Tilting the Balance

No wonder they give their Jews a hard time, he thought with a sudden burst of insight: they’re sure they can beat the Jews After losing so many wars to their neighbors, having in their midst people they could trounce had to feel sweet. That didn’t make him love the people who had driven his parents from Poland, but it did help him understand them.

Goldfarb looked around again. Almost everywhere in England, he’d been able to see hills on the horizon. Here, it went on forever. The endless flat terrain made him feel insignificant and at the same time conspicuous, as if he were a fly crawling across a big china platter.

The green of Polish fields was different from what he’d known in England, too: duller somehow. Maybe it was the light, maybe the soil; whatever it was, he’d noticed it almost at once.

He’d noticed the workers in those fields, too. Englishmen who labored on the land were farmers. The Poles were inarguably peasants. He had trouble defining the difference but, as with the colors of the fields, it was unmistakable. Maybe part of it lay in the way the Polish farmers went about their work. By the standards Goldfarb was used to, they might as well have been moving in slow motion. Their attitude seemed to say that how hard they worked didn’t matter-they weren’t going to realize much from their labors, anyway.

A noise in the sky, like an angry cockchafer… Goldfarb had heard that noise more times than he cared to remember, and his reaction to it was instinctive: he threw himself flat. Hugging the ground, a flight of German bombers roared by, heading east.

Ju-88s, Goldfarb thought, identifying them by sound and shape as automatically as he would have told his father from an uncle. He was used to praying for fighters and antiaircraft guns to blow German bombers out of the sky. Now he found himself wishing them luck. That felt strange, wrong; the world had taken a lot of strange turns since the Lizards came.

He got to his feet and peered south. Smoke smudged the horizon there, the first mark he’d seen. That ought to be Lodz, he thought. A little farther and he could start doing the job the British high command had, in their wisdom, decided he was right for.

Cloth cap, black jacket and wool trousers-they all shouted I am a Jew! He wondered why Hitler had bothered adding yellow stars to the getup; they struck him as hardly necessary. Even his underwear was different from what he’d worn in England, and chafed him in strange places.

He had to look like a Jew. He spoke Yiddish, but his Polish was fragmentary and mostly foul. In England, even before he went into uniform, he’d dressed and sounded like everyone else. Here in Poland, he felt isolated from a large majority of the people around him. “Get used to it,” he muttered. “Most places, Jews don’t fit in.”

An ornate brass signpost said, LODZ, 5KM. Fastened above it was an angular wooden sign with angular black letters on a white background: LITZMANNSTADT, 5KM. Just seeing that sign pointing like an arrow at the heart of Lodz set Goldfarb’s teeth on edge. Typical German arrogance, to slap a new name on the town once they’d conquered it.

He wondered if the Lizards called it something altogether different.

A little more than an hour brought him into the outskirts of Lodz. He’d been told the town had fallen to the Nazis almost undamaged. It wasn’t undamaged now. The briefings he’d read on the submarine said the Germans had put up a hell of a scrap before the Lizards drove them out of town, and that they’d lobbed occasional rockets or flying bombs (the briefings weren’t very clear about which) at it ever since.

Most of the people in the outer part of the city were Poles. If any German settlers remained from Lodz’s brief spell as Litzmannstadt, they were lying low. Sneers from the Poles were bad enough. He didn’t know what he would have done with Germans gaping at him. All at once, he regretted hoping the German bombers had a good mission. Then he got angry at himself for that regret. The Germans might not be much in the way of human beings, but against the Lizards they and England were on the same side.

He walked on down Lagiewnicka Street toward the ghetto. The wall the Nazis had built was still partly intact, although in the street itself it had been knocked down to allow traffic once more. As soon as he set foot on the Jewish side, he decided that while the Germans and England might be on the same side, the Germans and he would never be.

The smell and the crowding hit him twin sledgehammer blows. He’d lived his whole life with plumbing that worked. He’d never reckoned that a mitzvah, a blessing, but it was. The brown reek of sewage (or rather, slops), garbage, and unwashed humanity made him wish he could turn off his nose.