"What were they?" Mother asked, as she was surely meant to do. "Was it connected to… to the trouble on the radio?"
There was a safer way to talk about things than Sarah could have come up with. Any time the announcer told you to follow duly constituted authority, you started wondering what duly constituted authority was and why you should follow it. That was the opposite of what the announcer had in mind-but that was his worry, not yours.
Father nodded impressively. "You'd best believe it was. There were four trucks, and shepherding them along fore and aft were brand new half-tracked armored personnel carriers. Very nasty machines to be on the wrong end of." He spoke with a veteran's trained judgment.
"What did they do?" By the way Mother looked at her, Sarah got the question out first by no more than a split second.
"What did they do? I'll tell you what," Father said. "They stopped right in front of the recruiting headquarters, and SS men started jumping out of them and running inside."
"The Gestapo?" Mother's voice quavered. You didn't have to be a Jew in Germany to quaver at the thought of the secret police-although it sure didn't hurt.
But this time Samuel Goldman shook his head. "No. These fellows belonged to the Waffen-SS-the fighting part. Hitler's personal bodyguards, I guess you could call them. Much as I hate to say it, they were very impressive men." Again, he delivered the verdict with the air of a man who knew what he was talking about.
"There were regular soldiers at the headquarters, right? What did they do? Did they shoot these Waffen-SS men?" Sarah hoped the answer would be yes. She thought shooting was too good for the SS, but it would do in a pinch.
Her father shook his head again, though. "No. The SS took them by surprise. The regular soldiers never had a chance to fight. They don't keep many weapons at the headquarters, anyhow. The SS men stormed in with rifles and machine pistols. They came out again a few minutes later. Colonel Ziegler-the head of the Wehrkreis-came out with them, with his hands high. They seized a couple of his aides, too. They threw all of them into one of the personnel carriers, and then they drove away."
"What will they do with them? To them?" Mother asked.
"Nothing good." Father had smoked the hand-rolled cigarette down to a tiny butt. He stubbed it out and put the little bit of leftover tobacco back into the leather pouch. It wouldn't go to waste. Once he'd finished, he looked up again. "No, nothing good," he repeated. "You don't grab someone that way to pin the Ritterkreuz on him. Ziegler must have been involved in the plot against the Fuhrer-or the SS must have thought he was."
"It doesn't seemed to have worked, does it?" Sarah said. Her father pointed to corners of the room. For a second, that meant nothing to her. Then she remembered the house still might have hidden microphones. If she talked about Hitler's overthrow, she shouldn't sound disappointed because it hadn't happened. She fluttered her fingers to show she got it.
When Samuel Goldman said, "I don't think so. We would have heard by now if it had," he sounded glad the Fuhrer remained in power. Whether he was might be a different story, but he sounded that way.
Mother found a different question-or rather, the same one she'd asked before, but on a larger scale: "What will the Party do to the officers who violated their oath to strike at the Fuhrer?"
"It won't be pretty." Again, Father spoke with what seemed like grim satisfaction. "To do such a thing in wartime…" He shook his head like a judge passing sentence. That really might have affronted him. His desire to be German sometimes showed in peculiar ways.
"Would the officers have tried to make peace?" Sarah wondered.
Her father's chuckle was desert-dry. "You might have done better to ask Colonel Ziegler. I have no idea whether those people wanted to end the war or to fight it better than the Fuhrer was doing. It isn't likely to matter now."
"What did the other men in your labor gang think of-of what you saw?" Mother asked.
"Most of them were all for it. They're loyal Germans, after all." Yes, Father was speaking for the benefit of the microphones that might not be there. After a small pause, he went on, "But there were a couple who wanted to take their shovels and clout the SS men. They were behind me, so I couldn't see who they were."
That last sentence, surely, was also for the benefit of the hypothetical microphones. Sarah would have bet Father knew just who'd hooted the Waffen-SS. She also would have bet more than a couple of laborers wanted to go after the men in black with their shovels. Backing the Nazis was easy when Hitler led the Reich from one triumph to another. But when he took the country into a war that wasn't going so well, wouldn't the "Sieg heil!"s start to ring hollow?
She also wondered whether Father was smart to mention the carpers at all. If the Gestapo was listening, its minions were also liable to decide he knew more than he was letting on. That wouldn't be good-for him or for any of the Goldmans.
Sarah wasn't used to worrying that her father might have missed a trick. He didn't miss many, and she was sure she hadn't noticed most of the ones he had missed. But she'd noticed this one. Realizing your parents could make mistakes-realizing they were as human as anybody else-was part of growing up. All the same, it was a part she could have done without right now.
She didn't get a choice, not on things like that. Any Jew in Germany after the Nazis took over, young or old, could have given chapter and verse on not getting choices. You had to go on, and to hope you could go on going on. VACLAV JEZEK HAD FORGOTTEN just how heavy his antitank rifle was. On the march, the damn thing was ponderous as hell. It wasn't as if he weren't lugging another tonne and a half of soldierly equipment. In the trenches, where the front wasn't moving and where he could set the piece down whenever he felt like it, it wasn't so bad. With the Allied armies advancing, he couldn't do that.
But he was advancing. That made the antitank rifle seem lighter-when he wasn't too tired, anyway. Advancing against the Wehrmacht! Ever since the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, he'd dreamt of the moment when he could do that. Now it was here.
It was here, and he was scared. The trenches were pretty safe, as far as war went. He was out in the open, vulnerable to bullets and fragments and potato-masher grenades and all the other tools German ingenuity had crafted for maiming other human beings. (And, if his luck went bad, French ingenuity could do him in, too.)
He didn't hurry. Everything he was carrying made sure he couldn't very well hurry, but he wouldn't have even if he could. The Germans might be falling back. They hadn't given up. They rarely did. They skirmished, yielded a few hundred meters, set up their mortars and machine guns, and skirmished some more. Vaclav had no doubt that they dealt out more casualties than they took.
Whenever one of their MG-34s started firing, he hit the dirt. He might have been a dog, salivating at the sound of a bell. But he wasn't the only one who did. The Germans who manned those vicious machine guns might have thought they worked even more slaughter than they did in truth. They didn't even have to point their weapon at a man to get him to fall over. But if they didn't, he was liable to get up again and go on trying to kill them.
"Yes, you just can't trust us, can you?" Sergeant Halevy said when Vaclav remarked on that as they sprawled in a shell hole. "We do keep fighting."
"Every now and then. When we can." Vaclav remembered his dreary weeks in the Polish internment camp. If he'd stayed there, he would have ended up a German prisoner of war after Marshal Smigly-Ridz jumped into bed with Hitler.
"Enough to make the German generals sick of us," Halevy said. "That's how it looks to me, anyhow."
"Too bad they didn't do what they set out to do," Vaclav answered. "Trust a German to do things right most of the time and fuck it up when it really matters."
"True. No Nazis in Paris," the Jew agreed.
"I didn't mean that."