“Oh, really? Is that so?” Maybe the young officer was being ostentatiously brave. Then again, maybe he was being ostentatiously stupid. Vaclav took no needless chances. He wanted to live to get old and fat and lazy. If he settled down here and married a Frenchwoman, that wouldn’t be so bad, even if it meant he’d finally have to buckle down and learn the lousy language.
Antitank rifle clunking against his back at every step, he followed the officer down the trench. He made sure he didn’t show himself. If the German marksman was watching through field glasses or a telescope, he could recognize the rifle’s long, thick barrel. Better-much better-not to let him do anything about it.
“Here is our lookout position,” the officer said after most of a kilometer. Vaclav lowered the rifle and kept walking. The Frenchman spluttered. “You are insubordinate!” he declared, a word only an officer would bother learning auf Deutsch.
“No, sir,” Vaclav said stolidly as the Frenchman trailed after him. “Think the Fritzes don’t know where you look from? Maybe a sniper can’t put one through your loophole there, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
The officer grunted. Speaking German, Vaclav sounded as authoritative as he did. Speaking German, anybody could sound authoritative. That was one of the few things the language was good for. With any luck at all, the Nazi with the scope-sighted Mauser would figure he’d stopped at the observation post. Two or three hundred meters farther on, he raised his helmet above the level of the parapet. When no gunshot came his way, he slowly lowered the helmet, put it on again, and peered across toward the German position.
“Now,” he said, “tell me where the German colonel looks from. Don’t point or anything. Just tell me.”
“You know your business,” the officer said, coming up beside him to look east. He sounded surprised, and more respectful than he had before.
“I’m still breathing,” Vaclav answered, which covered everything that needed saying on that score.
“Do you see the burnt-out automobile, a little to the right of the broken brick fence?” the Frenchman asked. His right arm twitched, but he didn’t point. “That is where the cochon does his reconnaissance.”
Vaclav did see it. It was a long shot from here. He wasn’t sure of a kill, but he had a chance. “Sehr gut,” he said. “I will come back before sunup, so I can get ready without the Germans seeing me do it.”
“You will know what you require,” the French officer said stiffly. He gave Vaclav a jerky little nod, then hopped off the firing step and down into the trench again.
The Czech did know what he required. By the time the eastern sky started getting light, he’d placed his rifle and covered most of the barrel with branches he tore from bushes. His helmet was covered with leafy branches, too, held in place by a rubber strip he’d cut from an old inner tube. He’d seen Germans use that trick, and he liked it well enough to steal.
Once he was set, he had nothing to do but wait. Wait he did, and wait, and wait some more. He wanted a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke. He didn’t know if the enemy was watching this spot, and he didn’t want to do anything to draw his notice. A couple of poilus near the lookout post shot at the German line. They drew answering rifle and machine-gun fire. Vaclav smiled. If the Germans got all hot and bothered by those fellows over there, they weren’t worrying about him.
Halfway through the morning, he was bored. He needed to take a leak. He really wanted a cigarette. He waited. That was half the battle, or more than half, for snipers.
And he got his reward. Here came a fellow in a Feldgrau greatcoat, with an officer’s peaked cap on his head. He stationed himself near that dead motorcar and began a leisurely examination of the Allied position.
It seemed to Vaclav that the German was looking straight at him when he pulled the trigger. Did the fellow see the muzzle flash? Did he just have time to realize what it was before the bullet hit him? Because it did hit him-he went down like a marionette when the puppeteer drops the strings.
As soon as Vaclav saw that, he ducked and scurried away. The German sniper on the other side of the line would know he’d scored again. The bastard would want to meet him… in a manner of speaking. So many other things could kill or maim him, too. But he was still alive. He might stay that way a while longer.
Another miserable supper. Sarah Goldman’s mother was a good cook. When you had so little to work with, though, what could you do? Pharaoh had ordered the Children of Israel to make bricks without straw. Hanna Goldman faced the same problem, thanks to the orders of Germany’s latter-day Pharaoh. When root vegetables and turnip greens were all you could make, when salt was your only flavoring, you were licked.
After supper, Father turned on the radio. He didn’t usually bother any more. “What’s up?” Sarah asked.
“I want to hear the news,” he answered.
“Good God-why?” Sarah exclaimed. “Same old rubbish.”
“Probably.” Samuel Goldman rolled a cigarette from newspaper and tobacco scrounged from dog ends. It wasn’t a professorial skill, but he had it. Maybe he’d picked it up in the trenches in the last war. More likely, he’d acquired it since exchanging his university post for one in a labor gang. Jews got no tobacco ration of their own any more. After he lit the nasty cigarette, he went on, “I heard something interesting from somebody who said he heard it from someone you can trust. I want to see if the regular broadcast covers it.”
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. s 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.