signs in German seemed almost as alien here as they had in the Soviet Union.
No smiling, friendly girls greeted the Luftwaffe men. The snouts of 88mm flak guns pointed skyward to shoot at enemy raiders. Barbed wire held saboteurs at bay-people hoped.
Surveying the scene, Dieselhorst said, “Are you sure we left Russia?”
“Pretty sure,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “If we get shot down on this front, odds are they won’t stab us with pitchforks or start carving on us. We’re back in the land of the Geneva Convention.”
“Boy, sir, you sure know how to ease my mind,” Sergeant Dieselhorst observed, and Rudel found himself with no reply to that.
There were times when Sarah wondered whether she’d ever been married at all. Officially, her last name was Bruck now, not Goldman, but how often did you need to worry about your last name, or even remember you had one? She was living with her parents again, in her old room, almost as if the months with Isidor had never been.
Almost. Her clothes had gone to the Brucks’ flat above their bakery-and had gone up in flames when the bombs hit the place. She was left with no more than she’d had on her back the night of the RAF raid. Even Aryans in the Reich got scanty clothing rations; those for Jews were smaller still. Replacing what she’d lost would take, well, forever, or twenty minutes longer.
Mother shared what she had. But that was already shabby, and would only get shabbier faster from being worn by two people rather than one. Then, out of the blue, the rabbi who’d intoned prayers at Isidor’s small, sorry funeral showed up with a bundle.
“Not much,” he said, “and I know not stylish for a pretty young girl, but with luck better than nothing.”
The dresses and blouses must have come from little old Jewish women who’d died in Munster. Some of them hadn’t been stylish since the days when the Kaiser still ruled Germany. Not everything looked as if it even came close to fitting.
None of which mattered a pfennig’s worth to Sarah. What she couldn’t alter, her mother could. “Thank you so much!” she exclaimed, moved almost to tears. She’d never had much to do with the synagogue. Like her parents, she’d been secular, assimilated … and much good it did her once the Nazis started screaming about how the Jews-any Jews at all-were their misfortune.
“We try,” the rabbi answered. “We don’t always do as well as we wish we could, but we try.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said again. “Thank you for thinking of me.” Even if I never thought of you went unsaid but, no doubt, not uncomprehended.
No, not uncomprehended. “We are all in the same boat,” the rabbi said. “It may be the Titanic, but we are all in it together whatever it is. Alevai one day it will come to a safe harbor.”
“Alevai omayn!” Sarah agreed. The rabbi touched the brim of his hat and said his good-byes. His black suit was shiny in the seat and down the sleeves; his trousers showed a deftly mended rip. The six-pointed yellow star labeled Jude on his left lapel was noticeably newer and fresher than the coat it defaced.
Sarah and her mother sorted the clothes. “Well, we’ve got some work in front of us before you’ll want to go out in any of this,” Hanna Goldman said, as diplomatically as she could.
“Oh, sure.” Sarah nodded. “But it’s cloth!” She might have been one of the Children of Israel, talking about manna from heaven. She was one of the Children of Israel, she felt she was talking about manna, and the Third Reich was a desert beside which wandering through Sinai would have seemed a holiday by comparison.
She and her mother were still excited when her father came back from his shift on the labor gang. Benjamin Goldman’s mouth twisted when he saw the clothes. “Very nice,” he managed at last.
“I know they’re old,” Sarah said. “We can do things with them, though. We really can, honest.”
“She’s right,” Mother agreed.
“Oh, I believe you.” Believe her or not, Father sounded uncommonly bleak. “But those people shame me. We paid them no attention for so long, but they remember us. How can I not be ashamed?”
“The rabbi said we were all in the Titanic together,” Sarah said. The rabbi, actually, had said it better than that. He’d said it in a way Father might have, but Sarah couldn’t quite remember how. She had the gist, though: “How can we not help each other at a time like this?”
Her father’s mouth turned down on one side once more. “I never had the least trouble ignoring the frum.” He used the Yiddish word for observant as if it were from a foreign tongue. For an assimilated German Jew, it was. “I’m embarrassed, dammit. If we could find charity anywhere else …”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Mother said, her voice sharper than usual. “And we are beggars right now, whether it embarrasses you or not.”
Samuel Goldman sighed. “I wish I could tell you you’re wrong. Instead, I have to tell you you’re right, and you have no idea how much more that hurts.” In spite of everything, he still kept his touchy pride.
For a couple of days, playing with the old clothes and trying to turn them into something wearable kept Sarah too busy to worry about what she kept: a boatload of tsuris. Isidor had no brothers or sister. Sarah and Isidor’s uncle were the family heirs.
In a civilized society, it would have been a serious, even a solemn, business. In the Reich, it carried more than a few elements of farce. For one thing, quite a bit of her late husband’s family property had gone up in fire and smoke. For another, Munster’s Nazi hierarchy seemed bound and determined to steal what was left in the Brucks’ bank account.
Scowling at yet another threateningly official letter, Sarah put down her pinking shears for a moment. “The gonifs! It’s so unfair!” she burst out.
“And this surprises you because …?” Hanna Goldman had lived with Samuel for a lot of years now. She could do an excellent contralto impression of him. The voice might be too high, but the sardonic tone was perfect.
It teased a snort out of Sarah, but she quickly soured again. “They have everything!” she said. “Everything! And they want to take away some nothing that’s supposed to belong to a couple of Jews.” As far as she was concerned, Isidor’s uncle would have been welcome to whatever the Brucks had. She’d been part of the family only a little while. An inheritance like that would have made her hands feel slimy with blood if she were trying to take it from him.