What could you do if you'd lived by reason your whole life long but reason suddenly didn't count any more? Could you do anything at all, or were you just supposed to lie down and die?

That was what the Nazis wanted German Jews to do. That the Nazis wanted it was the best reason not to do it, as far as Sarah was concerned. She wished her family had got out of Germany while escape was still possible. But her father clung too fiercely to his Germanness to see the need. He could see it now. Easy enough, when it was too late.

Instead of explaining how he knew, Saul said, "Maybe the British will send planes over tonight."

"How can you sound so cheerful about it?" Sarah asked him. "They're liable to blow us up." With Jews having to shelter in their homes, enemy bombers were more likely to blow them up than anybody else.

Her brother only shrugged again. "They haven't yet. And the more Nazis they send to the Devil, the better I'll like it. If I had a gun…"

"Saul," Samuel Goldman said sharply. "That will be enough of that."

"Should I turn the other cheek?" Saul retorted. "I don't see what for. I'm no Christian. They keep reminding me of that, in case I'm not smart enough to figure it out for myself."

"They're no Christians, either," Father said. "Pagans. Barbarians." He looked disgusted. "And they're proud of it, too." A Roman noble talking about wandering Ostrogoths could have packed no more scorn into his voice.

He would have silenced Sarah. Saul still felt like locking horns. "What about the German Christians?" he said. "Their preachers wear Nazi uniforms. Even the Catholics have swastikas in their churches. The students at their universities give the Nazi salute." His right arm shot out.

"They can call themselves whatever they want. The name is not the thing," Father insisted. "Trying to make you believe it is-that's only one more lie."

"Maybe so," Saul said. "But we both tried to join the Wehrmacht anyway, didn't we? And if they'd only let us, we'd be braying 'Heil Hitler!' like all the other donkeys in the Reich, wouldn't we?"

Samuel Goldman opened his mouth, then closed it again. At last, he said, "I have no answer for that, because we would. If they'd let us be Germans, Germans we would have been. Since they make us into something else…" He left the table sooner than he might have.

No one else had much to say after that, either.

British bombers didn't visit Munster. They didn't drop anything close by, either. Especially in nighttime quiet, the sound of bombs going off carried a long, long way.

Saul went off to work early the next morning. Father looked lost, bewildered. He had nothing to do-nothing that would yield a Reichsmark, anyway. He started to fill his pipe, then thought better of it. The tobacco ration was miserably small. What he got smelled like burning overshoes, too.

Sarah went out shopping with her mother. When she was small, she remembered, she'd really enjoyed that. When she was small, they could walk into any shop in Munster and buy whatever they wanted. Shopkeepers fawned on them, as they fawned on any other customers.

Everything changed after the Nazis took over. Brownshirts stuck big signs-GERMANS! DON'T BUY FROM JEWS!-on the windows of Jewish-owned stores. And Jews were no longer welcome in shops run by Aryans. Some of the German shopkeepers seemed embarrassed about it. They did what they had to do to get along, no more. Others, though…Others gloated. Those were the scary ones.

Only a handful of shops Jews could go into were left now. The war'd just made things worse-not only for Jews, but for everybody. And the British air raids added to the burden of fear. The people across the street-Aryans-never stopped complaining about how their favorite bakery was gone. "Like someone yanked a tooth. It's not there any more," Frau Breisach would grumble.

She didn't know when she was well off. Of course she doesn't-she's an Aryan, Sarah thought. The one bakery in Munster that Jews could still use was way over on the far side of town. It wasn't open very often, and didn't have much when it was. But when the choice lay between not much and nothing at all…you went over to the far side of town.

They had a little wire basket with wheels. Sarah pulled it along behind her. It felt like nothing now. On the way back, it would be heavier. She hoped it would, anyhow. Sometimes the bakery didn't open, or it was sold out, or…I won't think about any of that, Sarah told herself fiercely.

A gang of laborers was repairing a bomb crater in the middle of the street. And there was Saul, as deft with a shovel as Father was with Greek irregular verbs. He turned the Nazi slogan on its head: he drew joy through strength.

The gang overseer was a wizened little man in his forties. The left sleeve of his shirt was pinned-up and empty. Maimed in the war, Sarah thought. Maimed in the last war, she amended. How many would get maimed in this one? Too many-that seemed sure.

Maimed or not, he carried a swagger stick in his right hand. He also had a foul mouth, and didn't care if women heard him use it. "Work harder, you lazy prick!" he yelled, and lightly swatted a laborer on the behind.

"Ja, ja," the fellow muttered, and went on working the same way he had before.

That didn't make the overseer any happier. "And you, too, you fucking kike!" he bellowed. When he hit Saul in the back with the swagger stick, it was no tap. The whack echoed like a gunshot. Sarah thought it would have knocked her over.

It barely staggered her big brother. Saul Goldman responded with what had to be instinct, as he might have on the soccer pitch. He'd been hit. He had a weapon in his hands. He used it. The flat of the shovel blade crashed into the side of the overseer's head.

The man went down as if he'd stopped an artillery shell. His skull was all caved in and bloody. Sarah and her mother let out identical shrieks of horror-anyone could see that the overseer would never get up again.

Saul stared at the man he'd killed. He stared at his mother and his sister-all that in maybe a second and a half. Then he threw down the gore-spattered shovel. It clattered on the cobbles. He turned and ran as if a million demons were at his heels.

"After him!" one of the other laborers shouted. Chasing a Jew was more fun than fixing a bomb crater any day of the week. The gang pounded after Saul, some of them still brandishing their spades.

Sarah and her mother looked at each other, each mirroring the other's anguish. As if on cue, they both burst into tears. A FRENCH PRIVATE FIRST CLASS wore a little brown hash mark on his sleeve to distinguish him from an ordinary private. Luc Harcourt was less than delighted when the indestructible Sergeant Demange told him he'd been promoted. "I'd've had more fun getting the clap," he said.

Demange's Gitane twitched as he chuckled. "Think of it as congratulations for living this long," he said.

Luc did. Suddenly, being a private first class looked a lot better. He said so, adding, "After all the shit I've gone through to get this, I'll be a general by the time the war finally ends."

"France is in trouble, yes. I hope to Christ France isn't in that much trouble," Demange said.

"Kiss my ass," Luc said. The sergeant only laughed. Luc had earned the right to swear at him. He did remember that he had to pick his spots with care.

"Anyway, sew that stupid thing on," Sergeant Demange told him. "You could be leading a squad at five minutes' notice. Hell, a couple of lucky German shell bursts and you could be leading a platoon."

He wasn't kidding. Luc had seen how fast casualties could chew a unit to pieces. He and Demange were two of not very many men who'd been with the company since before the German blow fell on the Low Countries. The rest were replacements, or replacements of replacements, or sometimes…