Striking the Balance

“A lot of partisans are Jews,” Mordechai said. The easy approach wasn’t going to work. Bluntly, then: “There are still a lot of Jews in Lodz, too, in the ghetto you Nazis set up so you could starve us to death and work us to death and generally slaughter us. If theWehrmacht goes into Lodz, the SS follows twenty minutes later. The second we see an SS man, we all go over to the Lizards again. We don’t want them conquering you, but we want you conquering us even less.”

“Colonel, why don’t I take this mangy Jew and send him on his way with a good kick in the ass?” the younger man-Gunther-said.

“Corporal Grillparzer, when I want your suggestions, be sure I shall ask for them,” Jager said in a voice colder than the snow all around. When he turned back toward Mordechai, his face was troubled. He knew about some of the things the Germans had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands, knew and did not approve. That made him an unusualWehrmacht man, and made Anielewicz glad he was the German on the other side of the parley. Still, he had to look out for the affairs of his own side: “You ask us to throw away a move that would bring us advantages. Such a thing is hard to justify.”

“What I’m telling you is that you would lose as much as you gain,” Mordechai answered. “You get intelligence from us about what the Lizards are doing. With Nazis in Lodz, the Lizards would get intelligence from us about you. We got to know you too well. We know what you did to us. We do sabotage back of the Lizards’ lines, too. Instead, we’d be raiding and sniping at you.”

“Kikes,” Gunther Grillparzer muttered under his breath. “Shit, all we gotta do is turn the Poles loose on ’em, and that takes care of that.”

Jager started to bawl out his corporal, but Anielewicz held up a hand. “It’s not that simple any more. Back when the war just started, we didn’t have any guns and we weren’t much good at using them, anyhow. It’s not like that now. We’ve got more guns than the Poles do, and we’ve stopped being shy about shooting when somebody shoots at us. We can hurt you.”

“There’s some truth in this-I’ve seen as much,” Jager said. “But I think we can take Lodz, and it would make immediate military sense for us to do just that. The place is a Lizard forward base, after all. How am I supposed to justify bypassing it?”

“What’s that expression the English have? Penny wise and pound foolish? That’s what you’d be if you started your games with the Jews again,” Mordechai answered. “You need us working with you, not against you. Didn’t you take enough of a propaganda beating when the whole world found out what you were doing here in Poland?”

“Less than you’d think,” Jager said, the ice in his voice now aimed at Anielewicz. “A lot of the people who heard about it didn’t believe it.”

Anielewicz bit his lip. He knew how true that was. “Do you suppose they didn’t believe it because they didn’t trust the Lizards to tell the truth or because they didn’t think human beings could be so vile?”

That made Gunther Grillparzer mutter again, and made the sentry who’d brought Mordechai into camp shift hisGewehr 98 so the muzzle more nearly pointed toward the Jew. Heinrich Jager sighed. “Probably both,” he said, and Mordechai respected his honesty. “But the whys here don’t much matter. The whats do. If we bypass Lodz north and south, say, and the Lizards slice up into one of our columns from out of the city, theFuhrer would not be very happy with that.” He rolled his eyes to give some idea of how much understatement he was using.

The only thing Adolf Hitler could do to make Anielewicz happy would be to drop dead, and to do that properly he would have had to manage it before 1939. Nevertheless, he understood what Jager was saying. “If you bypass Lodz to north and south, Colonel, I’ll make sure the Lizards can’t mount a serious attack on you from the city.”

“You’ll make sure?” Jager said. “You can still do so much?”

“I think so,” Anielewicz answered.I hope so. “Colonel, I’m not going to talk about you owing me one.” Of course, by saying he wasn’t going to talk about it, he’d just talked about it. “I will say, though, that I delivered then and I think I can deliver now. Can you?”

“I don’t know,” the German answered. He looked down at the pot of stew, dug out a mess kit and spoon, and ladled some into it. Instead of eating, he passed the little aluminum tub to Mordechai. “Your people fed me then. I can feed you now.” After a moment, he added, “The meat is partridge. We bagged a couple this morning.”

Anielewicz hesitated, then dug in. Meat, kasha or maybe barley, carrots, onions-it stuck to the ribs. When he was done, he gave the mess kit and spoon back to Jager, who cleaned them in the snow and then took his own share.