Harry Turtledove - Last Orders

The new panzer clanked past the burnt-out hulk of a German armored car. Fifty meters farther on sat the chassis of a Russian T-34, with the turret blown off and upside-down beside it. Theo did use a word: “Tiger.”

“You bet it was,” Adi agreed. The German heavy tank’s fearsome 88 could devastate a T-34 like that. A Panzer IV’s long-barreled 75 could kill one, but couldn’t smash it that way. And a T-34 could kill a Panzer IV just as readily, while a Tiger’s thick frontal armor laughed at anything the Russian machine threw at it.

And then Witt shouted, “Panzer halt!”

“Halting.” As Adi spoke, he trod hard on the brake.

At Witt’s orders, the turret traversed to somewhere between two and three o’clock. The gun rose slightly. Theo could just see it move. A shell clanged into the breech. “Fire!” Witt yelled.

“On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt answered. As he spoke, the big gun roared. Flame leaped from the end of the muzzle, and out to either side of the recoil-reducing muzzle brake.

Then Theo used another word: “Hit!”

Flame and smoke burst from a Russian panzer he hadn’t even seen till the big gun spoke. It was more than a kilometer away. When he peered out through the armor glass in his narrow vision slit, he couldn’t tell whether the crew escaped. Part of him hoped so-they were members of his guild, in a manner of speaking. But they’d try again to kill him if they did. Maybe hoping they died fast and without much pain was better.

Summer days over Germany were long, summer nights short. In winter, when things reversed, the RAF and French bombers struck deep inside the country. At this time of year, they couldn’t hope to do that and fly back out of danger before the new dawn showed them to the Luftwaffe .

In summer, then, the raiders concentrated on the western part of the Reich . They could drop their bombs on towns like Münster and be landing at their distant bases before the sun came up again.

As it sank in the northwestern sky this evening, Sarah Bruck apprehensively eyed the stretching shadows and the red-gold lights streaming in through the dining-room window. “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” she asked.

Her father paused with a forkful of boiled potatoes and turnip greens halfway to his mouth. Samuel Goldman considered the question as gravely as if it touched on the death of Socrates or the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had been a professor of ancient history and classics at the university. Since he was a Jew, that didn’t matter once the Nazis took over. Because he was also a wounded veteran from the last war, he still found employment: he was a laborer in a work gang that cleared streets of rubble and tore down shattered houses and made repairs after the enemy struck.

Having considered, he nodded. “ Ja , I think so. There will be plenty of moonlight to help show them the way.”

“Samuel!” Hanna Goldman said, as if he’d come out with something filthy. Well, in a way he had.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he told his wife. “She asked me what I thought. Should I have lied to her? Then, when the air-raid sirens start screaming, she’ll think My father is a stupid old fool! , and she’ll hate me.”

“What happens if the raiders don’t come tonight, though, and everything stays quiet?” Sarah’s mother sounded sure she’d won that one.

But she hadn’t. Father answered, “She’ll think My father is a stupid old fool! — and she’ll love me.”

They all laughed. The Nazis did everything they could to make life in the Reich as miserable for Jews as possible. They might have done a better job of it than any other gang of persecutors in the history of the world. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t wipe out every single happy moment. Some sneaked past in spite of them.

“If they come,” Sarah said, “maybe they’ll drop some on the Rathaus and on the square in front of the cathedral. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

“Dreadful. Frightful,” Samuel Goldman agreed, his voice full of plummy, pious hypocrisy. When you couldn’t be sure the house wasn’t bugged, you didn’t want to give the authorities any excuse to cause you trouble. They could do it without an excuse, of course, but why make things easy for them?

A bomb hit on the Rathaus in daylight would blow the Burgomeister and the Nazi functionaries who ran Münster straight to heaven-or, more likely, to some warmer clime instead. A bomb hit on the Rathaus at any old time might destroy all the city records, including the ones of who was and wasn’t a Jew. Plenty of people in town knew, of course, but Sarah suspected few would squeal on her parents and her if they somehow found an excuse to take the yellow Stars of David off their clothes. The National Socialist regime was less popular than it had been before it led the Reich into an endless, unvictorious war.

Which was why a bomb hit on the square in front of the cathedral would bring few tears to anyone in town. Bishop von Galen had dared to protest against the Nazis’ policy of euthanizing mental defectives (though he’d said not a word about how they treated the Jews). The Gestapo had seized him, and the Catholics in town, backed by some Protestants, rioted to try to gain his release. They rose not once but twice. Sarah had almost got shot from accidentally being on the fringes of their second eruption.

These days, armed SS men held the cathedral and the square. If the RAF sent them some presents, wouldn’t that be a shame? Sarah was sure lots of Münsterites were just as worried about it as she was.

She really did worry about bombs coming down close to the house here. In their infinite generosity, the Nazis had decreed that Jews weren’t allowed in public air-raid shelters. They had to take their chances wherever they happened to be.

Her mouth tightened. She’d been married to Isidor Bruck for only a few months when he and his mother and father had to take their chances in the family bakery and the flat above it. She would have taken her chances with them if she hadn’t been out. A direct hit leveled the building and killed them all. Now she was a widow, living with her parents again.

This house had been lucky. Most of the windows still boasted glass panes, not cardboard taped up in their place. But the Brucks had thought the bakery was lucky, too. And so it was … till it wasn’t any more.

The radio blared out saccharine music and Dr. Goebbels’ latest lies about how wonderfully things were going and how happy the German people were under the Führer ’s divinely inspired leadership. Neither Sarah nor her mother and father felt like staying up late to listen to more of that. They slept as much as they possibly could, Samuel Goldman because he worked so hard in the labor gang and all of them because they didn’t get enough to eat to have much energy.

Sarah didn’t think she’d been in bed more than a few minutes before the warning sirens began to howl. All the dogs began to howl with them. The sirens scared the dogs, and the animals had learned what happened after those sirens shrieked. They had plenty of reason to be scared.

So did Sarah. Along with her parents, she stumbled down the stairs in the inky darkness and huddled under the sturdy dining-room table: the best protection they could get. Just because it was best didn’t mean it was good.

“ Heil Hitler!” Samuel Goldman said dryly. That was the punch line to a bitter joke the Germans made about air raids. If you’d grabbed some sleep in spite of the bombers, the next day you greeted people with Good morning! If the raid had kept you from getting any sleep and you desperately needed some, you said Good night! And if you’d always been asleep, you said Heil Hitler!