Striking the Balance

Mordechai Anielewicz had played a lot of cat-and-mouse games since the Nazis invaded Poland to open the Second World War. In every one of them, though, against the Germans, against the Lizards, against what Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski thought of as the legitimate Jewish administration of Lodz, playing the Germans and Lizards off against each other, he’d been the mouse, operating against larger, more powerful foes.

Now he was the cat, and finding he didn’t much care for the role. Somewhere out there, Otto Skorzeny was lurking. He didn’t know where. He didn’t know how much Skorzeny knew. He didn’t know what the SS man was planning. He didn’t like the feeling one bit.

“If you were Skorzeny, what would you do?” he asked Heinrich Jager. Jager was, after all, not only a German but a man who’d worked closely with the commando extraordinaire. Asking a German felt odd, anyhow. Intellectually, he knew Jager was no Jew-butcher. Emotionally…

The panzer colonel scratched his head, “If I were in charge instead of Skorzeny, I’d lie low till I knew enough to strike, then hit quick and hard.” He chuckled wryly. “But whether that’s what he’ll do, I couldn’t begin to tell you. He has his own way of getting things done. Sometimes I think he’s daft-till he brings it off.”

“Nobody’s set eyes on him since I did,” Anielewicz said, frowning. “He might have fallen off the face of the earth-though that’d be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it? Maybe be is lying low.”

“He can’t do that for too long, though,” Jager pointed out. “If he finds out where the bomb is, he’ll try to set it off. It’s late already, of course, and a major attack hinges on it. He won’t wait.”

“We’ve taken out the detonator,” Mordechai said. “It’s not in the bomb any more, though we can get it to the bomb in a hurry if we have to.”

Jager shrugged. “That shouldn’t matter. If Skorzeny didn’t bring another one, he’s a fool-and a fool he’s not. Besides which, he’s an engineer; he’d know how to install it.” An engineering student himself, Anielewicz grimaced. He wanted nothing in common with the SS man.

Ludmila Gorbunova asked, “Will he have men he can recruit here in Lodz, or is he all alone in this city?”

Anielewicz looked to Jager. Jager shrugged again. “This town was under the rule of theReich for some time before the Lizards came. Are there still Germans here?”

“From the days when it was Litzmannstadt, you mean?” Mordechai asked, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “No, after the Lizards came, we made most of the Aryan colonists pack up and go. The Poles did the same thing with them. And do you know what? We don’t miss the Germans a bit, either.”

Jager looked at him steadily. Anielewicz felt himself flushing. If any man alive was entitled to score points off a German soldier, he was.A German soldier, yes, but notthis German soldier. If it hadn’t been forthis German soldier, he wouldn’t be hereto score points. He had to remember that, no matter how hard it was.

“Not many Germans, eh?” Jager said matter-of-factly. “If any are left, Skorzeny will find them. And he’ll probably have connections among the Poles. They don’t like you Jews, either.”

Was he trying to score points, too? Mordechai couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, that didn’t make him wrong. Ludmila said, “But the Poles. If they help Skorzeny, they’ll be blowing themselves up, too.”

“You know that,” Jager said. “I know that. But the Poles don’t necessarily know it. If Skorzeny says, ‘Here, I have a big bomb hidden that will blow up all the Jews but not you,’ they’re liable to believe him.”

“He’s a good liar?” Anielewicz asked, trying to get more of a feel for his opponent than he could from the unending propaganda theReich pumped out about Skorzeny.

But Jager might have been part of Gobbels’ propaganda mill. “He’s good at everything that has to do with being a raider,” he answered with no trace of irony, then proceeded to give an example: “He went into Besancon, for instance, with a sack of ginger to bribe the Lizards, and he came out driving one of their panzers.”

“I do not believe this,” Ludmila said, before Anielewicz could. “I heard it reported on German shortwave wireless, but I do not believe it.”

“It’s true whether you believe it or not,” Jager said. “I was there. I saw his head sticking up out of the driver’s hatch. I didn’t believe he could do it, either, I thought he was going in there to commit suicide, nothing more. I was wrong. I have never underestimated him since.”

Anielewicz took that evaluation, which he found almost too depressing to contemplate, to Solomon Gruver and Bertha Fleishman. Gruver’s mouth turned down at the corners, making him look even gloomier than he usually did. “He can’t be that good,” the former sergeant said. “If he were that good, he’d be God, and he isn’t. He’s just a man.”

“We have to put our ears to the ground among the Poles,” Bertha said. “If anything is going on with them, we need to hear about it fast as we can.”