power. She remembered her father playing records of Wagner’s operas then. And, after the direction in which the Nazis were taking Germany grew unmistakably clear, she remembered him smashing those records one by one and throwing the pieces in the trash.
That didn’t mean he, or anyone else in the Third Reich, could escape Wagner altogether. Naturally, Hitler’s favorite composer was on the radio all the time. Samuel Goldman had usually turned it off or found another station when that happened. Sometimes, though, Sarah had caught him listening, hardly seeming to realize he was doing it. The Germans made it plain that liking Wagner was a big part of being one of them, and her father’d always wanted nothing more than to be, and to be seen to be, a good German himself.
Besides, some of what Wagner wrote-not all, not to Sarah’s ear, but yes, some-was ravishingly beautiful.
These days, more French treason and French betrayal were on the radio than Wagner. German commentators screamed that France had broken her commitments as an ally and a friend.
David Bruck was nowhere near so sophisticated a man as Samuel Goldman, but did you need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing? “It’ll be two fronts going full blast, same as it was in the Great War,” he predicted. “It didn’t work then. What are the odds it will this time?”
“Do you want it to?” Sarah asked him. “If this regime goes down the drain, maybe whatever comes along next won’t blame everything on the Jews.”
The baker looked startled. “I hadn’t even though of it like that,” he confessed. Turning to his son, he went on, “See what a smart girl you married, Isidor?”
“Oh, yeah?” Isidor said. Sarah was about to throw something at him when he added, “If she’s so smart, how come she married me?” That self-mockery was very much his style. This time, he dragged her into it, too.
“Must be your good looks,” David Bruck said. They all laughed. Isidor looked a lot like his father. The older Bruck gave his attention back to Sarah. “I hadn’t even thought about no more Nazis. I just remember how hard things were during the last war, and what a horrible mess everything was afterwards.”
The Nazis had sprung from that horrible mess. What might spring from the next one, if there was a next one? Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Hitler’s party. Sarah was sure of that.
She wondered if her father would be so sure. The Nazis had surprised him with their virulence. Had they gone as low as people could go? Sarah thought so. If she was wrong, she didn’t want to find out about it.
“Well,” Isidor said, “let’s get these into the ovens.” And into the ovens the dark loaves went. He and his father complained all the time about the horrible brown coal with the lumps and chunks of worthless shale they had to use for baking these days.
Sarah understood why they complained: they were used to better. Jews all over Germany were used to better all kinds of ways. Here, though, Sarah wasn’t inclined to kvetch along with them. Before long, the baking bread would smell wonderful. And the ovens, even if they burned the cheapest, most adulterated coal around-and what else would a Jewish bakery get? — kept the place warm. In earlier war winters, she’d shivered till spring finally came. No more.
The war bread came out of the ovens right at the top of the hour. David Bruck turned on the radio to catch the news. “It’ll all be lies,” Sarah said.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “Not all. Just most of it.” She nodded; he was right. If you listened carefully and knew how to read between the lines, you could sometimes glimpse the real moving figures that cast the enormous, blurry shadows the newsreaders talked about.
The latest broadcast started out with a bang: “The Jews are our misfortune!” the announcer shouted, slamming his fist down on a tabletop. “So our beloved Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, said twenty years ago, and, as usual, history has proved him right.”
At that point, Sarah’s father would have given forth with a derisive snort. Since he wasn’t there, she did it for him. Her husband and father-in-law made identical shushing noises.
“Now the Bolshevik Jews of Moscow conspire with the plutocratic Jews of Paris to try to smash the German Reich between them,” the newsreader went on. “For a little while, it seemed the degenerate French would have will enough to resist the poisoned honey the Jews poured down their throats. Sadly, though, this was not to be. As a result of base French treachery and deceit, we are punishing the enemy soldiers who seek to desert to the Bolsheviks.”
They’d said the same thing after England decided she’d had enough of the fight in Russia. Maybe it was true. Maybe it was sweet syrup designed to make the radio audience feel better about what was going on. Here, Sarah couldn’t know for sure without going to Russia herself. There weren’t many places she wanted to be less than in Munster, but the Russian front was one of them.
“Fighting has resumed in France,” the announcer said in portentous tones. “Displaying their usual cowardice, the French were pushed back several kilometers in the skirmishes. No sign of English troops on the Western Front has yet been detected. As always, England talks a better game than she plays.”
Sarah would have looked across the street at the bombed-out grocery there, only she couldn’t. The bakery’s front window was repaired-after a fashion-with scraps of plywood and cardboard. The RAF played all too good a game.
“In other news relating to the changed war situation, unlimited U-boat warfare in the North Atlantic has resumed,” the announcer said. “If America’s Jew capitalists think they can get rich shipping arms to increase Europe’s woe, we will hurt them in their pocketbooks. Wait and see how loud they scream!” He laughed a most unpleasant laugh.
After that, home-front reports took over. Then the radio started playing Tristan und Isolde. David Bruck smiled. He liked Wagner. He hadn’t quit liking the composer because the Nazis liked him, too, the way Sarah’s father had. She wondered what that said. Most likely, no more than that he liked Wagner even better than Samuel Goldman did.
Isidor said, “I bet the Wehrmacht is jumping up and down with joy because they get to fight a two-front war again.”
“Bet you’re right,” his father agreed. “They’ve already tried to toss out our beloved Fuhrer ”-he laced that with sarcasm, not the newsreader’s schmaltz — “a couple of times. How long before they take another shot at it?”
Sarah looked from one of them to the other. No, they weren’t sophisticates like her father. But, as she was coming to realize, that didn’t make them dummies, either. They could see what was going on in the world.
Hitler would be able to see it, too. How far could he trust the Wehrmacht? If he didn’t trust it, what would keep the French and English out of Germany? For that matter, what would keep the Russians out of the Reich? There was a thought to make any good National Socialist’s blood run cold!
Sooner or later-probably sooner, the way Isidor grabbed her every chance he could steal-she was going to have a baby. What kind of world would it grow up in? In a world that didn’t look a whole lot like this one? In a world without Nazis? A few weeks earlier, that would have looked impossible. Now? Now she could hope, anyhow.
“ You can go home again, ” Vaclav Jezek said, contradicting the title of a new novel he’d never heard of.
Benjamin Halevy shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. But unless we all go back to France to fight the Germans, I’m staying right here with you guys.”
“You’re a French citizen. You’re a French soldier,” Vaclav said. “What if your government orders you back?”
Halevy told him what the French government could do about it. Vaclav didn’t think governments were equipped to do such things, especially not sideways. He laughed all the same.
“One thing,” he said when he got done laughing. “Now that France and Germany are on the outs again, they’ll open up the supply spigot here.”
“There you go. That is something.” Halevy sounded enthusiastic all at once. “Let the fucking Fascists get thirsty for goodies for a change. With France and England back in the war, I’d like to see Hitler and Mussolini ship Sanjurjo any toys.”
“It’s funny. The Nationalists are Fascists, and I can’t stand them on account of they’re dumb enough to be Fascists, but I don’t hate them the way I hate Germans,” Vaclav said. “I wonder why.”
“All the Spaniards have done is try to kill you,” Halevy said. “They haven’t raped your country and stolen it from you. Besides, I bet you didn’t have much use for Germans even before the war. What Czech does?”
