Hitler's War (50 page)

“Well, we haven’t starved yet,” Mother said, which was true but less than encouraging. With Jews able to shop only as things were about to close, and with their being unwelcome in so many shops anyhow, staying fed and clothed was even harder for them than for their German neighbors.

One clever Jew in Hamburg had given her family’s ration coupons
to a gentile friend, who used them to shop for her. The friend could have used the coupons for her own kin, but she hadn’t done that. She’d played square—till someone betrayed them. The Jewish family got it in the neck for evading rationing regulations. And the gentiles got it in the neck for helping Jews.

For all Sarah knew, they had side-by-side bunks in the Dachau camp. Or maybe they’d all been shot. She wouldn’t have been surprised. If you were a German Jew—or an Aryan rash enough to remember you were also a human being—you couldn’t win.

A trolley rattled by. The motorman ignored Sarah and her mother, as they ignored him. Jews weren’t supposed to ride streetcars, either, except going off to the work gangs in the morning or coming back from them at night. No, you couldn’t win.

“I hope our soles will last,” her mother said. Leather and even synthetics for shoe repairs were impossible to come by. Sarah nodded. She hoped her soul would last, too.

V
ictory will come soon. So the official from the German department in charge of interned neutrals had assured Peggy Druce. Konrad Hoppe, that was the bastard’s name. Well,
Herr
Hoppe wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. Here it was a month later, and Germany was still fighting hard.

Here it is, a month later
, Peggy thought.
More than a month. Pretty soon it’ll be spring. And here I am, still stuck in goddamn Berlin
.

The RAF had come over several times. French planes had dropped bombs once or twice. Even the Russians had shown up, flying all the way across Poland and eastern Germany in bombers said to be bigger than anybody else’s.

None of that had done a hell of a lot of actual damage. Berlin was a long way off for enemy planes—a long way off from anywhere civilized, in Peggy’s biased opinion. The bombers had to carry extra fuel, which meant they couldn’t carry so many bombs.

German searchlights ceaselessly probed the night sky, hunting marauders.
German antiaircraft fire was like a million Fourths of July all folded into one. It didn’t do much good, though.

That had to be part of why Berlin seemed so jumpy to Peggy These days, Berliners talked about Hermann Call Me Meyer Göring as Hermann the Kike—but in low voices, to friends they trusted, in places where the
Gestapo
was unlikely to overhear. They were less discreet than they might have been, though. Peggy wouldn’t have heard—and chuckled about—Hermann the Kike if they weren’t.

But she was careful where she chuckled, too. She judged that most of Berlin’s
Angst
came simply from victory deferred. Had the
Wehrmacht
paraded through Paris when
Herr
Hoppe thought it would, chances were the generals wouldn’t have tried whatever they tried. Or had that happened earlier? Nobody officially admitted anything. After whatever it was didn’t work, Peggy stopped hearing so many juicy jokes. Passing them on didn’t just land you in trouble any more. You could, with the greatest of ease, end up dead.

SS men in black uniforms and soldiers in field-gray seemed to compete with one another in arresting people and hauling them off God knew where to do God knew what to them. Peggy had never been so glad she carried an American passport. It was sword and shield at the same time. You couldn’t walk more than a block without somebody snapping, “Your papers!” at you.

And when you showed them, what a relief it was to pull out the leatherette folder stamped in gold with the gold old American eagle and olive branch rather than the German one holding a swastika in its claws. “Here you are,” Peggy would say, and show off the passport with all the pride—and all the relief—she felt.

So far, the talisman had never failed. Whether she displayed it to SS man,
Abwehr
official, or ordinary Berlin cop, it always made him back off. “Oh,” he would say, whoever
he
happened to be this time around. Sometimes the German would salute after that; sometimes he’d just
turn away in disappointment, or maybe disgust. But he would always let her go on.

Then, three blocks farther along, some other jumped-up kraut reveling in his petty authority would growl, “Your papers!” The whole stupid farce would play out again.

Once, a particularly reptilian SS man—again, in Peggy’s biased opinion—tried out his English on her, demanding, “What is an American doing in Berlin?”

“Trying to get out, pal. Nothing else but,” Peggy answered from the bottom of her heart. “You want to send me home, I’ll kiss your shiny boots.” And were they ever. She could have put on her makeup using the highly polished black leather for a mirror.

For some reason, the SS man didn’t like that, either. “It is a privilege to come to the capital of the
Reich,”
he spluttered.

“I’m sure the RAF thinks so, too,” Peggy said sweetly.

The SS man was a fine, fair Aryan, which only made his flush more obvious. “Air pirates!” he said, proving he not only read but believed Goebbels’ newspapers. “They murder innocent civilians—women and children.”

“Sure,” Peggy said, and then, incautiously, “What do you think your own bombers are doing?”

“We strike only military targets,” the SS man insisted. The scary thing was, he plainly believed that, too.

Peggy wanted to yank off his high-crowned cap and beat him over the head with it, in the hope of knocking some sense into him. But she held back—it was bound to be a lost cause. If you were the kind of jerk who joined the SS, you had to be immune to sense. She contented herself with, “Can I go now?”

“‘May.’ It should be ‘may.’” Proud of winning a battle in her language, the SS man handed back her passport and waved her on.

She turned a corner—and walked straight into a police checkpoint.
“Your papers—at once!” a beer-bellied cop shouted. Peggy produced the American passport. The policeman recoiled like Bela Lugosi not seeing his reflection in a mirror. As the SS man had before him, he barked, “What are you doing in Berlin?”

And, as she had before, Peggy answered truthfully: “Trying to get out.” Only later did she wonder about taking a big chance twice running. How many chances had she taken? Too damned many—she was sure of that. Hadn’t she been proud of acting more mature? She sure couldn’t prove it today.

But she got by with it one more time. “Pass,” the cop said, writing a note on a sheet clipped to a flat board. Any
Gestapo
official who examined all the reports various Berlin security officials compiled could figure out everywhere she went. For all she knew, some
Gestapo
goon did that every day. If she were a spy, it might have meant something. But she was only an interned tourist with a big mouth.

She couldn’t even have fun shopping. Window displays had nothing to do with what you could actually buy. And everything you
could
buy required ration coupons of one kind or another. She got enough for food to keep her going. For almost everything else, the Germans didn’t seem to feel obligated to take care of her.

And, after the
Athenia
went down, she couldn’t get out. She’d tried to arrange another train ticket to Copenhagen. She’d tried to arrange a plane ticket to Stockholm. Once she was in Scandinavia, she could get to England. Once she was in England, she could get to the States…if the Germans didn’t torpedo her on the way. And if they did, well, going down with her ship sometimes seemed more appealing than staying in Berlin.

But they wouldn’t let her out. She got “Your papers!” when she tried to buy her tickets, too. And when she flashed her passport then, it wasn’t magic. It was more like poison. They would frown. They would check a list. Then they would say, “I am very sorry, but this is
verboten.”
They liked saying
verboten
. Telling people no was much more fun than saying
yes would have been. You got to watch your victims throw the most delightful tantrums.

Peggy refused to give them the satisfaction. She just walked away both times. After failing to get the plane ticket, she hied herself off to the U.S. embassy. If she couldn’t get help there, she figured, she couldn’t get help anywhere.

By all the signs, she couldn’t get help anywhere. The embassy personnel spoke English, not German, but they might as well have clicked their heels and intoned,
“Verboten.”
What they did say amounted to, “Sorry, but we can’t make the German government get off the dime.”

“Why not?” Peggy snarled at an undersecretary—she’d made herself obnoxious enough at the embassy that the clerks had booted her upstairs to get rid of her. “Denmark’s neutral. Sweden’s neutral.
We’re
neutral, for crying out loud. Why won’t the Nazis let me out of this loony bin?”

The undersecretary—Jenkins, his name was, Constantine Jenkins—had shiny fingernails—painted with clear polish?—and a soft, well-modulated voice. Peggy guessed he was a fairy, not that that should have had anything to do with the price of beer. “Well, Mrs. Druce, the long answer is that the Germans say they’re at war and they fear espionage,” he replied. “That weakens any arguments we might make, because it means they can tell us, ‘Sorry, emergency—we don’t have to listen to you.’”

“Espionage, my ass!” Peggy blurted, which made the faggy undersecretary blink. She went on, “The only thing I’ve seen is what a horrible, run-down dump this place is.”

“That
is
information the Germans would rather keep to themselves,” Jenkins said seriously. “And besides, the short answer is, the Germans are just being Germans—sometimes they enjoy being difficult. And when they do, you can shout till you’re blue in the face for all the good it does you.”

“Being pissy, you mean. Shit,” Peggy said. That made much more
sense than she wished it did. She also made the American diplomat blink again, which was the most fun she’d had all day. She went on, “Can’t I just sneak over the border somewhere? All I want to do is go home.”

“I would not recommend it,” he said seriously. “We can be of no assistance to anyone caught violating the regulations of the country in which she happens to find herself, and whether those regulations are just or humane is, I’m afraid, beside the point.”

“Shit,” she said again, and walked out of the embassy. A man standing across the street wrote something down. Were the Nazis keeping tabs on her in particular or on everybody who went in and out? What difference did it make, really?

They wouldn’t let her go to Sweden. They wouldn’t let her go to Denmark. They wouldn’t let her go to Norway or Finland, either—she’d also found out that Oslo and Helsinki were off limits. The bastards wouldn’t let her go anywhere decent, damn them to hell.

She thought about Warsaw. Regretfully, she didn’t think about it long. Maybe she could get to Scandinavia or Romania from there, but she feared the odds weren’t good. The Russians had pushed Poland right into bed with Germany. The Poles probably didn’t want to land there, but what choice did they have when the Red Army jumped them? She wished Stalin such a horrible case of mange, it would make his soup-strainer mustache fall out. That’d teach him!

Then she had a brainstorm—or she hoped it was, anyway. She turned around and went back to the American embassy. The guy across the street scribbled some more. Maybe the
Gestapo
would have to issue him another pencil.

This time, Peggy didn’t have to be so difficult to get to see the queer undersecretary. Constantine Jenkins eyed her as if
she
had a case of the mange. “What can I do for you now, Mrs. Druce?” he asked warily.

“Can you help me get to Budapest?” Peggy asked. Hungary wasn’t exactly a nice place these days. Admiral Horthy’s government (and
wasn’t that a kick in the ass? a landlocked country run by an admiral) was a hyena skulking along behind the German lion, feeding on scraps from the bigger beast’s kill. When the Hungarian army helped Hitler dismantle Czechoslovakia, England and France promptly broke relations. So did Russia. But she didn’t think any of them had gone and declared war on the Horthy regime. And if they hadn’t…something might be arranged.

“Well,” Jenkins said. “That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“I hope so.” Peggy sent him a reproachful stare. “Why didn’t you think of it yourself?”

For his part, he looked affronted. “Because chances are the Germans won’t let you go, even if Hungary is an ally. Because getting to Budapest doesn’t mean all your troubles are over, or even that any of them are.”

“If I can get into Hungary, I bet I can get out,” Peggy said. “Romania—”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” the undersecretary warned. “Romanians and Hungarians like each other about as much as Frenchmen and Germans, and for most of the same reasons. Romanians spite Hungarians for the fun of it, and vice versa. But if you’re trying to get out of Hungary, you need to worry about Marshal Antonescu’s goons, not Admiral Horthy’s.”