The war started the next day.
The Poles had attacked a German radio station on the border. The Wehrmacht responded to this aggression by pouring into Poland. Their tanks had pushed aside the ragged Polish forces on horses and bicycles and soon the German peoples of Danzig and East Prussia, torn from Germany after the last war, would be reunited with the Reich.
The French and the British failed to see that the Fatherland was just defending itself and declared war on Germany two days later, using the agreement they had tricked the Führer into signing at Munich as a justification.
Everyone was delighted.
Sarah struggled to wear the right face among all the jollity. She was thinking about the massing German army, the hundreds of tanks she’d passed on the way to Berlin. Why would the Poles, with an army of horsemen and old men on bikes, provoke a war with a massively superior enemy? It was an inexplicable piece of hostility that gave the waiting Wehrmacht all the excuse they needed. The whole thing sounded like the Flunkerei of a child playing on the street, a tall tale where each question about it was met with another even more fabulous statement.
But what were the Poles to her? Everyone knew they were easy to dislike, and it was true that they were cutting off a piece of Germany from the rest. What did it matter? She had enough to worry about.
Her concerns were like wearing a coat in a stuffy room. Sarah knew she only had to take it off to be more comfortable.
But Sarah didn’t know any Poles, so how did she know they were unlikeable? Because she had been told so. Because people said that if something was dirty or old, it was Polish. Because she had swallowed that story whole, without checking the ingredients.
With the stomach-turning sensation of having forgotten something really important, Sarah realized that she was thinking like the little Aryan monster she appeared to be. This is how it happens, she thought. This is how the people turned their backs on the Jews, why no one helped on Kristallnacht. People had enough to worry about.
Poland is packed with Jews, dumme Schlampe. They suddenly have a lot to worry about.
Preparations. Photographs and maps. Diagrams and plans. Nights on a camp bed in a box room. Meals of juicy sausage and warm, crisp bread rolls. Strong bitter coffee, thick creamy milk and fat bags of brown sugar.
Sarah squinted at the grainy image. The figure was barely distinguishable from the background, his face obscured by distance. The Captain straightened it against the grid of the map.
“Hans Schäfer is a gifted scientist. Brilliant, but suspicious and paranoid. His arrogance makes him unpopular, so he’s struggled for academic recognition. However, he’s rich and powerful. He’s moved all his work on uranium to his estate near Nuremberg. Huge amounts of machinery and materials have been arriving for the past two years, but it’s locked up tight. Walls, military guards. I’d need a battalion of troops to break in.”
“So I’m your battalion?” She smirked.
“Yes. A very special unit.”
The Captain pinned a new photograph to the map. This photo was a little clearer. A blonde girl, with a very serious face, in a Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform and coat. He tapped the image with a fingernail.
“Schäfer has a daughter about your age – your real age, I mean – who has had friends stay on the estate. She attends a local Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt.”
“A Napola? A National Socialist school? You’re sending me to a Nazi school? A Jew?” Sarah laughed. It was too ridiculous, but one look at his face showed her he was completely serious.
“You’ve said it yourself. You’re not a Jew, not really. It’s just acting. You can act, can’t you?”
“‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’” Sarah said in English, holding her hands up in surrender.
The Captain smiled despite himself. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Shakespeare. English. Accent recognition. Any of it.”
“When the laws changed in ’34 my mother wasn’t allowed onstage any more and couldn’t work. We’d lost all our money in the crash, so she schooled me herself. Languages, accents, acting, listening to records of speeches, nothing really useful…but she was the truly gifted one. Polish, Czech, English, French, Dutch, even Russian. She was amazing. I was eight or nine before I realized that most people only speak one or two languages. In the end, it was all she could do to…” Sarah stopped, feeling hot behind the eyes, like she had just given something away. She ploughed on. “I didn’t have friends. I had books. We had a library in the house in Berlin and nothing else to do.”
“What about your father?”
“I don’t know anything about my father,” she said hurriedly. “He left a lot of military books. Different eras, the Chinese, the Hindus…every culture seems to love killing. Do you believe you can know people from their library, Captain Floyd?”
“I don’t know. Who am I?”
“A liar and a trickster.”
“Correct.” He nodded and slowly smiled.
Preparations.
Sarah woke as the box room door flew open. By the time she had opened her eyes, strong hands had pulled her by the arms from the cot and thrown her into a corner. She hit the walls, a jumble of arms and legs, collapsing onto the carpet.
A powerful light shone in her face and it stung her eyes. She covered them, but flashes of red still danced in the darkness of her fingers.
“What is your name?” The voice dripped with menace.
“What…?” she mumbled, disorientated.
“Your name,” screamed the intruder.
“S…sula. Ursula Haller,” Sarah managed.
The light went out and before she could open her eyes again, the door closed, leaving her alone in the darkness.
Diagrams and plans.
“I don’t really understand.” Sarah shook her head at the notes and arrows.
“You don’t really need to.”
Sarah sucked at her teeth and tried a different tack. “All right, this bomb…Lise Meitner’s Grapefruit Bomb that Schäfer is making. Why are you…why are we…why is it important for Germany? There have always been bigger and bigger bombs.”
“Not like this,” the Captain said with great intensity, gesturing to emphasize his words. “One little bomb could destroy a city. Instantly. Can you imagine that?”
She still couldn’t. She couldn’t envisage any bomb, for that matter. Then she remembered the flash and heat of the Captain’s improvised explosion at the station. Something about the memory made her want to recoil from it. “No. Not really.”
“Look at it this way. If you flattened half of London, or Paris and you forget about the dead,” the Captain continued, seemingly pulling the ideas together as he spoke, “there’d be, what? A million injured people? How would you treat them? There aren’t enough hospitals. How would you put out the fires of thousands of homes? The country would collapse in a day.”
Sarah thought about this, the queues for the doctor after the Novemberpogrome – what everyone else called Kristallnacht, when the stormtroopers wrecked the Jewish neighbourhoods. Still, the idea was too fantastic, like something from an H. G. Wells novel – Martians tramping over shattered London in their three-legged machines.
“But a whole city? All at once? With the buildings, the people, the women and children… No one would do that. How could anyone?”
The Captain seemed as if he was trying to remember what he was saying. Then he stood. “Let me show you something.”
From his secret office and shelves of incriminating books, he brought out a French magazine, Cahiers d’Art. He stood in front of Sarah and flicked through it as he spoke. “I was in Spain, two years ago, during their civil war. On the one side, the Republicans—”
“The communists?”
“The elected government,” replied the Captain with irritation. “On the other, the Nationalists. A fascist military rebellion. Just a year in, things were not going well for the Republicans. The Fascists could call on the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and that was decisive.”
“Why?” Sarah didn’t look up. He was leaving things out as usual.
“Why what?”
“Why were you in Spain? What were you doing, exactly?”
The Captain rolled his eyes. “I was there on business. I found myself in a town in the Basque Country, about thirty kilometres behind the front lines. There were no Republican troops stationed there, so it was a safe place to hole up for a while.”
He found what he was looking for and handed the open journal to Sarah. She didn’t recognize the painting on the pages, but the strange, angular, chopped-up style reminded her of Picasso. Unlike the jumbled, colourful and cheerful musicians and dancers from her mother’s books, though, this piece was painfully monochrome – grey, black, dirty white – and flat, like bits of newspaper pasted onto a board. It could have been drawn by a child, but that made the images more unsettling. Order had broken down and chaos had torn the canvas into stark pieces. The screaming horses were people, the people were bulls, crying or dying, crushed under hoof and foot. A building burned, a crying mother cradled a dead child, twisted, shrieking. Panic, pain, fear and grief. As her eyes moved from terrible image to terrible image, the Captain talked, his voice emotionless at first.
“It was Monday. Because of the war it wasn’t officially market day, but the farmers had to sell their produce and the townspeople needed to buy food, so the main square was full anyway. Refugees from the fighting resting, gathered around their few belongings. A few soldiers, who were probably deserters. Late that afternoon, the church bells rang, signalling an air raid. Everyone crowded into the refugios, little more than cellars, but no one was worried. Why would the Nationalists attack a town of civilians?
“But they did.” He grew less objective, more involved, more moved. “One plane came over and dropped its bomb load right in the centre of town. Everybody scrambled out of their shelters and ran to help. People under rubble, trapped in burning buildings, no one knew what to do. Farmers and priests pulling at the bricks with bare hands… So, after a few minutes of this, a whole squadron of the Luftwaffe – Italians, Condor Legion, whatever – flew over and emptied everything they had onto the town. Chaos. People tried to get back into the shelters, but the refuges were destroyed by the first attack. Flames, dust, noise. With nowhere to go, the people ran for the fields. A stampede, the small and the weak were trodden on…”
The Captain’s voice sounded strained. After a moment he continued. “As they ran away, waves of fighter planes swooped down and strafed them with bullets and grenades. Men, women, children…chased into the crops and slaughtered like grouse on a hunt.”
“That’s…horrible,” Sarah murmured, conscious of how inadequate the words were.
“That’s nothing.” His voice was full of derision. “The planes had hardly gone, just ten or twenty minutes of crying and screaming and trying to stop the blood with your hands, staring at the jagged shapes of smoking buildings, when we heard the low hum. Bombers, moving across the sky in threes, carving lines across the town for two and a half hours. Explosives shattered and flattened the buildings. Firebombs rained down like confetti, setting everything they touched alight. Animals ran burning and screaming through the streets. Men lit up like torches staggered among the wreckage, beyond help. When they were done, the town was gone. A skeleton was all that remained, filled with sixteen hundred corpses and nine hundred maimed, ruined people.”
“Why did they do that?” Sarah felt sick. “Why would anyone do that?”
“To terrorize the Basques by destroying their capital. To block the Republican retreat. To test out their new bombing technique. Maybe they were trying to hit the bridge outside town and got lost. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is they wanted to do it, so they did. It’s that simple. If it fits their purpose, they will do it.” He tapped the painting. “That was just twenty-two tonnes of explosive. Professor Meitner thinks Schäfer’s bomb would be more powerful than five hundred tonnes of dynamite. One bomb. The people who did this, who murdered these people, wiped this town from the map. If they could destroy Paris or London with one bomb? They wouldn’t hesitate.”
There was silence. Sarah looked at the painting one last time and closed the magazine, sealing the horrors away inside. Something else bothered her.
“Twenty-two tonnes of explosive. Exactly twenty-two tonnes. How do you know that?”
The Captain had his back turned to her. His shoulders twitched and then were still. “I sold them the bombs,” he said.
Preparations.
It was 4 a.m. when the Captain kicked the door open and shone a powerful torch on the camp bed.
It was empty.
From a dark corner behind him came a voice. “I’m bored now. I think we’re ready.”
The Captain nodded. “Goodnight, Ursula,” he said as he closed the door.
“Goodnight, Onkel.”