The War That Came Early: West and East by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

that wasn’t irony, what was?
    A young man in a
Wehrmacht
uniform, his left arm in a sling, smiled at her as she walked past. She didn’t smile back. She thought she might have if she were an Aryan; he was nice-looking. Up till Hitler took over, she’d always thought of herself as more German than Jewish. Even with everything that was going on, her father and brother had tried to join up when the war started. They still wanted to be Germans. The recruiters wouldn’t let them. It was all so monstrously unfair.
    The Jewish grocer’s shop and bakery sat across the street from each other. Before the war started, brownshirts had amused themselves by swearing at Jewish women who went in and out. They’d chucked a rock through the grocer’s window, too. Naturally, the police only yawned. Now most of the brownshirts were carrying rifles. Sarah hoped the French and the English—yes, and the Russians, too—would shoot them.
    She got some sad potatoes and turnips, some wilting greens, and a couple of wizened apples at the grocer’s. It all cost too much and too many ration points. When she grumbled, Josef Stein only shrugged. “It’s not like I can do anything about it,” the proprietor said.
    “I know.” Sarah sighed. “But it’s not easy for my family, either.”
    “You want easy, what are you doing here?” Stein said.
    She walked across the street to the bakery. The bread was what the ration book called war bread. It was baked from rye and barley and potato flour. It was black and chewy. The alarming thing was that people who remembered the last war said it was better than what they ate then. That bread had been eked out with ground corn and lupine seeds—and, some people insisted, with sawdust, too.
    The baker’s son stood behind the counter. Isidor Bruck was only a couple of years older than Sarah. He’d played football with her brother, though he wasn’t in Saul’s class (but then, who was?). No doubt his parentshad named him Isidor to keep from calling him Isaak. That kind of thing amused Sarah’s father, who’d told her
Isidor
meant
gift of Isis
—not the sort of name a Jew ought to wear. She didn’t think the Brucks had given it to him because of what it meant, but even so.…
    “This is a pretty good batch,” he said as he put the loaf in her cloth sack.
    “You always say that,” Sarah answered. “Or your father does, if he’s back there instead.”
    “We always mean it, too. We do the best we can with what they let us have,” Isidor said. “If they gave us more, we’d do better. You know what we were like before … before everything happened. We were the best bakery in town. Jews?
Goyim?
We were better than everybody.”
    “Sure, Isidor,” Sarah said. As far as she could remember, he was right. Whenever the Goldmans wanted something special, they’d come to the Brucks’ bakery. She remembered things as ordinary as white bread with a fond longing she wouldn’t have imagined possible only a couple of years before.
    She gave him money and more ration coupons. Just handling the coupons, printed with the Nazis’ eagle holding a swastika in its claws, made her want to wash her hands. But she had to use them—she or her mother. If they didn’t, the family wouldn’t eat. It wouldn’t eat well any which way. Aryans couldn’t eat well under rationing, though they could keep body and soul together. Jews had trouble doing even that.
    He handed her her change. Some of the bronze and aluminum coins also bore the eagle and swastika. She liked the older ones, from the Weimar Republic, better. They didn’t make her wish she could be a traitor against the government, or at least that the country
—her
country, in spite of everything—had gone in a different direction.
    “Take care,” Isidor said as she turned to go. “Hope I see you again before too long.”
    “Sure,” Sarah said, and then wondered if she should have. She could see his reflection in the front window as she walked to