Having successfully evaded any real duty most of the day, Delgadillo queued up for supper with no small feeling of accomplishment. Food on the Rock was pretty good. Not the smallest reason was that much of it came from captured British supplies. The enemy had done his best to destroy what he could before Gibraltar fell, but the Spaniards took the place before he could ruin it all. Joaquin had heard that the Tommies scorned bully beef, but it beat the devil out of going empty.

Pride went before a fall. He got nabbed for kitchen police. Washing and drying and scrubbing weren't dangerous, but they weren't any fun, either. Pepe Rivera, the boss cook, was a top sergeant, and an evil-tempered son of a whore, too. No matter what Joaquin did, it wasn't good enough to suit him.

Delgadillo had just gone to bed when antiaircraft guns woke him up. He grabbed his helmet-a Spanish copy of the German model from the last war-and ran for the closest trench. "God damn the French to hell!" he said as he scrambled down into it.

"He will. He does," another soldier said. It wasn't the first time French bombers had crossed from Morocco to hit Gibraltar. They were only nuisance raids-nothing like the pounding the papers said the Germans were giving to London and Paris. But you could get killed in a nuisance raid, too, if you were careless or unlucky.

Bombs whistled down. They exploded, none of them especially close. The drone of aircraft engines overhead faded away. The antiaircraft guns kept hammering for another ten or fifteen minutes. Then they seemed satisfied and shut up.

"Gracias a Dios y su Madre," Joaquin said, climbing out of the trench. He yawned enormously. Maybe he could grab some sleep at last. OUT ON THE STREETS OF MUNSTER, away from any possible microphones, Sarah Goldman said, "I wish we'd get another letter." Even here, she named no names and gave no details. You never could tell who was listening. If people in Germany had learned anything since 1933, that was it.

Her mother nodded. "So do I. But we were lucky to get one, and Frau Breisach put herself in danger to bring it to us."

"I know. It was kind of her. Brave of her, too," Sarah said.

Propaganda posters sprouted like mold on walls and fences and tree trunks. Some showed jut-jawed, blue-eyed men in coal-scuttle helmets: recruiting posters for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Sarah didn't mind those so much. Germany was at war, after all. Father and Saul would have joined if the country had let them. In spite of everything, Saul had joined.

There'd been more Waffen-SS posters lately, especially since the coup against Hitler failed. Sarah didn't like that, but she didn't know what she could do about it. No. Actually, she did know. She couldn't do a thing.

Other posters showed hook-nosed, flabby-lipped Jews pulling the strings on puppets of Chamberlain and Daladier, or a capitalist Jew in a morning coat and top hat shaking hands with a Communist Jew in overalls and a flat cloth cap above a woman's corpse labeled GERMANY. Still others carried a stark, simple message: THE JEWS ARE OUR MISFORTUNE.

"Why do they hate us so much?" Sarah whispered. The poison made her want to hate herself.

"I only wish I knew," Mother answered. "Then maybe I could do something about it." She sighed. Her breath smoked. Spring was supposed to be on the way, but it hadn't got here yet. "Or maybe knowing wouldn't make any difference. Sometimes things just are what they are, that's all."

"That's what I was afraid of," Sarah said. "If it made sense, though…" She shook her head in frustration. "If it had to make sense, the goyim wouldn't do it."

"They might. Sometimes people don't care what they do." Mother paused, then added, "And look at the name you just called them. If you could, you'd do worse than call them names, wouldn't you?"

"I wouldn't start anything," Sarah said. "But after all they've done to us, shouldn't we get even if we can?"

"An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. And after a while everyone's blind and nobody has any teeth," Mother said sadly.

Laborers were still repairing British bomb damage and hauling away rubble one wheelbarrow at a time. The RAF wanted to make sure Germany had no eyes or teeth. Sarah had always thought of herself as a German, at least till the Nazis wouldn't let her any more, and the enemy bomber crews were trying to kill her, too. All the same, she wouldn't have shed a tear if one of their bombs blew up Hitler and Hess and Goebbels and Goring.

The laborers paused when Sarah and her mother went by. Sarah felt their eyes on her-and maybe on Mother, too. She tried to pretend the sweaty men in overalls weren't there: that was one more complication she didn't need.

And looking at them would have reminded her of Saul working in a gang just like this one…and of his shovel caving in the gang boss' skull. She wished she could forget she'd ever seen that. She wished she could forget she'd ever heard it, too.

"Hey, sweetheart!" one of the workmen called. He rocked his hips forward and back. His buddies laughed.

Sarah just kept walking. "They don't know we're Jews," she said in a low voice.

"A good thing, too. They'd be worse if they did," her mother answered. "I keep hearing they're going to make us put yellow stars on our clothes. Thank God it hasn't happened yet-that's all I can say."

"Like the ghetto in the old days." Sarah shivered.

"Not quite," Mother said. Sarah raised a questioning eyebrow. The older woman explained: "In the old days, they wouldn't have charged us ration points for the cloth we need to make the stars."

"Where did you hear that?" Sarah's heart sank. It had the ring of truth: exactly the kind of thing the Nazis, with their often maniacal drive for efficiency, would think of.

"I forget who told me. Maybe I don't want to remember." Mother's face twisted. "It sounds too much like something they'd do."

"I was thinking the same thing," Sarah said. "I was hoping you'd tell me I was crazy." She said verruckt, the proper German term. Back before the Nazis took over, or back at home even now, she would more likely have said meshuggeh. It was a friendlier, more comfortable word. But she didn't want to speak any Yiddish where Aryans might overhear.

Aryans! Her father had had several instructive things to say on that score. He tore Mein Kampfs claims to little pieces and then stomped on the pieces. He really knew what he was talking about, where the half-educated Hitler cobbled together bits and pieces from pamphlets and political tracts and lying, outdated books he'd read. Hitler reassembled them into his own mosaic, which had precious little connection to real history.

Samuel Goldman was scholar enough to know as much. He could prove it, citing chapter and verse. All of which, of course, did him no good whatever. He wasn't going to change the Nazis' minds. Knowing how much of the Party's antisemitism was built on lie atop lie only gave him a sour stomach and heart palpitations.

With an effort, Sarah dragged her mind away from Father's frustrations. She had plenty of her own to dwell on. The most immediate came out: "I hope we'll be able to get what we need. I hope we'll be able to get anything."

"Well, we haven't starved yet," Mother said, which was true but less than encouraging. With Jews able to shop only as things were about to close, and with their being unwelcome in so many shops anyhow, staying fed and clothed was even harder for them than for their German neighbors.

One clever Jew in Hamburg had given her family's ration coupons to a gentile friend, who used them to shop for her. The friend could have used the coupons for her own kin, but she hadn't done that. She'd played square-till someone betrayed them. The Jewish family got it in the neck for evading rationing regulations. And the gentiles got it in the neck for helping Jews.