Two Brothers Read online

  ‘So now,’ the Truppführer snarled into Fischer’s face, on the right cheek of which a great swelling was rising. ‘Let’s start again, shall we? You say that this is your banner, is that right, Mr Yid?’

  The scene spun and rocked before Dagmar’s eyes. Her ears were ringing, an orchestra seemed to be playing inside her head, an orchestra whose instruments were broken glass and blaring horns, harsh cries and the crunch of steel on stone. She saw a hand thrust forward at her father’s chest. She saw him fall to the pavement for a second time. Then she felt a blow herself, a violent shove in the small of the back, her knees buckling, and then she also was on the pavement, her mother beside her, sprawling amongst the black and the brown boots.

  ‘If it’s your banner, cunt, then you and your bitches need to clean it up,’ she heard the troop leader saying through the strange cacophony that was pounding in her head. ‘It’s littering the street, if you hadn’t noticed.’

  Had he said it?

  Was it real?

  In that moment Dagmar truly felt she had gone mad. She was on the pavement on the Kurfürstendamm outside her father’s store. That great castle of commerce of which she was the princess. Not standing on the pavement, but sprawled on it. The breath knocked from her body. Her beloved parents, those symbols of strength and authority to whom she had always looked for comfort and certainty, were helpless on their knees beside her. Her father’s face swollen and bruised. His blood was on the stones.

  On the Kurfürstendamm.

  Minutes earlier, not even as many as three, they had all been driving together in the family Mercedes. In one of the family Mercedes. These were the stones across which she had stepped a thousand times. Alone. With her friends. With her parents. Occasionally (and discreetly) with Paulus and Otto, who simply could not believe it when she had been saluted at the door by a smiling doorman.

  This was her kingdom. It had been so only yesterday.

  ‘You’re not cleaning up your dad’s banner, Fräulein Fischer,’ a voice called out, half shout, half sneer. ‘Maybe we should teach you some respect for a German pavement.’

  Mechanically Dagmar began to reach out and collect a piece or two of the torn and shredded banners.

  She heard a cry beside her. It was her mother, who, having collected a number of scraps, had then had them kicked from her hand.

  ‘I thought you were told to pick up your rubbish,’ a brown-shirted thug shouted at her. ‘Pick it fucking up, Jew bitch.’

  They were speaking to her mother.

  In Berlin.

  On the Kurfürstendamm.

  Dagmar looked up. She could see that beyond the circle of SA men people were hurrying by. Heads down, faces turned away, seeing no evil. Others stopped, not many but enough, and they had smiles on their faces, one or two held small children up to watch as they shouted encouragement to the troopers.

  Make them pay.

  Make them crawl.

  Make those rich fat Jew bastards pay for what they’ve done to us.

  What they’ve done? What had she done?

  Dagmar felt that she would faint. She wished that she would faint.

  Die, in fact, that would be a relief.

  But she did not faint or die. She remained stubbornly conscious of the fact that she was on her hands and knees, head bowed searching for scraps to pick up. Praying that they would not crush her fingers on the pavement with their boots.

  A voice rose above the general hubbub.

  It was a passer-by, one of those who had stopped to gloat. A woman, quite smartly dressed.

  ‘Make them lick it,’ she shouted. ‘Make them lick the pavement.’

  And the Nazi young men thought that was a wonderful idea. They must have wondered how it had not occurred to them before.

  And so, under threat of further blows, the Fischer family, mother, father and daughter, bowed their heads to the flagstones and putting out their tongues began to lick.

  Laughter mingled now with the jeers. Horrible, triumphant, mocking laughter. Somebody tried to start a song, the Horst Wessel Lied, of course, ubiquitous marching anthem of the SA. It was inevitable. Did they only know one song?

  But the singing did not catch on this time. People were having too much fun to bother singing.

  Suddenly Dagmar could bear it no longer. She leapt to her feet, blind with tears, screaming at the top of her voice, and began to run. To her surprise the storm troopers didn’t stop her, perhaps her revolt had been so sudden and her condition so hysterical that they were taken by surprise.

  The crowd parted too. She was not yet fourteen, a girl in a sailor dress, wild with terror, possibly they felt pity for her. Possibly they did not wish to be infected by the progeny of subhumans. Either way, she found herself suddenly outside the crowd and running along the wide pavement past the great display windows of the store.

  She could hear the sound of her shoes on the pavement. They were beautiful shoes of shiny patent leather.

  It was lucky her mother had made her wear flatties. She could never have run so fast in the heels she had begged to wear.

  The store was huge. It spanned a whole block along the Ku’damm and stretched back nearly a block behind. It had many entrances, all of which were picketed by SA men.

  She was running blindly. Looking down at her shoes, focusing on the black shining uppers as they rose and fell, disappearing under the hem of her dress and then re-emerging.

  Had she not been stopped she would undoubtedly have careered into something or somebody or run off the kerb into traffic. But instead brown-shirted arms reached out, gathering her up as once more Dagmar found herself in the clutches of her mortal enemies.

  ‘Not so fast, little miss,’ a rough voice said. ‘We saw you run. Aren’t you supposed to be helping Daddy clean the street?’

  ‘Please,’ Dagmar whispered, ‘please.’

  But the man did not reply.

  Because suddenly and without warning she was back on the ground.

  How had it happened?

  At first she thought her SA tormentor had pushed her.

  But he was on the ground too. Lying beside her, gasping for breath.

  Gasping beneath the weight of a boy.

  It was Otto Stengel.

  The moment that the Stengel twins had put down the phone to Dagmar on the previous evening they had known that she wanted their support. A member of the Saturday Club had been reaching out to them and it was their duty to go to her. Although of course in truth their decision had nothing to do with those solemn weekend oaths of solidarity taken after their music lessons when they were little kids. Dagmar was an obsession for them both, an object of both reverence and desire. They certainly were not going to pass up this excellent and legitimate excuse to seek her out and perhaps do her service.

  Therefore, on the following morning, the moment that they had left the Stengel apartment, ostensibly to go to school, Paulus and Otto rushed to the U-Bahn and jumped on a train to Bahnhof Zoo. From there they ran the rest of the way and emerged on to the Ku’damm just in time to see what was happening at the entrance to the department store. And Dagmar forcing her way through the crowd that had gathered to watch.

  Instantly the twins gave chase, skirting the terrible scene where Herr and Frau Fischer were still on their knees, their heads to the pavement, and charging along after Dagmar, catching up with her just as the SA man took hold of her.

  Otto, who always acted on instinct, simply launched himself at Dagmar’s attacker, hurling his body against the man at a full run, cannoning into him with all the force that a muscular thirteen-year-old boy travelling at speed could deliver. All three of them, Otto, Dagmar and the SA man, hit the pavement together. Otto on top of the large, pot-bellied, heavily winded thug, and Dagmar sprawling beside them both, her legs in the air and her pretty sailor dress torn and spoiled.

  Paulus, who always acted on intellect, had been a step or two behind in the chase. As he brought himself to a skidding halt, barely avoiding t
ripping over the prostrate threesome, he knew he had perhaps a second and a half at most to consider his plan. After that there could be no doubt that the other Brownshirts would overcome their surprise, pull Otto off their comrade and beat him, very possibly to death.

  The trick must be, Paulus thought, in the flash of time available to him, to get his story in first.

  ‘Bastard!’ he shouted, reaching down and hauling his brother to his feet and putting him into a vicious neck lock. ‘Got you now, haven’t I? You’re mine!’

  Then with the arm that was not around his brother’s neck he delivered a rabbit punch to the side of Otto’s head (with what, Otto was later to complain, was unnecessary force).

  Paulus then looked up at the Brownshirts who surrounded him.

  ‘Jews! Jews!’ he shouted in affected semi-panic. ‘Dirty Jews! A pack of them! With a German girl! Round the corner! They have her, it’s revenge! They’re pulling off her clothes! Please. I’ve got this guy, I won’t let him get away, run! You have to help.’

  Young though he was and with almost no time in which to think, Paulus had made his pitch brilliantly, appealing to the very heart and soul of the Nazis’ pathological anti-Semitism. That most favourite and well-rehearsed part. The crude and salacious sexual fantasies that made up the majority of the accusations peddled against Jews in Der Stürmer and other Nazi papers.

  The men didn’t hesitate. The prospect of being able to intervene violently in a pack rape appealed to so many of their natural instincts and secret fantasies at once that they clattered off immediately in the direction in which Paulus was pointing. This left just their winded comrade who was now beginning to pull himself together, sitting up on the pavement, chin on chest, catching his breath.

  This man, Paulus realized, would be highly unlikely to give up his opportunity to avenge himself on Otto, even for the opportunity of seeing a girl having her clothes torn off by Jews. Besides which, it would only be moments before the other Brownshirts reached the corner and realized that they had been tricked. Again Paulus had less than seconds in which to consider his next move and again he was able to find the most promising point of psychological weakness in his still groggy opponent.

  ‘I’ll get these two across the street!’ Paulus shouted urgently, dragging a dazed Dagmar to her feet with his free arm. ‘My father is a Hauptsturmführer. He is collecting prisoners. He will be very pleased you stopped this swine. I’ll send him over to speak to you personally.’

  As a sentence it did not make a lot of sense but what it did do was invoke authority. And if there was one thing that Paulus knew Nazis liked, it was to be told what to do. Nothing seemed to make them more comfortable than following a leader, and if there was a Hauptsturmführer in the vicinity then his will must of course be obeyed.

  Paulus did not hang around to find out how long it would take the trooper to ask himself why a thirteen-year-old boy who was not even in a Hitler Youth uniform would be running around the streets collecting prisoners for a Hauptsturmführer SA. Instead he dragged his brother and Dagmar off the kerb and into the road, oblivious to the beeping horns and screeching tyres as he headed for the central reservation where the trams ran constantly up and down the street.

  The folding middle doors of an east-bound carriage were just closing as Paulus reached it, but (much to the annoyance of the passengers already on board) he was able to get an arm in and force the doors wide again.

  Once they were seated on the tram, Otto took his chance to protest.

  ‘Shit, Pauly, you didn’t have to whack me in the side of the head!’

  ‘Never mind that, you arsehole,’ Paulus replied. ‘Are you OK, Dag? What happened?’

  But for the time being at least Dagmar was incapable of speech. She simply stared ahead of her, unable even to cry. Simply trying to breathe.

  The Banks of the Red Sea

  Berlin, 1 April 1933

  ‘EVERYONE IS LOOKING for Moses.’

  Frieda smiled as she said it. She felt she had to smile.

  The horror and the shock on the faces that surrounded her was so absolute that some show of spirit seemed to her essential. For if Frieda Stengel knew nothing else on that dreadful day, that awful, ill-starred day when the Nazis began truly to show their hand, truly began to give some glimpse of the limitless darkness into which they would be prepared to take their crazed philosophy, she knew that from that point on in all their lives, spirit would be the only thing that could possibly sustain them.

  If they were to be sustained at all.

  She looked around at the faces assembled in her living room.

  Faces that had only recently been familiar but which seemed now to stare back at her as if belonging to new and different people. Blank, bewildered people, lost and helpless. Babies, it seemed to Frieda, born that very morning, ejected screaming from the warmth and comfort of the womb of their previous lives to find themselves blinking and struggling for breath in the harsh and unforgiving glare of a totally alien and entirely brutal new world.

  New and different people. Quite literally.

  Previously respectable citizens of the German Republic. Parents, workers, taxpayers, war veterans. Human beings.

  Now Untermensch. Subhumans. Despised outcasts. Officially despised. Legally outcast. Barred from their businesses. Ejected from their work. Beaten and bewildered, they had come to her, to Frieda Stengel. The good doctor.

  Fear twitching in their nostrils. Standing red wet in their eyes.

  Wringing, pulling and twisting at their fingers until the knuckles turned white with the effort of self-control.

  Katz the Chemist, with his wife and grown-up daughter. The Loebs, who ran the little tobacco and newspaper kiosk at the steps to the U-Bahn. Morgenstern the book dealer. Schmulewitz, a broker of insurance. The Leibovitzes, who owned the little restaurant on Grünberger Strasse. A garbage man. An employee of the wire factory. A brewer’s assistant. Two men currently looking for work. Wives. One or two children too scared to go to school.

  The Jews of Friedrichshain.

  Citizens yesterday. Today just Jews.

  They had gravitated to the Stengels’ apartment in search of some comfort, some meaning. Frieda was a community lynchpin. Loved for her kindness, respected for her intelligence and her tireless energy. Perhaps she would have an answer. Some crumb of comfort to offer, some semblance of an explanation. After all, the good Frau Doktor had always had answers in the past.

  But Frieda had no answers this time.

  For there were none.

  All she could do was smile and find herself, to her surprise, taking refuge in imagery from legends in which she neither believed nor had a spiritual interest and yet which were without doubt appropriate.

  ‘I guess the poor old tribe is on the move again,’ she said, trying to impose some brightness on her tone. ‘We’re standing on the shores of the Red Sea, chucked out of Egypt for the umpteenth time. Hitler’s just another pharaoh, isn’t he, really? The question is how to save our skins this time? Everybody is looking for Moses.’

  But no one knew of a Moses at that point and so, with nowhere to go on a day when their own streets were occupied by the Brown Army, they sat. Strange and stilted. Counting the seconds that led to nowhere.

  Coffee was served, there were various cakes and small treats which people had brought. Sweet pretzels, Butterstollen, Streuselkuchen. More coffee.

  Wolfgang played a little quiet piano. Nothing too mournful, gentle show-tunes mostly.

  ‘This is rather like how I imagine it was in the last hour on the Titanic,’ he said. ‘Always admired the boys in that band. Never thought I’d be a member myself.’

  Frau Katz began to cry at this.

  ‘Wolfgang, please,’ Frieda admonished.

  Wolfgang apologized and returned to his playing.

  Occasionally there were exclamations of anger and frustration.

  They pushed me.

  They spat at me.

  Frau So-and-So said not
hing.

  Herr So-and-So turned away.

  I’ve known them years. I gave them credit after the crash. They did nothing when those thugs broke my window. When they shoved the dog’s mess through. Nothing.

  But for the most part they made polite conversation. Papering over the chasmic, vault-like, hellish darkness lying just below the surface of every word they spoke.

  How are your children?

  Is Frau So-and-So recovered from her flu?

  Hasn’t the blossom come early in the Tiergarten this year?

  While all the time the strained voices and nervous rattle of Frieda’s best china coffee cups screamed WHY? WHY! WHY!

  Why us?

  And, of course, what next?

  Once or twice, non-Jewish friends did drop by to show their support. The chairman of the housing collective. The man who swept the street and who every morning for ten years had stood by his dusty hand barrow as Frieda emerged from her building, leant on his broom and told her how lovely she looked. Wolfgang had always thought this was a bit creepy but he was grateful to the man now.

  ‘And you look lovely today, Frau Doktor,’ the man said, standing shyly in the doorway, holding his cap and staring at his feet. He had brought flowers which he left on the little table by the door as he hurried away.

  Doctor Schwarzschild, a colleague of Frieda’s from the surgery, came in his lunch break. He explained that they had thought about closing the medical centre in solidarity but had decided it would be a counterproductive gesture. Frieda agreed.

  ‘People still need doctors,’ she said.

  ‘Just be sure to treat the Jews too, eh?’ Wolfgang added.

  Schwarzschild looked confused. ‘Of course,’ he stammered. ‘How could you think otherwise, Wolfgang?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know, mate,’ Wolfgang replied with a hint of angry sarcasm. ‘Can’t imagine.’

  ‘Stop it, Wolf,’ Frieda said for the second time. ‘It isn’t Rudi’s fault.’

  ‘Whose fault is it then?’ Wolfgang asked.

  Already a gap was opening up.

  And the gap was wide. As wide as that universe that lies between life and death.