Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Rivka smiled at him. “Remember how we shivered under our blankets when the explosions started going off?”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Russie answered. Since Warsaw surrendered, the ghetto hadn’t known the sounds of real warfare. The dreaded crummp of bombs reminded everyone who had managed to endure since 1939 that more straightforward means of death than starvation, disease, and beatings were loose in the world. Russie went on, “And then, when the curfew lifted… Oh, when the curfew lifted!”

Bombs or no bombs, if he didn’t get to his sewing machine, he’d lose his job. He knew it, and sallied forth at the usual time. The streets had seemed to fill with amazing speed that morning. People moved along at their usual pace; no one who had work would risk losing it, and no one without would throw away a chance to find some. But somehow everyone managed to stop for a few seconds and gape at one-or more than one-of the holes torn in the wall that sundered the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw.

Russie stood in front of one of those holes now, a three-meter stretch where there was no wall. As he stepped into the bomb crater, the soles of his feet felt every sharp brick fragment through the rags that wrapped them. He did not care. Still holding the Holy Scriptures before him, he walked through the shallow crater and out of the ghetto.

Turning, he said, “Jericho’s walls could not hold the Hebrews out, nor can Warsaw’s hold us in. The Lord has set us free!”

The crowd of Jews cheered once more. He drank in the shouts of “ Reb Moishe! Reb Moishe!” The more he heard them, the better they sounded in his ears. God had given, him the sign, after all.

Someone in the crowd, though, called, “The Lord may have set us free, but has He bothered to tell the Nazis?”

The word itself was enough to make people look this way and that in alarm, Russie among them. Even without walls, the Germans could have kept the ghetto sealed by posting machine guns in the streets around it. They hadn’t done so, which seemed to Russie another sign of divine intervention.

He took a short, fearful breath. As if thinking of German was enough to conjure them up, here came two. The crowd behind him started to melt away. “Moishe, get back here!” his wife said urgently.

Too late. One of the Germans, an officer by his peaked cap, pointed to Russie. “You, Jew, come here,” he said in peremptory tones. His companion, an enlisted man, had a rifle. If Russie ran, the fellow might shoot, and wasn’t likely to care whether he hit the man he was aiming for or some other fleeing Jew.

Russie took off his hat to the officer-an army man, he saw with relief, not a member of the SS. Some army men were decent. Still, omitting the gesture of respect the Nazis demanded was too dangerous to risk. If he’d been on the sidewalk, he would have stepped down into the street. As it was, he bent his head and said, “Yessir. How can I help you, sir?” in the pure German he’d learned in medical school: he also did not care to risk angering the man by making him try to follow Yiddish or Polish.

“What do you make of-this?” The officer-he was a major, Russie saw by his shoulder straps, which were embroidered but bore no pips-waved at the wreckage of the wall that had surrounded the ghetto.

Russie stayed silent for some time, considering the tone of the question. Germans were like any other folk in that some wanted to hear only that which agreed with what they already thought, while others asked in hope of learning something they did not yet know-and in that, the former type outnumbered the latter by a goodly margin. Safest to say nothing, and say it in a pleasing way.

Safest, yes, but he found all at once that he could not stomach simple safety, not any more, not with a German for once asking a question of a Jew and sounding as if the answer mattered to him. Russie held out the Bible he was carrying. “I take-this-to mean that God has not forgotten us after all.”

Under the outthrust rim of his steel helmet, the enlisted man’s ginger-colored eyebrows drew together in anger. The major, however, nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “You may be right. In truth, you would require the aid of God to escape from our hands.”

“That I know.” Russie did not bother to hide his bitterness. With the whole world turned topsy-turvy, somehow it did not seem wrong for the prisoner to speak his mind to his gaoler.

The German major nodded again, as if thinking along the same lines. He said, “Do you know, Jew, the Lizards who bombed these walls are not even human beings, but creatures from some other world?”

Russie shrugged. “How could it matter to us, trapped back in there?” He half-turned and pointed with his chin into the ghetto. “And why should it matter to you Germans, either? You named us Untermenschen- subhumans. What difference between sub-humans and creatures from some other world?” He repeated the major’s phrase without any real feeling for what it might imply.

“What difference? I’ll tell you what. By all accounts, the Lizards are ugly enough to be Untermenschen, but they fight like Ubernenschen, like supermen.”

“So do the Russians, by all accounts,” Russie said. Just standing on the far side of the ghetto wall was making him reckless.

He got away with it, too. The German enlisted man’s scowl got deeper, but the major accepted the gibe. With almost British understatement, he said, “The problem with the Lizards is rather worse.”

Good, Russie thought. If the mysterious Lizards ever showed up in person in Warsaw, the ghetto Jews would greet them with open arms. No matter how reckless he’d grown, though, he did not say that aloud. Instead, he asked, “And what, sir, do you make of this?”

“We are still deciding precisely what to make of it,” the major answered. “I have as yet no orders.”

“Ah,” Russie said. In combat, a German without orders was as deadly as one who had them, for German soldiers were endlessly trained to react and seize the initiative when and as they could. In matters political, though, Germans without orders were as helpless as so many unweaned babes, fearing to take a step in any direction. A strange folk, Russie thought, and all the more dangerous for their strangeness. He asked, “Then you have no orders to keep us from coming out of the ghetto, nicht wahr ?”

“That is so,” the major admitted, in the hollow voice of a man who has had too much happen to him too quickly. “In any case, with the Lizards having established a base inside the Polish Generalgouvernement, the Wehrmacht has more to worry about at the moment than you Jews.”

“Thank you, sir,” Russie breathed. His own sincerity startled him. After a moment, it angered him as well: why should he thank this Nazi for deigning to allow him what should have been his by right?

And, indeed, the German tempered his own moderation: “You would likely do well to remember that the SS never has more to worry about than you Jews. Be careful.” Be very careful, the cold gray eyes of the silent enlisted man seemed to add. Be very careful … kike.

“We have learned to be careful,” Russie said. “Otherwise we would all be dead by now.”

He wondered how the major would react to that. The man merely nodded, as at any statement of obvious fact. His arm shot up and out in the German salute. “Heil Hitler!”

Russie could not bring himself to answer with the Nazi farewell. But the officer had talked to him as man to man, not as master to slave. He said, “God keep you safe from the Lizards, Major.”

The German nodded again, this time brusquely, did a military about-face, and strode away. The enlisted man stalked after him. They left Moishe Russie still standing in Polish Warsaw, outside the ghetto. “Moishe, are you all right?” his wife called from the other side of the fence. She had not fled, but Reuven was nowhere to be seen-a sensible precaution, for he was all they had left.