Hitler's war

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 verruckt, 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about, where the half-educated Hitler cobbled together bits and pieces from pamphlets and political tracts and lying, outdated books he’d read.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.”

“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.