“You know full well they run the camps in Germany,” Paul pointed out.
“Yeah,” she replied nonchalantly, trying to deflect his blunt observation.
“And they’ve taken over army and RAF barracks here…” he pressed on, hesitant to drum the point home. She sighed.
“Yes. I have thought about it.”
The SS, so rumour had it, arrived soon after the Wehrmacht’s inexorable advance and apparently acquisitioned the main Yorkshire army barracks at Catterick Camp, which could hold 40,000 people. The visions of barbed wire camps filled with emaciated internees in typhus-filled long-huts were at the forefront of everyone’s mind.
“Laying low, let’s call it… is better than potentially ending up in there. Potentially.”
She contemplated it quietly. Paul did not move a muscle.
“Underground… like a rat?” she said flatly. “Like the vermin they say we are?”
Paul’s reply was firm. “No. Like a wonderful, flawed human being the same as me or anyone else, but one who’s in danger and needs to be safe.”
The words felt awkward and clumsy on his lips, but he neither blushed nor stammered. She changed the subject; not out of embarrassment, flustered though she was – and had been for weeks – but to explain herself.
“I can’t, Paul. Besides, losing my employment might not even come as a result of ethnicity.”
He looked at her blankly, and she sighed.
“Have you ever noticed I’m a woman?”
“Yes, but I don’t think your parents would approve of me,” he quipped.
She mused inwardly that in times of stress, he seemed to revert to little wisecracks as a safety mechanism. In all fairness, it was an admirable attitude.
“With good reason. Anyway, I am. A woman. And Nazis don’t like women, not outside in the world doing man things… like working. They don’t want us doing anything ending in ‘ing’ – I’m sure they’d ban us from eating and fornicating if it weren’t for childbirth.”
“You can…” he began, but the joke died on his lips. As radically liberated as her humour and tastes were for a modern woman, even post-Pankhurst, the implications of her ethnicity were too serious to act the fool, as ludicrous as the Nazi definition of a ‘Jew’ was. Paul realised how naïve he would appear should he continue to make flippant jests, and he stifled his instincts. Taking advantage of his uncertainty, Naomi pressed home her point.
“Paul, you should know my job’s at risk anyway. Forget race. The woman’s place is at home, producing good Aryan children. Not so Aryan in my case, obviously…”
“That doesn’t matter. Fu… bugger the job – you’ll always teach. You’re born for it. But –”
She interjected, resuming her point: “–Have you seen what they want us to teach?”
He looked discomfited, but nodded.
“They want the Protocols taught as fact to the children of this country. They’ve been debunked by more journalists as a fraud than the Dreadnought Hoax, let alone scholars. Have you read them?”
He nodded again, a little hesitantly.
“Skim read, yeah.”
She laughed bleakly. “Illuminating, aren’t they?”
“Bollocks, is what they are.”
That was met by a small, sad shake of the head. “Who will say that in two years? Or five? Or ten?”
“Or never.”
Naomi’s head continued to gently shake. “If only that were true, Paul.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion detailed a plot of hegemony from Jewish financiers and shadowy power-players to seize global economic domination, supposedly leaked from a secret Zionist organisation at the turn of the century, and serving up such juicy apéritifs as the plans to poison the populace with pornography, destroy their religions and control the world’s press to perpetuate these aims. The texts ‘proved’ that the total global enslavement of gentiles was the aim of the mysterious, as-yet unnamed Jewish elders. Henry Ford published them far and wide across America, to undermine national opposition to the Nazi cause. In Germany, Hitler and Göring had decreed that the Protocols were a mandatory staple of school education since 1933. Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer adopted a different approach – referencing the sacrifice of children in ‘ritual murder’, and calling on other historical allegations made against the Jews – but Goebbels and the party ‘intellectuals’ more often than not took the Protocols and world hegemony theories as their licence to persecute; their warrant to wage war on the evil agentur forces of world Jewry and its scattered wanderers of the diaspora.
Naomi had referenced them impersonally, but now couldn’t restrain herself. Suddenly, the pent up aggression that was her natural response to the slanderous provocation of these documents came rushing out.
“They want me to teach our kids that my own blood is poisoning them and their lives.”
“I know, I know.”
“‘The Jew controls all media and economy, owns politics and creates all war, enslaves the Goyim with debt; the Jew poisons Christian civilisation and Aryan blood’ – how can I do this, Paul?”
“You can’t. Listen to me…”
He gripped her shoulders, keeping eye contact determinedly until she gave relented, with a short jerk of the head in acceptance.
“You need to lay low. We both know that eventually the Gestapo will tire of its arrest lists, or will run out of subversives to deal with. There’s only so many J.B Priestleys’ and Noel Cowards’ out there…” he searched her eyes for acquiescence, and saw a small semblance of acceptance. “And then, if they haven’t already, they’ll one day come to remove all the Jews, and the gays and communists and everyone else that caused Germany to lose the Great War and go bankrupt twice and rejected Hitler from the Viennese art gallery, and all t’ rest of it. Aye?”
She nodded, frowning slightly.
“Good,” he resumed. “Those Germans we see patrolling the city centre? Nothing. Wait for the Nazi police ruling openly. They’ll take away your jobs. And if they’ve taken your jobs, they’ll take your citizenship. And later, they’ll take you. And… assuming that all this is an aberration, that some good will eventually come out o’ this and the old world’s values don’t completely perish, there’s a future that still needs you.”
She was genuinely stunned into silence. Paul had always been good company and a fun friend, but to hear him now was like listening to a different person. But, she was her own woman. She couldn’t fold so quickly.
“You’re a good man, Paul.”
“Naomi–”
“But I’ve a feeling if you were the Jew you’d think differently.”
Usually, the younger man would have interjected with a joke about how the yarmulkes wouldn’t suit him, or that he could never abandon pork, but even he knew this certainly wasn’t the time or place. He opened and closed his mouth, like a goldfish. A lot of people were doing that, these days. Naomi continued.
“Every time they say the Jew is vermin, the Jew is a rat, and make things harder for us here the way it is over there, they’ll expect us to crawl. They’ll expect us to scurry and hide like rats. And if I do, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The kind that Hitler and the fat one and Goebbels love to make.”
“But Naomi –”
“I love you.”
She stopped in her tracks, alarmed. Where had that come from? Perhaps just to shut him up. But, she conceded, she was deeply touched by his concern, by the obvious and open fear for her wellbeing and the advice that only he – no other friends, or colleagues – had been able to actually say. There was something in the others’ eyes; a kind of fear, something indiscernible, or wariness. She couldn’t tell if some of the other teachers were afraid for her sake, or worried about being denounced for cosying up to the school’s own subversive pet parasite. But not Paul.
“That got your tongue,” she teased him, her tone deliberately breezy. “Seriously Paul, you’re a good man and I know you mean well. But I love my family, tea
ching, Leeds, you… even the kids! You think I should react to their hatred? They want me in a sewer. I can’t do anything other than continue on as a human being.”
He just stood, dumbfounded. Naomi realised she’d gone too far with the casual term of affection. Where had that come from? Where had that come from? The intent had been casual, its delivery less so; regardless, there was no use backpedalling and demeaning them both with a silly explanation. Still, though… there had never been so much of a hint of romance between them, she mused, attractive though he was. In the two years both had been at the school, after determining they were of similar age and both unmarried, they’d somehow adhered to an unspoken rule of never raising such topics beyond an occasional unobtrusive jest. Paul had never intruded on her privacy, insofar as probing for the otherwise negligible details of her life that she kept from him, in a refreshingly transparent and well-intentioned bond. For whatever reason, Naomi – Paul or no Paul – had simply never been highly sexed. She was remarkably undersexed for a humorous, vivacious young woman, particularly one so relentlessly eye-catching.
“I’m scared,” she admitted with some reluctance.
He found his voice. “I know.”
“I’m scared of what they’ll do to my old parents. I’m scared of what they’ll do to me…” she paused, ears pricking up at a slight noise in the stairwell, but it was only some far-flung vibration resonating from elsewhere in the great building. She resumed, “I’m scared they’ll set up some kind of city ghetto in Leeds like in Poland. I’m scared they’ll set camps up like in Germany. Yes, I’m scared.”
Paul tried his usual smirk, defying the gravity of the current situation in which the whole country was trapped. Hoping he could cheer her up; knowing, even as he spoke that it was a foolish misstep. “Relax. This is Leeds, the biggest city in Yorkshire and a northern hub. In Yorkshire, Jorvik. This is Viking land. We’re Leodensians, our lot are gonna be fine.”
Briefly, the ghost of a smirk flitted across her pouted lips and he hesitated, gauging her state of mind before plunging forwards:
“Anyway lass,” he boomed, “… cheer up. You’ll look more Saxon with some peroxide – even real Aryans in Germany use it. Bit o’ Schwarzkopf, even if schwarze is black – I reckon it’s a Jerry joke. Stick a picture of Göring on your desk; you can say you always loved pilots, even fat morphine addicted ones with a God-complex. Goose-step into class. Change your accent to sound less Heeb. Salute every copper. In the meantime let’s get you sorted with some false ID and rename you Helga. Throw your skull cap away. No circumcision to betray you – I assume, eh? Use some Barnsley dialect, tha knows, cocker… and buy a Bible. Ditch the Talmud. There’s tons of tricks, aye? They’ll never know…”
Paul’s babbling finally ground to a halt; his jaw bunched, cursing at his own verbally incontinent drivel as he gyrated slightly on the spot, his hands gesturing as he cheerily spewed a stream of nonsense quips at the poor, frightened girl, his friend who was at risk. Had the war done this to him? Made a fool of him, completely incapable of communicating properly with the person he felt most comfortable around, in her hour of need?
To his intense relief she chuckled, though it was noticeably with neither enthusiasm nor humour.
“They’ll know when I sacrifice an Aryan child after class. It’s been a while since I drank your pure Teutonic blood. What will the Elders say? I’m letting the tribe down.”
A deep wave of affection washed over him, recognising the valiance of her flimsy attempt to dignify, and even play up to his weak buffoonery.
Deciding to operate on instinct after the prior foolishness, Paul placed his hands back on her shoulders, resting a steady gaze on her again to confer earnestness, while fighting his body’s natural reflex to break away. Her eyes, even scared, were mesmerising. “Jokes aside, lass; I can protect you. Even if they stop your pay, I can… I could sustain us until the whole thing settles… we’ll work it out. It will be fine…”
It had been his turn to blurt something impulsively. He’d shown his youth before and had wanted to make amends with the serious solution, which he’d ad-libbed on the spot. It was the kind of decision that had been made – or not made – across Europe for seven years, with life-changing consequences for the people involved. But, while touched, Naomi was set on her path. Her decision had been reached.
“I’m scared, Paul, and I appreciate it. But –”
“–You think if they see the name ‘Rosenberg’ on a teachers list they won’t pay you a call? Think, lass.” Paul interjected in vain, attempting to dissuade her, yet even as he resorted to observing the painfully obvious, the young man could already sense her rejection. She was bloodyminded, which he found quite endearing, but in this context it worried him sick.
“Fear or not, lists or not, Paul,” Naomi replied gently, “I’m not a rat, and I’m not vermin. I won’t hide; under a bridge, in a wood, not even in your basement. I’m English, this is my country. The values we believe in protect the citizens of this country. If we hide, they really have won.”
Naomi squeezed her friend’s hand, briefly, before turning and strolling back down the steps with an affected confidence. There was no more she could say. Paul watched her legs, back, and then finally her head disappear from view, and buried his hot face in his hands, letting it boil against the skin of his palms for a while. For every one of the nineteen seconds it took her to reach the bottom floor and exit into the back foyer, she expected to hear his voice call out to her, or hear footsteps thumping on the floor behind her. There was only silence.
~
Violence lingered in the cold, thin air.
The deathly silence continued through Naomi’s lonesome journey home; first down past Hyde Park into the city centre as she breezed through the Headrow, where the cobbled roads rubbed smooth by the countless shoes, hooves and tyres of centuries sloped down to the Corn Exchange and the open markets. Millgarth Police Station, a hulking, ugly dark monstrosity was still operational, but everyone knew it was under German supervision and the few that had to use the city centre regularly gave the dark bricked building a wide berth, as though it was haunted. Naomi was sure that years from now, children would say it was.
The main Leeds market lay directly in its shadow, with a cavernous warehouse room and stalls that spilled out into the open square. The young teacher strolled through, as ever, but there was no fruit available, and no laughter. A lethargy hung in the air, as stall workers completely bereft of their spirit barely put forth an effort to attract the attentions of the few stragglers wandering aimlessly through the rows of quiet counters filled with second hand garments and tins of thick, cloying milk; a sustenance so viscous in its gelatinous dairy form that parents would layer it over bread with a spoon for their children to eat, wincing at its sickly sweetness.
Naomi, seeing the ‘bread milk’, wistfully remembered her mother, stingy with jam even prior to rationing. “Watch it with that jam,” she had always snapped. “Remember there’s other people in this ’ouse!”
She walked on, viewing the sparse food available with her rather limited collection of coupons.
Further on, trouble was brewing.
Two German soldiers were harassing a leathery faced little stall owner, who had the misfortune of being burdened with an inescapably large nose stuck in the middle of his rather tired, haggard face, weather-beaten by the potent combination of time, stress and alcohol. It was the kind of Talmudic nose that would escape attention only in the context of a Bar Mitzvah or a synagogue, and even then, Naomi suspected that few others would match him for length, girth and the pointedness of its wickedly hooked curve. Clean-shaven, pockmarked and small, the man had not been blessed with aesthetically pleasing looks, yet one attractive attribute that he did seem possessed of was courage. Despite his gaunt and wearied appearance, and the disadvantage he faced in every aspect of his confrontation, the little market man was determinedly defending himself.
“I don’t bloody ’ave ’em wi�
� me, a’right?” He chuntered crossly.
Utterly impassive, the two Germans shared a look, before returning their hostile stares to the stall man. The larger of the two, whose boulder-sized head sported cropped blond hair and pink skin, began cracking his knuckles menacingly. He looked like a gigantic wild pig, preparing to charge at some hapless creature in its way. A vicious, stupid creature that only moves forwards, and always attacks.
Naomi doubted he could fit through an average doorframe.
“Papers,” his smaller comrade purred; the soft, silky demeanour equally threatening.
“I’m tellin’ you,” the local snapped, “ah’ve left me papers at home! That’s t’ long and short of it. All right?”
The larger Wehrmacht patrol man laughed, falsely. “Ja, with that nose. OK, Moses. Prove it. Papers.”
His body language resembled a rabid dog straining at the leash. Visible tremors shook his body as the huge pig fought to stay calm. Incredibly, the bloodyminded little Yorkshireman did not seem to recognise the imminent threat he faced.
“I’m tellin’ you, they’re at home! And you know what, so what if I were’ bloody Jewish anyway! I’m a market boy, what do you bleedin’ care? Fucking idiots…”
Naomi winced. He’d gone too far. The German who had demanded his papers flinched visibly, as though the retort had affected him physically, though with predictable spite, he recovered quickly, reacting to the verbal scorn with physical aggression. The market boy had barely lowered his outstretched finger when the soldier ducked low and struck him hard in the stomach with a great fist; the piston-like attack from the big brute doubling the little man over, and he tottered dizzily for a brief moment before sinking to one knee, desperately gasping for air. It was a cruel blow from such a powerful specimen, delivered to a tiny stall boy who was barely five feet tall. Outraged by the ugly spectacle, several of the nearby stall sellers piped up.
“Oi! What are you doing that for, you bloody Boche twat!”
Jackboot Britain: The Alternate History - Hitler's Victory & The Nazi UK! Page 10