"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."
"I know. It's still true, though."
A French tank clattered past them. Several soldiers trotted behind it almost in Indian file, using its steel bulk to shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous MG-34s. As machine gunners often did, the one in front of them concentrated on the tank. Bullets spanged off the armor one after another. They chipped its camouflage paint but did it no other harm.
"That's a fool," Halevy said. "There-you see? The Germans can screw up the ordinary stuff, too."
"I only wish the cocksuckers would do it more often," Jezek answered.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a 37mm armor-piercing round from an antitank gun slammed into the French machine. That made the 13mm slugs Vaclav fired seemed door-knockers by comparison. The tank slewed to a stop, smoke and fire spurting from every hatch. Inside the doomed machine, ammunition started cooking off. Nobody got out.
That left the men who'd followed the tank in a horrible spot. If they pushed on, the machine-gun bullets that had hit armor plate would go after their soft flesh instead. If they stayed where they were, they might as well have been out of the fight. They were no more thrilled about taking chances than Vaclav would have been. They started digging foxholes behind the burning tank carcass.
"Some sergeant will come along in a while and make them get moving, poor saps," Benjamin Halevy said.
"You're a sergeant. What about you?" Vaclav asked.
"Nah." Halevy shook his head. "I saw why they're holing up. And I know that goddamn gun is waiting for them to show themselves. Some other sergeant who comes along in a couple of hours won't care. And by that time the machine gunners will be thinking about something else, so these guys should be able to go forward again."
"Huh," Vaclav said. "You better be careful, or people will start thinking you're a human being or something."
"Don't be dumber than you can help, Jezek. I'm a sergeant, and I'm a Jew. How can I be a human being with all that shit piled on my shoulders?"
"Sergeant's a problem, yeah. I didn't say anything about you being a Jew," Vaclav answered uncomfortably.
"No, but you were thinking it," Halevy said without rancor, putting a finger on why the Czech felt uncomfortable. "If it weren't for the fucking Nazis, you wouldn't want anything to do with me."
"Of course I wouldn't. You are a sergeant," Vaclav said, which made Benjamin Halevy laugh. But it wasn't as if the Jew were lying. Back before Vaclav got drafted, he'd had little use for Jews. Czechs didn't despise them as thoroughly as, say, Poles did, but all the same… Even after he got drafted, he'd preferred Jews to Slovaks or Ruthenians only because they were more likely to stay loyal to Prague and fight the Germans.
"Well, you're a corporal yourself," Halevy said.
"A Czech corporal in France! That's worth a lot," Jezek returned.
He still couldn't get a rise out of the Jew. "If Czechoslovakia hadn't gone to pieces, you'd be a sergeant for sure. They aren't exactly equipped to promote people here."
"If I hadn't got out, I'd be a dead man by now, or else wounded, or sitting in a POW camp somewhere-I was just thinking about that a minute ago," Vaclav said. "And those all sound better than being a goddamn sergeant. What do you think of that?"