Hitler's War (49 page)

He got down. To his surprise, Colonel Steinbrenner trotted up before his prop stopped spinning. “Rudel!” the colonel said. “They swore you’d got shot down again. They said nobody could go into that kind of fire and come out the other side in one piece.”

They, whoever they were, hadn’t tried it themselves. Hans-Ulrich shrugged. He hadn’t thought—much—about going down. All he’d thought about was doing his job. Letting the other get in the way would have distracted him. It might have given him cold feet. Now that he’d made it through, he wondered why the devil it hadn’t.

Shrugging again, he said, “I’m here. The bridge is down.”

“There’s an Iron Cross First Class!” Steinbrenner said.

Medals weren’t the biggest thing on Rudel’s mind—nowhere close. He did say, “Make sure Dieselhorst gets one, too. He kept the enemy fighters off my back.”

“He’ll be taken care of,” the wing commander promised. Hans-Ulrich believed him. Back in the last war, enlisted men always got the shitty end of the stick. The
Führer
understood that—he’d seen it for himself, in four years at the front. He’d sworn things would be different this time around, and he’d meant it. Some of the
vons
left over from the last round might not like it, but too bad for them.

Hans-Ulrich climbed out of the cockpit. Behind him, Sergeant Dieselhorst was coming out, too. “Made it,” the noncom said with a wry grin.

“Ja.”
Hans-Ulrich nodded. “And do you know what we won? Besides the
Eisenkreuz
, I mean?”

“What’s that?” Dieselhorst asked.

“A chance to have just as much fun again tomorrow, or maybe later on today,” Rudel answered.

The rear gunner and radioman made a wry face. “Hot damn!” he said.

JOAQU IN DELGADILLO LOOKED ACROSS THE
Straits of Gibraltar to Africa. That was better than looking at Gibraltar itself. The British had fought like fourteen different kinds of demon to hold on to the Rock. In the end, it didn’t do them a peseta’s worth of good. Spain’s gold and scarlet flew over Gibraltar for the first time in more than two hundred years.

Posters slapped onto walls or fences still standing boasted of the return to Spanish sovereignty.
OURS AGAIN!
they shouted, and
GOOD-BYE TO ENGLAND!
Glum British POWs moped behind barbed wire. The people who’d lived in Gibraltar were mostly Spaniards. The ones left alive after the fight seemed just as disheartened as the enemy soldiers. General Sanjurjo’s men were making them sorry they’d backed the Union Jack.

A couple of Condor Legion German airmen walked by, gabbing in their incomprehensible guttural language. Delgadillo wondered why they didn’t choke to death every time they opened their mouths. One of them nodded to him and said,
“Buenos días.”
Sound by sound, the words were in Spanish, but no one who heard them would have dreamt they came from a Spaniard’s throat.

“Buenos días,”
Delgadillo answered politely. Even if they did talk as if their mouths were full of glue, they’d done Marshal Sanjurjo a lot of
good. German bombers had helped flatten the British defenses here, for instance, and made British battleships keep their distance.

That thought made Joaquin look west instead of south. If the Royal Navy wanted to cause trouble, it still could. And it might: not only to pay Spain back for reclaiming Gibraltar but to keep the Straits open so British and French ships could pass into and out of the Mediterranean.

He’d faced fire from big naval guns before German planes pounded them into silence. If he never had to do that again, he’d light a grateful candle in church. Once was twice too often. They were much, much worse than land-based artillery—and that was more than bad enough.

The Condor Legion men were looking out to sea, too. One of them—not the one who’d spoken before—asked, “Where is your engineering officer?” He spoke better—not well, but better.

Delgadillo pointed north. “That way, about a kilometer and a half. Why do you need him?” He would never have asked that of one of his own officers. Spanish common soldiers didn’t ask their officers anything. They existed to do as they were told. But the Germans were so foreign, so exotic, they might not know that.

Sure enough, this one answered readily enough: “We need spare parts to discuss. Since the big war in Europe began, we have from a shortage of them suffered.”

Why didn’t he put his verbs where they would do him some good? Did he hide them in his own language, too? He must have, or he wouldn’t have done it in Spanish.

“I don’t know if he’ll be able to help you,
Señor.”
Delgadillo
was
polite. He didn’t tell the Condor Legion men the engineering officer didn’t have a chance in hell of doing them any good. Lieutenant Lopez tried hard. Sometimes he could come up with a new bolt or a spring for a rifle. He’d done yeoman’s duty repairing the broken axle on a horse-drawn wagon. But he knew no more about airplane parts than a goat knew about the miracle of transubstantiation.

“Well, we will out find. Many thanks. Much obliged,” the German said. He and his pal headed north. A Spaniard, on a mission bound to be futile, would have taken his time. The Germans marched away as if they were on a parade ground. Why anybody would be so diligent without some superior’s eye on him was more than Delgadillo could fathom. He shrugged. The foreigners might be a little bit crazy, but they were good at what they did, and they were on his side.

He looked west again. No British battleships. No smoke in the distance. No enormous shells crashing down like the end of the world. Nothing but one Spanish soldier with the jitters.

Well, no. That wasn’t quite true. A couple of hundred meters away, an officer with enormous, tripod-mounted binoculars scanned the horizon. Delgadillo knew there were observation posts up on the heights of the Rock, too. They could see farther from there.

If the battleships came and those Germans didn’t have their spare parts…What would happen then? The same thing that would happen if there were no airplanes. The ships would pound the stuffing out of Gibraltar.

He laughed at himself. What could he do about it any which way? Jump into the closest foxhole, work his rosary for all it was worth, and pray to the Virgin to keep the guns from blowing him to dogmeat. A common soldier’s life wasn’t easy, but most of the time it was pretty simple.

Any common soldier, no matter whose army he belonged to, learned to look busy, even—often especially—when he wasn’t. Sergeant Carrasquel turned his basilisk stare on Joaquin, but didn’t put him to work. If you had a rag and a brush, you could look as if you were cleaning your rifle. No underofficer ever complained if he caught you doing that. And if you weren’t so diligent as you might have been…well, how could a sergeant tell?

Having successfully evaded any real duty most of the day, Delgadillo queued up for supper with no small feeling of accomplishment. Food
on the Rock was pretty good. Not the smallest reason was that much of it came from captured British supplies. The enemy had done his best to destroy what he could before Gibraltar fell, but the Spaniards took the place before he could ruin it all. Joaquin had heard that the Tommies scorned bully beef, but it beat the devil out of going empty.

Pride went before a fall. He got nabbed for kitchen police. Washing and drying and scrubbing weren’t dangerous, but they weren’t any fun, either. Pepe Rivera, the boss cook, was a top sergeant, and an evil-tempered son of a whore, too. No matter what Joaquin did, it wasn’t good enough to suit him.

Delgadillo had just gone to bed when antiaircraft guns woke him up. He grabbed his helmet—a Spanish copy of the German model from the last war—and ran for the closest trench. “God damn the French to hell!” he said as he scrambled down into it.

“He will. He does,” another soldier said. It wasn’t the first time French bombers had crossed from Morocco to hit Gibraltar. They were only nuisance raids—nothing like the pounding the papers said the Germans were giving to London and Paris. But you could get killed in a nuisance raid, too, if you were careless or unlucky.

Bombs whistled down. They exploded, none of them especially close. The drone of aircraft engines overhead faded away. The antiaircraft guns kept hammering for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they seemed satisfied and shut up.

“Gracias a Dios y su Madre,”
Joaquin said, climbing out of the trench. He yawned enormously. Maybe he could grab some sleep at last.

OUT ON THE STREETS OF MÜNSTER
, away from any possible microphones, Sarah Goldman said, “I wish we’d get another letter.” Even here, she named no names and gave no details. You never could tell who was listening. If people in Germany had learned anything since 1933, that was it.

Her mother nodded. “So do I. But we were lucky to get one, and
Frau
Breisach put herself in danger to bring it to us.”

“I know. It was kind of her. Brave of her, too,” Sarah said.

Propaganda posters sprouted like mold on walls and fences and tree trunks. Some showed jut-jawed, blue-eyed men in coal-scuttle helmets: recruiting posters for the
Wehrmacht
and the
Waffen-SS
. Sarah didn’t mind those so much. Germany was at war, after all. Father and Saul would have joined if the country had let them. In spite of everything, Saul
had
joined.

There’d been more
Waffen-SS
posters lately, especially since the coup against Hitler failed. Sarah didn’t like that, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. No. Actually, she did know. She couldn’t do a thing.

Other posters showed hook-nosed, flabby-lipped Jews pulling the strings on puppets of Chamberlain and Daladier, or a capitalist Jew in a morning coat and top hat shaking hands with a Communist Jew in overalls and a flat cloth cap above a woman’s corpse labeled
GERMANY.
Still others carried a stark, simple message:
THE JEWS ARE OUR MISFORTUNE
.

“Why do they hate us so much?” Sarah whispered. The poison made her want to hate herself.

“I only wish I knew,” Mother answered. “Then maybe I could do something about it.” She sighed. Her breath smoked. Spring was supposed to be on the way, but it hadn’t got here yet. “Or maybe knowing wouldn’t make any difference. Sometimes things just are what they are, that’s all.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Sarah said. “If it made sense, though…” She shook her head in frustration. “If it had to make sense, the
goyim
wouldn’t do it.”

“They might. Sometimes people don’t care what they do.” Mother paused, then added, “And look at the name you just called them. If you could, you’d do worse than call them names, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t start anything,” Sarah said. “But after all they’ve done to us, shouldn’t we get even if we can?”

“An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. And after a while everyone’s blind and nobody has any teeth,” Mother said sadly.

Laborers were still repairing British bomb damage and hauling away rubble one wheelbarrow at a time. The RAF wanted to make sure Germany had no eyes or teeth. Sarah had always thought of herself as a German, at least till the Nazis wouldn’t let her any more, and the enemy bomber crews were trying to kill her, too. All the same, she wouldn’t have shed a tear if one of their bombs blew up Hitler and Hess and Goebbels and Göring.

The laborers paused when Sarah and her mother went by. Sarah felt their eyes on her—and maybe on Mother, too. She tried to pretend the sweaty men in overalls weren’t there: that was one more complication she didn’t need.

And looking at them would have reminded her of Saul working in a gang just like this one…and of his shovel caving in the gang boss’ skull. She wished she could forget she’d ever seen that. She wished she could forget she’d ever heard it, too.

“Hey, sweetheart!” one of the workmen called. He rocked his hips forward and back. His buddies laughed.

Sarah just kept walking. “They don’t know we’re Jews,” she said in a low voice.

“A good thing, too. They’d be worse if they did,” her mother answered. “I keep hearing they’re going to make us put yellow stars on our clothes. Thank God it hasn’t happened yet—that’s all I can say.”

“Like the ghetto in the old days.” Sarah shivered.

“Not quite,” Mother said. Sarah raised a questioning eyebrow. The older woman explained: “In the old days, they wouldn’t have charged us ration points for the cloth we need to make the stars.”

“Where did you hear that?” Sarah’s heart sank. It had the ring of
truth: exactly the kind of thing the Nazis, with their often maniacal drive for efficiency, would think of.

“I forget who told me. Maybe I don’t want to remember.” Mother’s face twisted. “It sounds too much like something they’d do.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Sarah said. “I was hoping you’d tell me I was crazy.” She said
verrückt
, the proper German term. Back before the Nazis took over, or back at home even now, she would more likely have said
meshuggeh
. It was a friendlier, more comfortable word. But she didn’t want to speak any Yiddish where Aryans might overhear.

Aryans! Her father had had several instructive things to say on that score. He tore
Mein Kampfs
claims to little pieces and then stomped on the pieces. He really knew what he was talking about, where the half-educated Hitler cobbled together bits and pieces from pamphlets and political tracts and lying, outdated books he’d read. Hitler reassembled them into his own mosaic, which had precious little connection to real history.

Samuel Goldman was scholar enough to know as much. He could prove it, citing chapter and verse. All of which, of course, did him no good whatever. He wasn’t going to change the Nazis’ minds. Knowing how much of the Party’s antisemitism was built on lie atop lie only gave him a sour stomach and heart palpitations.

With an effort, Sarah dragged her mind away from Father’s frustrations. She had plenty of her own to dwell on. The most immediate came out: “I hope we’ll be able to get what we need. I hope we’ll be able to get
anything.”