The Children's War (195 page)

“Maybe a sex scandal. Top aide’s daughter, depraved acts, blah, blah, blah.”

“Your daughter?” Peter blanched.

Ryszard tilted his head at Peter. “She makes her own decisions,” he stated calmly.

“So what do you plan to do once you achieve that vaunted position?” Peter asked as he recovered his composure.

“I’ll be able to push forward some initiatives: cultural rights—”

“Initiatives?” Peter sputtered.

“—autonomy for various nationalities, maybe national assemblies with limited
democratic representation. Abolish the camps, reform the penal code, introduce wages, and eventually outlaw slavery—”

“Eventually!”

“—enact education reforms, restructure the economy—”

“What about compensation for our suffering? What about all the murders?”

“—privatize industry, open up foreign policy, ease censorship—”

“What about justice? After all these years!”

Ryszard interrupted his list. “Too divisive.”

“What about restoring our independence?”

“Impossible, at least in the near term. The complete scattering of peoples around the Continent would lead to mayhem if we tried to divide things along nationalistic lines. Millions would have to be relocated, land confiscated, nationalities assigned to people without one. It’s a recipe for disaster. There’s going to have to be some sort of united Europe.”

“You mean all mixed into one happy pan-European family?” Peter scoffed.

“Do you see any other way?” Ryszard asked calmly. “I’ve studied the demographics. If we start drawing lines on the map, we are guaranteeing border wars and civil wars and genocide.”

“And the lingua franca?”

“German. What else? If there is a sufficient concentration of speakers for another tongue, then that region can be bilingual.”

“So in your scheme, they win. It’s that simple—a European Union under German hegemony.”

“Why not? All of North America speaks the language of one tiny, foggy, backwater island.”

“That was done voluntarily—”

“Yes, so the American Indians say.”

“—whereas everything we have here is based on force,” Peter argued, ignoring Ryszard’s interjection, “and it must not be allowed to continue!”

“I’m dealing with reality, my dear brother-in-law. You can construct whatever fantasy world you want, but the truth is they have had more than half a century to leave their mark on this continent, and if we try to go back to the way things were, we’re asking for slaughter on a massive scale.”

“So you’re saying Joanna and Andrzej died for nothing?” Peter asked bitterly.

“Of course they died for nothing! I don’t believe in causes which cost children their lives! Do
you
think there was meaning in their deaths? Do you?”

Affronted by Ryszard’s patronizing tone, Peter responded darkly, “I want this regime toppled.”

Ryszard blew a stream of smoke into the air, then eyed his brother-in-law meaningfully. “Ah, yes, and
you
have been so effective in
your
efforts,” he sneered.

Annoyed by the truth in Ryszard’s words, Peter chose to ignore them. “What you’re suggesting—we could have had better than that by dealing with Hitler in ’39 without a war!”

“Yes, without a war
which we lost.”

“So what you want is National Socialism with a human face,” Peter sneered.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Ryszard replied, unruffled.

“What about the revolution?” Peter asked, exasperated.

“We can’t afford such romantic nonsense. The system must be dismantled slowly, not overthrown—otherwise there’d be a power vacuum and a hundred, no, a thousand different groups vying for control.”

“I think you enjoy being in this hierarchy and you don’t want to dismantle it! You’re power mad.”

“And you’re bloodthirsty. Do you want to change things for the better or do you just want revenge?”

Peter almost blurted
Revenge!
but then thought better of it. “Maybe,” he answered carefully, “meting out justice is not inconsistent with establishing a just society.”

“Do it on your own time. Once we’re in a position to change things, we can’t afford to lose the support of mainstream society.”

“You mean the bastards who destroyed Europe in the first place.”

“The criminals of that era are mostly dead. The children raised with this system cannot know what they are doing. What would you do, punish an entire population?”

Peter thought of Teresa. Was she guilty by birth? That was all too familiar a concept. “We could be selective.”

“Assuming we’re omnipotent and have nothing better to do with our time, yes. Otherwise, it’s unrealistic and the alternative to a peaceful transition is civil war. Do you want a bloodbath?”

Peter fell silent. He felt rather perturbed because he had recognized something about himself in Ryszard’s questions. He was no longer driven by the need for a just society, and indeed, if the Nazi leadership confessed its sins and righted its wrongs, that would no longer be enough: he wanted to see them hang. Peaceful evolution was not sufficient, the revolution had become a goal in and of itself. The righting of injustices, the restructuring of society, all took a backseat to his deep-seated need for vengeance, and when he closed his eyes and imagined the changes that would be wrought in the future, he no longer saw peace and prosperity and freedom, he saw Joanna’s murderers swinging from gallows, he saw his tormentors on their knees begging in vain for mercy, he saw Berlin as leveled as Warsaw had been. He saw revenge.

“Just imagine that you get the world you want,” Ryszard spoke into Peter’s thoughts. “What do you think the economy would look like?”

Resenting the patronizing tone, Peter responded too quickly, “Who gives a fuck about economies?”

“Grow up!” Ryszard snarled. “Economic chaos means starvation and riots! You’re asking for death and destruction as your idea of justice. Look at the numbers and think!”

“What are the current numbers?” Peter asked quietly.

“One hundred fifty million German or Germanic citizens. Of those, about two million are in prison or concentration camps and have been stripped of their citizenship.”

Peter nodded, repeating, “Two million.”

“Thirty or so million non-Germans who have obtained full Reich citizenship. Altogether, that’s roughly one hundred eighty million people who have a vested interest in the current status quo and who would be the possible victims of any revolutionary terror. Then there are about eighty million subjects without citizenship. These are people who are governed by the Basic Law and the Minimum Guarantee of Rights. Of that number, about fifty million are in untied, paid employment and would have questionable loyalty to any revolution. The other thirty are in tied jobs. They receive minimal salaries and housing but must remain with their employer unless given permission to move. Even they would have a reason to fear abrupt change.”

“And the rest?” Peter asked. “How many natural allies do we have?”

“There are about thirty million people in forced labor. About sixteen million of these are in conscription with a finite service length. The remaining fourteen million are either in indefinite or permanent forced labor. Eight million of those are living in camps, prisons, and industrial barracks and are completely cut off from the outside world. Of the remaining
Zwangsarbeiter,
about five million work in shops, restaurants, and other small businesses. The remaining million are in domestic employment, mostly in and around Berlin.”

“Only a million?” The number did not match intuitively with Peter’s own experience, but then he had been a resident of a wealthy and politically connected suburb. “Didn’t the number used to be much higher?”

“Yes, in the forties it was, and the promise was that every German hausfrau, no matter how lowly, would one day own a servant, but that proved to be unworkable, and the Labor Ministry pulled back on the numbers.”

“Why was it unworkable? Was there unrest?”

“No. Not unrest, fraternization,” Ryszard explained. “You wouldn’t believe the number of conspiracies between German women who wanted to skip the joy of eight pregnancies and the servant women who wanted to keep their babies. Even without sham adoptions and faked births, they found there were problems with children raised to speak fluent German. Once you get rid of the language differences, our people are indistinguishable.”

Peter’s thoughts turned to Josef and his wife, and he wondered if they were together with their child. He remembered Josef ’s vehement denial of paternity, Martin’s sly look. “But that has always been true in Europe. What makes things different now?” Peter wondered aloud.

Ryszard shrugged. “I would guess, in the past, the strong combination of religion, malnutrition, and ignorance kept the lower orders in their place. Now, well, we still use malnutrition, but we’re very weak at utilizing religion properly, the
lower stratum is being educated by the Undergrounds, and . . .” He rubbed his chin as he thought.

“America,” Peter suggested. “It’s a thorn in their ideological side.”

Ryszard nodded. “Yes. Proof positive that the mob can rule.”

“So they cut back on domestic help.”

“Yes, particularly women. You and your ilk are a genuine status symbol, held only by the most politically trustworthy. And even then . . .” Ryszard opened his hands, indicating his unwillingness to refer to Peter’s affair with Elspeth.

“All right, so you think we’re too mixed and confused to disentangle.”

“Not only that, but the people with the greatest interest in revolution are those who have been brutalized for so long that we have no way of knowing how they would react to freedom. One could guess though that their vengeance could be terrible and not particularly well directed. Do you want that for Magdalena?”

Peter rubbed his forehead trying to erase the image of his innocent daughter being thrown onto a pyre of vengeance. “What do you suggest?”

“Clearly we need to restructure the system and establish some openness. Maybe when that’s done, we can oversee letting the system gently collapse into a multinational Europe, but whatever we do, we can’t afford a violent overthrow of everything. It’s the only system we have and the alternative would be chaos!”

“You’re assuming cooperation on the part of every revolutionary. That’s a lot to ask.” Could Peter pass his erstwhile torturers in the street day in and day out? Could they work side by side in some office in the interests of peace and prosperity?

“Yes, it’s a lot to ask, but we’ll cross that bridge if we get to it. I’m hoping, at that time, that you’ll speak out as a voice of reason. With your experiences, your words could carry a lot of weight.”

Peter’s eyes strayed across the room to the woman and the burly man. He had his arm draped around her waist and they were intimately close, both drinking. “Fine. I’ll do you a deal. You help me take the information directly to Szaflary, and later, I’ll be your voice of reason. I’ll say whatever you want.”

“That was a rather quick change of heart,” Ryszard noted suspiciously.

“Do we have a deal?”

“You have become rather usurious, haven’t you?”