“Hiding him,” Virgil said.
“Or they got Jurgen a new identity, birth certificate, and 4F card. He might even have something working he thinks is fun, while he’s teaching Otto to speak American. Jurgen told me one time the Escape Committee, the hard-ass Nazis that run the camp inside, wanted him to study blowing up an ammunition dump they heard about, out in the country south of McAlester. Jurgen telling me about it shows what he thought of the Committee. He said, ‘Even if I could blow it up, this place in the middle of nowhere, who would hear the explosion?’ He’s saying, What good would it do? Working some kind of sabotage now, this late in the war, makes no sense at all. The Battle of the Bulge was Germany’s last full-out assault. They pushed off the sixteenth of December with a thousand tanks and by the twentieth of January they had a hundred thousand casualties and lost eight hundred of the tanks. We lost a lot of good soldiers, but we pushed the Krauts back to where they’d started, pretty much done. It was their last assault but, boy, it cost us.”
Virgil said, “If the war over there ends pretty soon, what happens to Jurgen and Otto?”
“I take ’em back to the camp. The Committee’s had prisoners killed, ones they saw as weaklings pretending they’re faithful Nazis. Had ’em hanged in the washroom to look like they committed suicide. Jurgen said in a statement he left with the camp commander, he and Otto had to get out of there or they’d be the next ones strung up. In the meantime the Committee guys have been sent to Alva in the western part of Oklahoma, the camp where they keep the thugs, the super-Nazis.”