Free The War That Came Early: The Big Switch by Harry Turtledove Page A

from a blue sky, it was still bitterly cold. Sarah couldn’t remember a winter that had dug its claws in deeper or clung to Germany, to all of Europe, harder. Neither could Father, who’d spent three winters in the trenches during the last war. That he was a wounded, decorated veteran made things a little easier for the Goldmans than they were for most German Jews. Not much, but a little. When you weren’t in such good shape, you took what you could get.
    Naturally, the Jews went into the city hall by a side entrance. If that line had snaked up the stairs to the main doorway, Jews might have—gasp!—inconvenienced Aryans. In the Third
Reich
, what could be worse? Nothing either Sarah or Nazi officials could think of.
    Portraits of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and other Nazi
Bonzen
hung on the walls of the hallway along which the Jews had to go. Maybe it was Sarah’s imagination, but the photographs seemed to be glowering at the Chosen People. Maybe it was her imagination, but she didn’t think so.
    When she whispered her thought to Father, he snorted softly and whispered back: “Chosen People, nothing. We’re the Singled-Out People, is what we are.”
    “Yes!” Sarah exclaimed. The phrase fit much too well. God had singled out the Jews all those years ago, and now the Nazis were doing it instead.Didn’t that mean the Nazis had assumed the mantle of divinity? If you asked them, they would tell you yes.
    Along with the National Socialists’ icons hung portraits of the local Party leaders, men nobody outside of Münster would recognize. They looked just as peevish as the Nazi big shots who ordered much of Europe around from Berlin. Maybe they were less ambitious, maybe only less lucky. Some of them seemed quite ready to start telling Czechs and Danes and Dutchmen what to do.
    Down the hallway swept a strange apparition: the Bishop of Münster, in full ecclesiastical regalia: a uniform far older and, to Sarah’s eyes, far more impressive than the quasi-military garb that so delighted the Nazis. He stopped and asked one of the Jews, “What are you poor, unhappy people doing here?”
    The man explained. Even speaking politely to a Jew could land someone in trouble. But Clemens August von Galen was already in trouble with the authorities for having the nerve to complain about the way they tried to rein in the Catholic Church in Germany. If they wanted to toss him into a concentration camp, they didn’t need to blame him for being friendly to Jews.
    He rolled his eyes now at the answer he got. “This is a disgrace,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice. “They aren’t content with harassing you every other way they can think of? Now they have to rob you of your names, too?”
    No one was brave enough to reply to him after that. Nazi functionaries clumped up and down the corridor in their shiny jackboots. Anything a Jew said would be noted and held against him.
    “Disgraceful,” the Bishop of Münster said again. Robes swirling around him, he strode away. Sarah was far from the only Jew who stared admiringly after him. You couldn’t get in trouble for just looking. She didn’t think you could, anyhow.
    Her father leaned close and whispered in her ear: “If a few hundred important people had spoken up like that when things were starting out, none of this
Schweinerei
would have happened. None of it
could
have happened.”
    “But they didn’t,” Sarah answered.
    “I know,” said Samuel Goldman—former professor of ancient history and classics, now a road-gang laborer. No wonder he sounded bleak. Things
were
bleak for the Jews of Münster, as they were for Jews all over Germany.
    Typewriters clattered up ahead as clerks made out the new identity cards. In due course, the Goldmans reached the front of the line. They duly surrendered their old cards. The new blanks, Sarah saw, had JEW printed on them in much bigger letters than the old ones had used.
    “For all official purposes, you are now Moses Samuel