Page 58 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

Anielewicz scowled at the posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski that stared down from every blank wall in the ghetto. Some of the posters were old and faded and peeling; others looked to have been put up yesterday. Rumkowski had run things here under the Nazis, and by all appearances was still running them under the Lizards. Mordechai wondered how exactly he’d managed that.

Friedrich noticed the posters, too. “Give that old bastard hair and a little mustache and he could be Hitler,” he remarked, glancing slyly over at Anielewicz. “How does that make you feel, Shmuel?”

Even now, surrounded by Jews, he didn’t leave off his baiting. Neither did Anielewicz. It wasn’t particularly vicious; it was the sort of teasing two workmen who favored rival football clubs might have exchanged. “Sick,” Mordechai answered. That was true, for before the war he’d never imagined the Jews could produce their own vest-pocket Hitlers. But he wouldn’t give Friedrich the pleasure of knowing he was irked, so he added, “Hitler’s a much uglier man.” As far as he was concerned, that was so both literally and metaphorically.

“Ah, rubbish,” Friedrich said, planting a playful elbow in his ribs. One of these days, the Nazi would do that once too often, and then something dramatic would happen. He hadn’t done it quite often enough for that, not yet.

Something dramatic happened anyhow. A Jew in a cloth cap and a long black coat stopped in the middle of Lutomierska Street and stared at Friedrich. The Jew had a wide, ugly scar across the right side of his face, as if a bullet had creased him there.

He walked up to Anielewicz, waggled a forefinger in front of his nose. “Are you a Jew?” he demanded in Yiddish.

“Yes, I’m a Jew,” Mordechai answered in the same language. He understood why the newcomer sounded a little uncertain. Even with the light brown beard on his cheeks, he looked more like a Pole than the swarthy, hook-nosed stereotype of a Jew.

“Youare a Jew!” The newcomer clapped a hand to his forehead, almost knocking the cap from his head. He pointed at Friedrich. “Do you know whom you’re walking with? Do you knowwhat you’re walking with?” His hand quivered.

“I know that if there’s a fire, the engine is going to come out of there and smash us flat as a couple oflatkes,” Anielewicz answered, nodding over toward the fire station in front of which they stood. The ghetto fire engine still had petrol. As far as he knew, it was the only vehicle in the Jewish quarter of Lodz that did. He gently took the Jew by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go over on the sidewalk.” He gathered in Friedrich with his eyes. “You come, too.”

“Where else would I go?” Friedrich said, his voice easy, amused. It was not an idle question. A lot of the young men on the street had rifles slung over their shoulders. If he ran, a shout of “Nazi!” would surely get him caught, and likely get him shot.

The Jew with the scarred cheek seemed ready to give that shout, too. His features working, he repeated, “Do you know what you’re walking with, you who say you are a Jew?”

“Yes, I know he’s a German,” Mordechai answered. “We were in a partisan band together. He may have been a Nazi soldier, but he’s a good fighting man. He’s given the Lizards many a kick in the arse.”

“With a German, you might be a friend. With a Nazi, even, you might be a friend,” the Jew answered. “The world is a strange place, that I should say such a thing. But with a murderer of his kind-” He spat at Friedrich’s feet.

“I said I was his comrade. I did not say I was his friend,” Anielewicz replied. The distinction sounded picayune even to him. He stared at Friedrich with a sudden, horrid suspicion. A lot of men in the partisan band had been reticent about just what they’d done before they joined it. He’d been reticent himself, when you got down to it. But a German could have some particularly good reasons for wanting to keep his mouth shut.

“His comrade.” Now the Jew spat between Mordechai’s feet. “Listen to me,comrade.” He freighted the word with the hate and scorn a Biblical prophet might have used. “My name is Pinchas Silberman. I am-I was-a greengrocer in Lipno. Unless you are from there, you would never have heard of it: it is a little town north of here. It had a few Jews-fifty, maybe, not a hundred. We got on well enough with our Polish neighbors.”

Silberman paused to glare at Friedrich. “One day, after the Germans conquered Poland, in came a-platoon, is that what you call it? — of a police battalion. They gathered us up, men and women and children-me, my Yetta, Aaron, Yossel, and little Golda-and they marched us into the woods. He, your precious comrade, he was one of them. I shall take his face to the grave with me.”

“Were you ever in Lipno?” Anielewicz asked Friedrich.

“I don’t know,” the German answered indifferently. “I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns.”

Silberman’s voice went shrill: “Hear the angel of death! ‘I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns,’ he says. No doubt he was, and left not a Jew alive behind him, except by accident. Me, I was an accident. He shot my wife, he shot my daughter in her arms, he shot my boys, and then he shot me. I had a great bloody head wound”-he brought a hand up to his face-“so he and the rest of the murderers must have thought I was dead along with my family, along with all the others. They went away. I got up and I walked to Plock, which is a bigger town not far from Lipno. I was half healed before the Germans emptied out Plock. They didn’t shoot everyone there. Some, the able-bodied, they shipped here to Lodz to work-to slave-for them. I was one of those. Now God is kind, and I can have my revenge.”

“Policebattalion?” Anielewicz stared at Friedrich with undisguised loathing. The German had always acted like a soldier. He’d fought as well as any soldier, and Anielewicz had assumed he’d been aWehrmacht man. That was bad enough, but he’d heard of and even known a few decentWehrmacht men even before the Lizards came. A lot of them were soldiers like any other country’s, just doing their jobs. But the men in the police battalions-

The most you could give them was that they didn’t always kill all the Jews in the towns and villages they visited. As Silberman had said, some they drafted into slave labor instead. And he’d fought beside Friedrich, slept beside him, shared food with him, escaped from the prison camp with him. He felt sick.

“What can you say for yourself?” he demanded. Because he’d done all those things with Friedrich-and because he was, in part, alive thanks to the German-he hesitated to shout for one of those armed Jews right away. He was willing, at least, to hear how the German defended himself.

Friedrich shrugged. “Shall I tell you I’m sorry? Would it do me any good?” He shrugged again; he hadn’t intended that second question to be taken seriously. After a moment, he went on, “I’m not particularly sorry. I did what my officers told me to do. They said you Jews were enemies of theReich and needed eliminating just like our other enemies. And so-” Yet another shrug.

Anielewicz had heard that same argument from Nazis the Jews had captured when they helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw. Before he could say anything, Pinchas Silberman hissed, “My Yetta, my boys, my baby-these were enemies? They were going to hurt you Nazi bastards?” He tried to spit in Friedrich’s face, but missed. The spittle slid slowly down the brick wall of the fire station.

“Answer him!” Anielewicz barked when Friedrich kept silent for a moment.

“Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!”Friedrich said, clicking his heels with exquisite irony. “You have me. You will do as you like with me, just as I did as I liked before. When England dropped bombs on us and blew up our women and children, they thought those women and children were enemies. And, before you start shouting at me, when we dropped bombs on the English, we did the same thing,ja. How does that make me any different from a bomber, except I did it retail with a rifle instead of wholesale with a bombing plane?”

“But the Jews you murdered had never done anything to you,” Mordechai said. He’d run into that peculiar German blind spot before, too. “Parts of Poland used to be Germany, and some of the Jews here fou

ght for the Kaiser in the last war. What kind of sense does it make to go slaughtering them now?”

“My officers said they were enemies. If I hadn’t treated them as enemies, who knows what would have happened to me?” Friedrich said. “And let me ask you another question, Shmuel-if you could make a giant omelet out of all the Lizards’ eggs, would you do it so they’d never trouble us again?”

“A Nazitzaddik we don’t need,” Silberman said. “Answer me this, Nazischmuck — what would you do if you found the man who’d killed your wife and children? What would you do if you found himand he didn’t even remember doing it?”

“I’d kill the motherfucker,” Friedrich answered. “But I’m just a Nazi bastard, so what the devil do I know?”

Silberman looked at Mordechai. “Out of his own mouth you heard it. He puts the noose around his neck-and if he didn’t, I would.”

Friedrich looked at him, too, as if to say,We fought together, and now you’re going to kill me? You already knew part of what I was a long time ago. How much were you pretending so we didn’t go for each other’s throats?

Anielewicz sighed. “Friedrich, I think we’d better go over to the Balut Market square.” The square didn’t hold the market alone; the administration offices for the Lodz ghetto were there, too. Some of the Jewish fighting men there would know Mordechai was not Shmuel, a simple partisan. With some of those who knew who he really was, that would work to his advantage. Others, though, might be inclined to reveal his true name to Chaim Rumkowski-or to the Lizards.

“So you’re going to tell them to hang me, too, eh?” Friedrich said.

“No,” Anielewicz said slowly. Pinchas Silberman let out an outraged howl. Ignoring it, Mordechai went on, “Silberman here will tell what you did before the Lizards came. I’ll tell what you’ve done since, or what I know of it. It should tilt the balance toward-”

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