“I am,” Matthew said after a moment. He’d been advised to use discretion when telling POWs he was German, for if he were captured himself, he could be executed by his captors for, ironically, being a deserter of the Germany army, not to mention a Jew.
The man raised his eyebrows. “How did you end up there, while I am here?” He gestured to his seat.
“I emigrated to America in 1938, after stormtroopers beat my father to death,” he answered shortly. A wave of sudden, unexpected rage rose up in him, threatening to engulf him, but Matthew forced it down.
The boy’s eyes widened. “You are Jewish?”
“Yes.” It was reckless, perhaps, to admit as much, but Matthew knew he couldn’t have kept himself from it. He wanted this man—this paltry, pathetic little tool of the Fuhrer, a tiny cog in the vast machinery of the Nazi party—to know who he was. What he was.
If he expected some sort of jibe or barbed retort, he did not get one. The man let out a defeated sigh as he flicked some ash from the tip of his cigarette. “What is it you wish to know?”
Matthew masked his surprise with a cool look. In his training, he’d learned the four methods of interrogation, from building rapport to playing on fear, and how to use each of them effectively to gain information from a prisoner, often without him even realizing he’d given it. This fatigued compliance was not something he’d ever expected. The instructors who had pretended to be prisoners during his training had surely never given it. Was it some sort of trick?
Matthew reached for a chair and sat down opposite the man. “What is it you wish to tell me?”
The man shrugged. “I don’t know how much I know. I’m just an Obersoldat. But I am tired of this damned war, and I want to go home. We’re going to lose anyway.” He drew deeply on his cigarette as he gazed at Matthew with a deadened defiance.
Matthew stared back evenly. The rage he’d felt a moment before had trickled away, replaced with a weary numbness. “What were you doing before you were captured?” he asked.
“I was laying mines along the road to Sainte-Mère-Église.”
Matthew kept his expression neutral as he asked in a diffident voice, as if it didn’t matter very much, “Would you be able to show me where they are?”
The man shrugged and dropped his cigarette. “If you like.”
Fifteen minutes later, pistol in hand, Matthew was following the soldier along the road, accompanied by a lieutenant and a private who walked along warily, rifles at the ready.
“Here,” the man said with a shrug, as he pointed out the place where a mine had been buried. “And here. And here. And here.”
By the time they returned to the village several hours later, over fifty mines had been discovered and, thanks to the help of the German Obersoldat, dismantled. Matthew felt a weird mix of exultation and fury; what might have happened if those mines hadn’t been dismantled? And the Obersoldat had seemed almost indifferent to it all, to the lives he had saved, or those that might have been lost. He just wanted the war to end, so he could go home.
“There’s another one for you, Lawson.” Matthew turned around at the sound of the voice, and then he nodded and headed back to the dusty bar with its broken chairs—and another German prisoner.
This one, he saw, was completely different to the first. He was sitting up straight in the chair, his military bearing evident, shoulders thrown back, chin poised at a haughty angle. Matthew took in the insignia on his uniform—he was a Wehrmacht Oberleutnant, with an impressive Knight’s Cross on his tunic, granted when fighting in the Afrika Korps. A seasoned soldier, then, who would not volunteer information when offered a cigarette.
As Matthew approached, the man’s eyes narrowed and his lips twisted in scorn, even though Matthew hadn’t said a word.
“Name?” he asked shortly, in German.
“Hahn, Dieter.”
“Rank?”
“Oberleutnant.” The single word rang out proudly.
“Serial number?”
The man gave it.
Matthew stood in front of him, surveying him coolly. He could not bring himself to act out the camaraderie he’d first intended on, and he felt instinctively Dieter Hahn would mock it, anyway. Instead, he relied on a silence that spun out several minutes until finally Hahn broke it.
“You are German.” It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yes, and a Jew.” Again he could not keep himself from saying it. He watched impassively as the man spat on the floor.
“You left,” Hahn stated, a sneer in the words.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Matthew didn’t know how it had become so personal so quickly; he knew it wasn’t meant to be. He and the other German-born Jews had been coached again and again not to make their interrogations emotional. They needed information, not justice.