The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Zigeuner ^{HARRY TURTLEDOVE}

Hauptsturmführer Joseph Stieglitz looked up into the gloomy gray late-October sky. Drizzle speckled the lenses of the SS officer’s steel-framed spectacles. It wasn’t really raining, but it also wasn’t really not raining. Muttering, he pulled a handkerchief from the right front pocket of his Feldgrau trousers and got his glasses as clean as he could.

He peered across the town square, then nodded to himself. Yes, the Kübelwagens and the trucks were ready. Everything here in Zalaegerszeg seemed peaceful enough. Yes, the town lay in Hungary, but on the west side of the Platten-See (on Magyar maps, it was Lake Balaton). Off in the eastern part of the country, the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS and the Hungarian Honvéd were fighting thunderous panzer battles to try to halt or at least slow the onrushing Red Army.

Better not to dwell on that too much. Better to hope the Germans could use their now-shorter supply lines to advantage. Better to hope the Honvéd would fight hard now that it was defending its homeland. Better to hope Ferenc Szalasi and his Arrow Cross Fascists would make the Honvéd fight harder than Admiral Horthy had. Horthy the trimmer, Horthy the traitor, Horthy who’d tried to fix up a separate peace with Russia till the Führer got wind of it and overthrew him before he could make it stick.

Because if you did dwell on that, if you looked at where the Red Army was and at how far it had come since the start of summer, what could you do but realize the war was lost? Like almost all German officers in the autumn of 1944, Joseph Stieglitz made the effort of will he needed not to realize that.

He walked across the square toward the transport he’d laid on. The hobnailed soles of his jackboots clicked on the cobbles. The drizzle was turning the stones slippery; he planted his feet with care so he wouldn’t take a tumble. As long as he kept his head down, the patent-leather brim of his cap protected his glasses well enough.

Some of the men in the Kübelwagens wore German Feldgrau like Stieglitz. Others were in Hungarian khaki. Despite the brown Stahlhelms on their heads, they were militiamen, not real soldiers; their Arrow Cross armbands showed as much. The truck drivers were also Hungarians. Hauptsturmführer Stieglitz shrugged. For this operation, he probably wouldn’t need anything more.

His driver was an Unterscharführer named Klaus Pirckheimer. The junior noncom waved as Stieglitz came up. “We’re all ready, sir,” he said. “Let’s go clean those bastards out.”

“Sounds good to me.” Stieglitz slid into the right front bucket seat.

Pirckheimer started the engine. As he did so, the bells of the Catholic church on the square chimed the hour: ten in the morning. The Hauptsturmführer had gone into the church to admire its eighteenth-century frescoes. Though no Catholic himself, he appreciated fine art wherever he found it. He was, and worked at being, a man of Kultur.

The road leading south had been blacktopped but not recently. Some of the potholes the Kübelwagen hit seemed big enough to swallow the utility vehicle. But it kept going. It didn’t have four-wheel drive like an American jeep, but was surprisingly nimble even traveling cross-country.

“Don’t miss the turnoff, Klaus,” Stieglitz said. “We want the right-hand fork, remember.”

“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Somehow, in Pirckheimer’s mouth, a simple Yes, sir! sounded more like Why don’t you shut up and leave me alone?

He did find the fork—just in time, with a hard right turn, to keep from driving past it. The rest of the column followed his lead. No sign marked the road’s branching. Maybe there had been one before the war drew near, and the local authorities took it down to give invaders a harder time navigating. More likely, the turnoff never was important enough to mark.

A couple of kilometers past the turnoff, maybe ten kilometers out of Zalaegerszeg, lay the village of Nagylengyel. Though it too boasted a Catholic church, it couldn’t have held more than three or four hundred people. Two grannies were selling beans and grapes at a little roadside market. An old man hawked sausages on a folding table and had a half-grown pig on a rope tied to one of the table legs. Business looked slow.

“We’re getting close, hey, Herr Hauptsturmführer?” Pirckheimer said.

“Well, I hope so,” Joseph Stieglitz replied. “The Zigeuner encampment was reported to be three kilometers south of Nagylengyel. SS headquarters in Szombathely got the word a couple of days ago. They didn’t waste any of their precious time telling me about it till last night, of course.”

“Of course,” the driver agreed. Stieglitz was an officer, but officers and enlisted men united in sneering at the headquarters oafs who didn’t bother to let them know what was going on. Pirckheimer went on, “Gotta be better than even money the rats have found a new hole between then and now.”

“If they have, we’ll find them,” Stieglitz said, shrugging. “If we don’t find them today, we’ll find them tomorrow. If we don’t find them tomorrow, somebody else will next week.”

“And then they’ll get what’s coming to the, the stinking Untermenschen,” Pirckheimer said.

“Ja,” the Hauptsturmführer agreed, though he preferred not to think about that too much. His job was rounding up the Zigeuner and arranging for them to be transported. What happened after they got where they were going to… That was none of his business. The fewer questions you asked about such things, the less you officially knew, the better off you were. But there had been almost a million Zigeuner in Europe when the war started. If any were there when fighting finally stopped, it wouldn’t be for lack of effort.

The Kübelwagen rounded one more corner. Klaus Pirckheimer let out a happy little yip. “They are still here! Too dumb even to run, looks like.”

Another Zigeuner encampment, as filthy and disorderly as all the rest. Six or eight wagons that looked as if they’d been designed and possibly built in the seventeenth century sat on the grass by the side of the road. The donkeys that pulled them when they were on the move grazed one here, one there, one somewhere else. The sorry beasts were scrawny and tiny: hardly bigger than large dogs. To give comparison, a couple of big, toothy, plainly mean dogs prowled among them and started barking as the vehicles neared.

A motley assortment of tents sheltered the Zigeuner from the elements. By the faded paintings on its canvas, one had come from a traveling circus a long time ago. Another… The Hauptsturmführer’s mouth twisted. It was assembled from no doubt stolen German shelter halves. Zigeuner produced next to nothing for themselves, but they were first-rate thieves.

“Pull past them and stop,” Stieglitz said.

“I’ll do it, sir,” his driver replied, and did. The other Kübelwagens and the trucks halted behind the first.

SS men and Arrow Cross militiamen hopped out of the vehicles. The Germans carried Schmeissers or captured Russian PPDs. The submachine guns weren’t worth much out past a couple of hundred meters, but they made dandy intimidators at close range. The Hungarians had Mausers and pistols.

Stieglitz himself wore a Walther P-38 on his belt but didn’t unholster it yet. Instead, he cupped both hands in front of his mouth and bellowed, “Alle Zigeuner raus!” For good measure, he added, “Sofort!” Right away!

Out they came: swarthy, sharp-nosed, feral-looking men and women in shabby clothes, some of the women’s outfits ornamented with incongruously bright embroidery. They all wore the brown triangle, point down, required of their kind; they didn’t break the law in such small ways.

A skinny, gray-mustached fellow who looked like a pimp down on his luck spoke to the others in the gibberish the Zigeuner used among themselves. Their dark, frightened eyes went back and forth from Stieglitz to him.

The leader of the pack, the Hauptsturmführer thought. He pointed at the man. “Du! Sprichst du Deutsch?” He used the familiar pronoun, as he would have with children or servants or anyone else with whom he didn’t have to bother staying polite.

Only a string of that incomprehensible lingo came back at him. Stieglitz rolled his eyes. He could have just taken out the pistol and pointed with it. That probably would have worked. But the Zigeuner might have panicked if he gave orders with the barrel of a gun. They were liable to have a shotgun or two in the tents or in their wagons. If a hothead grabbed one, he might hurt somebody before he could be disposed of.

So Stieglitz turned to the Hungarian lieutenant who headed up the militiamen. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” With the Hungarian, who was on his side, he used the formal pronoun.

But the man spread his hands and shook his head. He answered in Hungarian. That did the Hauptsturmführer as little good as the nonsense the Zigeuner spouted.

He eyed the rest of the Hungarians. The armed militiamen were all young, like their officer. One of the truck drivers, though, had graying hair and the beginnings of a wattle under his chin. He was bound to to be close to fifty. Stieglitz walked over to him. “How about you?” he asked. “Do you speak German?”

“Military German,” the said. Stieglitz nodded; that was what he’d hoped for. German had been the language of command in the Austro-Hungarian army during the last war. Basic words got drilled into soldiers of all nationalities. Then the Magyar unbent enough to go on: “Maybe more than military German. We had a division from the Kaiser’s army on our left for a while in the Carpathians, and we got friendly with them. I think it was the one your Führer served in.”

“Ach, so.” Joseph Stieglitz nodded. “It could be.” He knew the Führer had fought against the Russians in World War I. Everybody knew that. It was where he’d acquired his rancorous hatred for the Zigeuner. They’d stolen horses and boots and telegraph wire from his outfit, and cost it casualties it wouldn’t have taken if they hadn’t prowled around. Now he was taking his revenge on them, as he had on so many others.

Which Austro-Hungarian division had served on the German unit’s flank, Stieglitz couldn’t have said. That didn’t much matter, though.

“Translate for me, will you?” he said to the truck driver. “They may act like they don’t speak German, but I doon’t think they can pretend they don’t know any Hungarian.”

“I’ll do it, Herr Major,” the driver replied. He could read German shoulder straps, anyway. Stieglitz’s SS rank was equivalent to major in the Wehrmacht.

“Danke schön,” Stieglitz said. “Tell them we’re going to put them in the trucks and transport them up to Zalaegerszeg.”

He waited for the veteran to translate that. As soon as the man did, the old villain who led this band of Zigeuner let loose with his own torrent of Hungarian. “He says, ‘What will you do with us there?’” the truck driver reported.

Stieglitz suspected the chieftain said some other things as well, but that would do for now. “We’ll put you on a train with others of their folk,” the Hauptsturmführer said. “We’ll take you to resettlement camps in Poland, far away from the fighting. You’ll be well housed there, and well fed.”

The driver duly translated. The chieftain said, “But we like it where we are now just fine. We don’t want to be resettled.”

“It’s a matter of military necessity,” Stieglitz said, trying not to meet the Zigeuner’s dark and piercing gaze. He told the old bandit what his superiors instructed him to say whenever he rounded up a band of these subhumans. Maybe it was true; maybe it wasn’t. Poking into that wasn’t good for your career. If you poked too hard, it wasn’t good for your own safety.

“Why is it military necessity for us to get shipped away and not for the Hungarians?” the chieftain asked after he got that turned into a language he could follow.

“Because the Hungarians are allies of the Reich,” Stieglitz answered. “We trust their loyalty.” We do now, with Horthy out and Szalasi in. Szalasi has no more use for Zigeuner than the Führer does.

“It doesn’t matter whether we’re loyal or not,” the old man insisted. “We want nothing to do with this cursed war.” He spewed out more of his own jargon. The rest of the Zigeuner bobbed their heads up and down in unison to show they wanted nothing to do with it, either.

“I’m sorry, but it’s not as simple as you make it out to be. That’s why I have my orders, and why I’ll carry them out.” Joseph Stieglitz let the truck driver translate that, then continued, “Besides, it’s for your own safety. Some Zigeuner bands have stolen from German supplies. Some have spied and scouted for the Red Army. You can guess what happened to them after that.”

“We would never do any such wicked things! By the Mother of God, I swear it!” The chieftain made the sign of the cross. After he told his chicken thieves and slatterns and brats why he did it, they crossed themselves, too.

The SS officer was not a Christian. The SS discouraged religious observances of any kind. He strongly doubted the Zigeuner were Christians, either. They were for themselves, first, last, and always. Cockroaches and rats with—almost—human faces, he thought, curling his lip in distaste.

“Look, tell him I didn’t come here to argue with him,” he said to the Hungarian truck driver. “Tell him I came here to relocate his band. I’ll do that peacefully if I can. If I can’t, I’ll do it anyway. He won’t like that so much. Make sure he understands how much he won’t like it.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll do it, sir.” The driver could have sounded no more obedient if he were a German. By the way he pointed at the submachine guns and rifles the SS men and Arrow Cross militiamen carried, he was making the point with gestures as well as with his jabbering.

Stieglitz watched the air leak out of the Zigeuner chieftain as he weighed his chances and found them bad. He deflated still more when he tried to choose between bad and worse. He didn’t realize even yet that none of his choices was merely bad; they were all worse. The Hauptsturmführer didn’t aim to enlighten him on that score. Soon enough, he’d find out for himself.

His lined, tanned face a mask of bitterness, he said something in his own lingo. A couple of the younger Zigeuner men started to gabble out protests. As the truck driver had before him, the chieftain pointed to the weapons the Germans and Hungarians held at the ready. He spoke again. Stieglitz didn’t need to know what the words meant to get the drift. What can we do? They’ll murder us right here if we give them grief.

He was right. The young bucks in the band could see it, too. They might not like it, but they could see it. They subsided.

Wearily, the mustachioed villain switched back to Magyar. “He says he and his people will go to the train with you, sir,” the truck driver told Stieglitz. “He says he relies on your honor as a German officer that everything will work out the way you told him it would.”

“Mein Ehre heisst Treue.” Joseph Stieglitz quoted the SS motto—my honor is loyalty. And it was. He was loyal unto death to the Führer. He was just as loyal to the Reichsführer-SS, the commander-in-chief of the Black Corps. To an unwashed old Zigeuner? That might be a different story.

By the look in the old man’s eye, he suspected it was. Untermensch or not, he was nobody’s fool. But when all your cards were bad, how many brains you had didn’t win you even a pfennig.

“Tell him to tell his followers”—Stieglitz wouldn’t call them people—”they can go back to the wagons and tents and take whatever they can carry in their hands. Tell them to get into the trucks then. And make sure you tell them that if anyone tries to jump out of a truck and run, it’s the last stupid mistake he’ll ever make.”

“I’ll take care of it, sir.” The Hungarian turned that into his own language. The Zigeuner chieftain translated the translation. How long had this band lived in Hungary? Generations, by the look of things. Were there still some of these petty bandits who knew no Magyar? Evidently there were, though Stieglitz had trouble believing it. He shook his head. They were aliens. They didn’t belong here. They didn’t belong anywhere. The Führer was dead right about that. He usually was right.

“Come on,” Stieglitz said sharply. “Let’s get moving. We’ve wasted enough time here already.” He noticed a couple of the Arrow Cross militiamen nodding before the driver translated. So they followed more German than they let on, did they? Somehow, the Hauptsturmführer found himself unsurprised. Hungary was like that. It remained Germany’s ally, but nothing could make the Magyars enthusiastic about the struggle against subhumans and Bolshevism.

The Zigeuner went off to snag their movable property. They came back with coats and trousers and blankets and pots and pans. Stieglitz suspected they’d taken the chance to stash rings and chains and coins and bills where they wouldn’t be so easy to find. He also suspected that would do them less good than they hoped.

One little girl cradled an ugly puppy in her arms. By the smiles she gave it, it wasn’t ugly in her eyes. The Arrow Cross lieutenant sent Stieglitz a questioning glance. Stieglitz shrugged an answer. If carrying the dog kept the girl quiet, she was welcome to it as far as he was concerned.

The chieftain walked over to Stieglitz and the truck driver. His shirt looked lumpy. What all had he stashed under there? “Please, your Excellency,” he said, “but what about our donkeys? What about our watchdogs?”

“I’m sorry, but they have to stay,” Stieglitz replied. “The people in Nagylengyel will tend to them, I’m sure.”

The people in Nagylengyel would shoot the dogs (Stieglitz was glad his men hadn’t had to shoot any themselves) and either work the donkeys to death or butcher them for their meat. By the old Zigeuner’s narrowed eyes and tight lips, he knew it as well as Stieglitz did. But he also knew he couldn’t do anything about it. He turned his head to the side before spitting on the grass. “It will be as it must be,” he said. “Everything will be as it must be.”

That was true. It couldn’t very well help being true. Stieglitz figured the scrawny Zigeuner couldn’t tell the truth any other way.

“Everyone have everything you can take?” the Hauptsturmführer asked loudly. Also loudly, the truck driver turned his words into Hungarian. Stieglitz went on, “All right—into the trucks, then. We’ll take you back to Zalaegerszeg.”

Into the backs of the Opels they went. Men helped women climb up and hoisted children in. No one raised a fuss. Part of that was the Zigeuner’s hopelessness of resisting the firepower the SS men and Arrow Cross militiamen had. And part of it, Joseph Stieglitz judged, was the fatalism of their kind, a fatalism spawned in ancient days far beyond the borders of Europe.

Stieglitz went back to the men he led. “We’ll put Kübelwagens between trucks on the way up to Zalaegerszeg,” he told them. “If anybody tries to jump out and run for it, you’ll finish off the damn fool, right?” He waited for the driver to render that into Hungarian for the benefit of the Arrow Cross militiamen, then continued, “You fellows behind the wheel, look into your rearview mirrors every now and then. If the Zigeuner try to overpower a driver and hijack the truck, they won’t get away with it.”

As he got into his Kübelwagen’s front passenger seat, Klaus Pirckheimer hopped in on the other side. “Been easy so far, Herr Hauptsturmführer,” Pirckheimer said as he fired up the sturdy little utility vehicle. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

“Yes,” Stieglitz agreed laconically. “Let’s.”

And it did stay easy all the way back to Zalaegerszeg. No Zigeuner sprang out and tried to dash for the roadside bushes. The Untermenschen didn’t try coshing the Hungarian truck drivers. They didn’t send any of their prettier women to seduce the drivers away from their duty, either. Fatalism, Stieglitz thought again.

Yes, everything was fine as long as the convoy stayed on the road. It all went sideways when the trucks and Kübelwagens came into town and made for the railroad station to unload the Zigeuner onto the waiting train. But traffic around the station had gone to the devil.

Another train, this one completely unexpected (at least as far as Joseph Stieglitz was concerned), had come into Zalaegerszeg while he was out on the roundup. The new arrival was full of Wehrmacht troops bound for eastern Hungary and the fight against the Red Army. But the driver of the train that would haul the Zigeuner up into Poland had refused to clear the track to let the German soldiers head for the front.

That left the major in charge of the held-up regiment hopping mad. Seeing they weren’t going anywhere right away, some of his men had got off to rubberneck or grab something to eat or a glass of beer. The major took out his fury on Stieglitz. “I’ll be hours herding everybody back into place!” he shouted. “Some of these bastards will find a way to get left behind, too—see if they don’t. Gott im Himmel! How are we supposed to win the war if we can’t get to where we need to be when we need to be there?”

“I’m very sorry, my dear fellow.” Stieglitz’s tone gave his words the lie. “I must remind you, though, that SS transports have priority over all other rail traffic. That includes troop movements. So the train driver’s done the right thing. We might have made other arrangements if anybody in Szombathely telephoned or wired to tell us you were on the way. But no one did. And so…” He shrugged.

The Wehrmacht major exhaled angrily. “We’re fighting the Russians, you know.”

“We’re fighting the Zigeuner, too. I presume you have read the Führer’s book and all he has to say about them?” Stieglitz’s voice, silky with menace, presumed no such thing. But he’d gone all the way through the hefty volume—gone through it two or three times, in fact. He knew exactly what it said about enemies of the Reich.

“They’re less likely to shoot us or blow us up than the Red Army is.” But the Wehrmacht officer knew he was fighting a losing battle here. He threw his hands in the air. “All right. All right, dammit! Would your most gracious Majesty please be kind enough to let me know when my men can proceed to their little tea party with the Ivans?”

Had Joseph Stieglitz been a vindictive man, he could have made the younger major pay for that. But he wasn’t. He was just a fellow trying to do the job his superiors had given him. “I’m not trying to hold you up,” he said—fighting the Russians, after all, was its own punishment. “We’re all in the same struggle, you know.”

“Yes, and the way things are going right now, we’re all losing it.” The Wehrmacht major had to be either a fine soldier or a hell of a lucky man. No ordinary jerk could have won the rank he had without learning how to put a governor on his tongue. Shaking his head, he clumped away.

Stieglitz let him go. It wasn’t that he was wrong, only that he was impolitic. The Hauptsturmführer went back to his own command. “Let’s get them onto the train,” he said. “The sooner they’re on, the sooner they’re gone, the sooner the soldiers can head east.”

The Wehrmacht major seemed eager to get into the fight against the Red Army. How many of the troops he led shared his eagerness? Not so very many, not if Stieglitz was any judge. German soldiers commonly wanted to avoid the Eastern Front, not to go there. But, these days, not so many got what they wanted. And the Eastern Front was coming to them.

Pretty soon, we won’t be fighting the Russians in Hungary and Poland. We’ll be fighting them in Germany. As he always did when that thought floated to the surface of his mind, Stieglitz shoved it under again. However many times he tried to drown it, though, it kept popping up.

The transport train sat waiting, a thin plume of steam and smoke rising from the stack. All the cars behind the locomotive and its tender were cattle cars. Some already had their doors barred and secured. Others were ready for more Zigeuner.

When the band Stieglitz had rounded up came out of the trucks, their chieftain took a long look at the train. Arrow Cross militiamen opened one of the cattle cars and grinned in mocking invitation as they waved the Zigeuner towards it. Instead of climbing in, the chieftain ambled over to Stieglitz. “So much for your honor,” he said in pretty good German.

That didn’t altogether astonish the Hauptsturmführer. “We all do what we’re required to do,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” With immense dignity, the old man walked to the cattle car and climbed in. The rest of the band followed him. As they had with the trucks, men helped women and children board. The dark little girl with the puppy hesitated for a moment in front of the cattle car. Then she put the dog down on the gravel. It didn’t want to leave. She drew back her leg and kicked it in the ribs. It ran off, yipping in pain and shock. The girl clambered into the car without help from anyone.

She’d made the right choice. If the dog went with her, it had no future at all. Now someone in Zalaegerszeg might give it a home. Or if nobody did, it might eke out a living by guile and theft, the way the Zigeuner had for so many centuries.

Not for much longer, though, Stieglitz thought. The Führer had ordered Europe purified of Zigeuner and Bolsheviks and homosexuals and other such riffraff. The Bolsheviks had an unfortunate tendency to shoot back. The others, though… The others were sand in the tide of history, and the tide was going out.

As soon as the last short-pants boy went into the cattle car, the Hauptsturmführer gestured sharply at the Arrow Cross militiamen standing in front of the door. They slid it shut. The bar slammed down into the steel L that secured it. Chains and padlocks made sure no one would defeat it from the inside.

Stieglitz walked up to the locomotive. The engine driver was swigging from a bottle of slivovitz or vodka. When he spotted Stieglitz, he quickly made the bottle disappear. Stieglitz wouldn’t have called him on it. He’d seen the like plenty of times. Some people needed numbing before they could do what they were required to do.

“They’re here. They’re loaded and secured. You can take them away,” Stieglitz said.

“Zu Befehl, mein Herr.” The engine driver didn’t sound thick. When you had enough practice, you didn’t get sloppy drunk the way someone new to the sauce would. You didn’t show it. You soaked up the hooch and went on about your business.

The whistle screamed, once, twice, three times. The world needed to know the train was leaving the station. Smoke belched from the locomotive’s stack. The drive wheels began to turn, ponderously slow at first but then faster and faster. Away went the train. Away went the Zigeuner. Except through tiny spaces between the planks of the cattle car, they wouldn’t see daylight again till they got to Poland. After they got there, they probably wouldn’t see it for long.

With the cork that had plugged his way east gone, the Wehrmacht major started chivvying his men back to the troop train. No, they weren’t so eager to go as he was to get them going. Junior officers and noncoms gave the regimental CO what help they could.

So did the chaplains. In their purple-piped frock coats, they stood out from the soldiers. They weren’t supposed to carry weapons, but the Lutheran minister wore a holstered pistol on his hip. The world was a rougher, crueler place than the striped-pants gentlemen who made rules like that could imagine.

When one of the chaplains turned and happened to catch his eye, Stieglitz waved to him. He would have had trouble saying why. Maybe the way the little Zigeuner girl put down her puppy was still on his mind. Maybe it was that the chaplain followed the faith the Hauptsturmführer’d been raised in. Maybe it was all of that. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing.

Whatever it was, the Feldrabbiner walked up to Stieglitz. Where his Catholic and Protestant counterparts wore two different versions of the cross on a chain around their necks, he had a Star of David. Another one replaced a cross on his officer’s cap. Unique among German servicemen, he was allowed to have a beard.

“Something I can do for you?” he asked, his voice friendly, his accent Bavarian.

“I don’t even know.” Joseph Stieglitz wished he’d kept his damn hand at his side. “Those Zigeuner—” he started, and then broke off. He didn’t know what he wanted to say. He didn’t know if he wanted to say anything.

“That’s a hard business, all right.” The Feldrabbiner studied him with shrewd eyes. “You’ll tell me if I’m wrong, but I’d say you also come from a family of Germans of the Mosaic faith.”

That also invited Stieglitz back into something he’d invited himself out of long before he joined the SS. It was nothing he much wanted to return to. Nevertheless, he couldn’t bring himself to lie. “Well, what if I am?” he said harshly.

“If you are, Herr Hauptsturmführer, I suggest you do what I do every day,” the Feldrabbiner said. “Count your blessings.”

“Excuse me?” Stieglitz said, in lieu of something like That’s fine for a clergyman, but not for an SS officer.

The Feldrabbiner understood him whether he said it out loud or not. “Count your blessings,” the man repeated. “Some Englishman is supposed to have said, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I often think that when I see Zigeuner getting on those trains.”

Stieglitz wished he hadn’t waved to the Feldrabbiner. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” he aid, and began to turn away.

But the man with the frock coat and the Star of David didn’t let him escape so easily. “When you’re a Jew, when you remember you’re a Jew, you also have to remember such things can happen to you, too.”

“Oh, Quatsch!” Stieglitz said.

“It isn’t rubbish,” the Feldrabbiner insisted. “Plenty of people don’t like us. Let’s not mince words. Plenty of people hate us. If the Führer hadn’t seen what the Zigeuner were like when he fought in the east during the last war, if he hadn’t already despised the Russians and seen how they mistreated the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian provinces they overran… Herr Hauptsturmführer, you might have boarded that train yourself instead of putting them on it.”

“You are a man of the cloth. I make allowances for that. But if you say one more word along those lines, I will give you to the Sicherheitsdienst,” Stieglitz said, his voice colder than any blizzard on the Eatern Front. “I am a good German, and whatever religion my grandparents held has nothing to do with it. I follow the Führer’s orders the way any other good German would. Since you wear the uniform, mein Herr, you had better do the same.”

If he hadn’t put the fear of God in the Feldrabbiner, he had put the beard of the SD in him. That would do. The man gulped. He licked his lips. “I mean nothing by it, of course,” he said quickly. “Just, uh, thinking on how things might have been.” He showed far more alarm than the wicked old Zigeuner chieftain had.

“Of course.” Stieglitz freighted the words with all the scorn he could. When he turned this time, the Feldrabbiner didn’t bother him. He walked away, grubbing in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes.