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Her sister shook her head. Her hair-straighter and a little lighter brown than Alicia's-flipped back and forth. "No. That would have been bad. What she did was even worse. She started going on about how we needed change and how good it was going to be. It was like she hadn't been talking about the other stuff at all. It was scary."
The bus came up then. Alicia and Francesca sat down together. Emma and Trudi sat on the seat in front of them so they could all keep talking. As the bus pulled away from the curb, Alicia said, "Didn't anybody ask her about that?"
"Werner Krupke did," Francesca answered. "She looked at him like he was something you had to scoop out of the cat box, and she didn't say a thing. Nobody asked any more questions after that."
"I wonder why," Alicia said. Trudi snorted.
Emma said, "Boy, I'm glad I never had the Beast."
Alicia was glad she'd never had Frau Koch, too. How could you call yourself a teacher if what you said on Wednesday didn't count on Thursday? The Beast probably still believed what she'd said before. You didn't say those things if you didn't believe them. When "Enough Is Enough" came out, she must have thought it was safe to say them out loud. How scared was she when she found out she was wrong? Plenty, I hope, Alicia thought.
Trudi had to wiggle past Emma to get out at her stop. "See you tomorrow," she called as she went up the aisle, down the rubber-matted steps, and out the door.
A few stops later, Emma got out with all three Gimpel girls-Roxane had been chattering with a couple of her friends toward the back of the bus. She'd got to the stop after Francesca, and hadn't even noticed how mad she was. Now she did. When she asked why, Francesca started ranting all over again.
"That doesn't sound very good," Roxane said when she could get a word in edgewise, which took a while.
"What does your teacher say about all this stuff?" Alicia asked her.
"She's said the Fuhrer is making some changes in how things work, and they'll probably work better once everything's done," Roxane answered. That seemed sensible enough. And Roxane was only in the first grade. What more did she need to know?
"Has she said anything about 'Enough Is Enough'?" Francesca asked.
"She says that all the time-whenever we're too noisy." Roxane spoke with a certain amount of pride. If she wasn't one of the first-graders who made a lot of the noise, Alicia would have been surprised. But she'd plainly never heard of Dr. Jahnke's article.
Emma waved good-bye to the Gimpel girls when she came to her house. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane walked on. Alicia said, "Maybe getting caught like this will make the Beast pull her horns in."
Francesca gave her a look. "Fat chance!" She was probably right. People like Frau Koch were the way they were, and that was all there was to it. The Beast wasn't about to change her mind or the way she acted. Alicia wouldn't have wanted to be Werner Krupke, who'd called her on her inconsistency. She'd likely make his life miserable for the rest of the school year.
"Home!" Roxane said with a theatrical sigh as they came to the front door.
Mommy let them in. Francesca told her horrible story for the third time. She'd no doubt tell it all over again when Daddy got home, too. Mommy never turned a hair. What was going on inside her? Did she feel the sting because her own daughter didn't know what she was? Of course she did. She had to…didn't she?
When Francesca was done, Mommy said, "The Beast sounds like she's living up to her name, all right. But you've only got her for this school year, and then you'll be done with her forever. And when you have children of your own, you can say, 'You think your teacher's mean? You should hear about the one I had. She was so bad, everybody called her the Beast.'"
Alicia smiled. Francesca didn't. She said, "That doesn't do me any good now!"
"Well, would cookies and milk do you some good now?" Mommy asked. Francesca nodded eagerly. Alicia and Roxane didn't complain, either-not a bit.
Susa
She poured a knock of Glenfiddich over ice and turned on the televisor. That wasn't Horst Witzleben's face that appeared on the screen. It was Charlie Lynton's. The head of the British Union of Fascists spoke good, if accented, German. He was saying, "-intend here to bring the democratic principles of the first edition into effect as soon as possible. Most seats in the next Parliamentary elections will be contested. I particularly admire the Fuhrer for looking on this course with favor, and for recognizing that he need not yield to the forces of reaction."
His image disappeared. Horst's replaced it. "Along with the Scandinavian leaders, Great Britain stands foursquare behind the Greater German Reich 's revitalization effort," the newscaster said. "We'll be back in a moment."
The picture cut away to an obviously German farm family somewhere in the conquered East-probably on the broad plains of the Ukraine. The advertisement was for Agfa color film. The smiling father took pictures of his wife and children. Relatives in a crowded German apartment admired them when they came in the mail. That not only promoted the film, it also urged Germans to go out and colonize. The Propaganda Ministry didn't miss a trick. Susa
Another advertisement followed, this one for Volkswagens. They still looked buggy, as they had for more than seventy years. But the lines were smoother, more rounded, now. The engine had moved to the front, the trunk to the rear. The engine was water-cooled these days, and didn't sound flatulent. The bumpers were actually good for something besides decoration. The VW still had a bud vase on the dashboard, though.
Horst Witzleben returned. "In St. Wenceslas Square in Prague, several hundred persons gathered near the statue of the saint to protest the incorporation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia into the Reich, " he said.
St. Wenceslas' equestrian statue was surrounded by figures of other Bohemian saints. Counting the large base, the statue stood seven or eight times as high as a man. It dwarfed the men and women at its base and the signs they carried. Some of those signs were in German. They said things like FREEDOM FOR THE CZECHS! and WE REMEMBER! Others, in Czech, presumably said the same thing.
And some of the demonstrators carried flags: the blue, white, and red ba
"Because the protest was peaceful and orderly, no arrests were made," Horst Witzleben said, and he went on to a different story. He spoke as if that had been standard practice in the Third Reich from the begi
A fat official pontificated about improvements to the harbor in Hamburg. Susa