Two Brothers

Visitors to the Surgery Berlin, 1933

BOOM BOOM. BOOM boom. Boom boom.

Frieda listened to the tiny heartbeat and smiled at the anxious face of the expectant mother at whose belly she had placed her stethoscope.

‘All well I think, Frau Schmidt,’ she said with a smile, ‘just like the previous six.’

‘Well, let’s hope it’s a quiet one,’ the large, round-faced woman replied happily, ‘I can’t stand another like the last. Nor can anybody else in my building for that matter! When the idiots below us found out I was knocked up again they actually complained to the block management committee. As if they could do anything about it. It gets cold in bed in the winter and things happen, don’t they? Can’t stop that.’

‘Well you can try and control the consequences of course, Frau Schmidt,’ Frieda said, probing gently at her patient’s belly with delicate fingers. ‘No woman need feel obliged to have a child these days, you know, or at least you can considerably reduce the risk. In the past I have mentioned to you the idea of birth control—’

‘Hush, doctor! That’s treason!’ The woman laughed, her big, stretched, purple-streaked, tired old tummy wobbling with merriment. ‘Never mind obliged, haven’t you heard? These days it’s our duty! All these years I’ve been thinking I was an idiot for letting the old fella bother me when he’s been on the beer and it turns out I’m a hero! How about that, eh? Mind you, I actually thought I was a bit of a hero at the time, to be honest — he’s not getting any thinner or any easier on the eye.’

They laughed together, a shared moment of female solidarity in a man’s world.

‘Besides which, doctor, this one’s going to turn a profit. How about that, eh?’

Frieda smiled, she knew that the woman was referring to the government plans to ‘reward’ motherhood. Repayment of state family loans could be offset against the number of children that were produced. Abgekindert, as the joke went: borrow money and then ‘child it off’.

‘That’s a good thing though, isn’t it?’ Frau Schmidt went on. ‘I mean, you can’t deny that.’

The jolly, red-faced woman looked slightly uncomfortable. In recent weeks Frieda had got used to people avoiding her eye as they selfconsciously encouraged her to acknowledge the ‘good’ things that ‘they’ were doing for the nation. She had even noticed some irritation amongst non-Jewish acquaintances about the way Jews seemed fixated with their own situation. As if anti-Semitism was the only relevant feature of the new government. After all, everyone was making sacrifices for Germany’s reawakening, weren’t they? Why shouldn’t the Jews?

‘I don’t think quite all of us will be eligible for the payment,’ Frieda replied quietly. ‘I’m not sure Herr Hitler is anxious for people like myself to procreate.’

‘Mister’ Hitler. It was how Frieda and all her Jewish friends referred to the Leader, in the desperate, unspoken hope that somehow referring to him in a civilized manner might actually make him civilized himself. That perhaps even after everything he’d said, beneath the surface he was a legitimate politician who recognized some sort of rules and norms of behaviour, rather than a deranged psychopath, the stuff of gothic nightmares.

Once more Frau Schmidt avoided Frieda’s eye. Concentrating instead on buttoning up the front of her dress.

‘No,’ she said brightly, ‘I suppose not. But then you never wanted a large family anyway, Frau Stengel. You after all are a doctor.’

‘I am at the moment, Frau Schmidt.’

Frieda put away her stethoscope. She took the Schmidt family medical file from the bulging filing system that covered an entire wall of her surgery and went to her desk to write down the conclusions of her examination.

Frieda had worked in that same office, at that same community clinic, since graduating from medical school in 1923. Ten years of long, tough days and many many disturbed nights. Endless hours of hard and emotionally draining work on a small civil service grade salary.

This was a sacrifice that she had not made alone. Her family had made it with her. The boys had often missed their mum at supper time and even bedtime, while Wolfgang’s dreams of spending long days writing jazz symphonies had been sacrificed to child care and bread and butter engagements.

‘When are you going to finally stop being a martyr, put up a brass plate on your door and make some proper money, girl,’ Wolfgang had often begged, only half joking. ‘Help some fat society mommas with their hot flushes. Charge them a fortune to loosen their corsets and give them an aspirin.’

But Frieda loved her work, she was passionately committed to the Weimar Government’s public health policies, which were the most advanced in the world, and she felt huge responsibility to her patients. After her family, the Friedrichshain community clinic was the centre of Frieda’s life.

‘If we don’t look after these people,’ she’d tell her husband as they struggled to balance their own family budget, ‘who else will?’

‘Well, I’m with your dad on this one,’ Wolfgang would reply. ‘Fuck ’em,’ and Frieda hoped he was joking.

Flicking through the Schmidt file in search of the right card, Frieda found herself reflecting how badly her handwriting had deteriorated over her decade of practice. In that file were some of the first notes she had made as a junior doctor, when Frau Schmidt’s husband had registered with the clinic as a young single man. He had come to her with a case of gonorrhoea picked up in an army brothel in Belgium. She had noted down the details in a clear youthful hand. The writing she added to the file now was, as with most doctors, legible only to herself and the local chemist.

‘You will still be coming to see me, Frau Schmidt?’ Frieda enquired, without looking up from her desk. ‘You still wish me to deliver your baby?’

‘Of course, Frau Doktor. You’ve delivered all the others, one a year since 1927, all ship-shape and screaming blue murder. Why stop now?’

‘Well, Frau Schmidt, I think perhaps you know why. These are changing times.’

Now Frieda looked up. Frau Schmidt was putting on her coat, on the collar of which was a small swastika badge. Women were not allowed to be actual members of the Nazi Party but that did not stop them buying brooches to show their support.

‘You mean because you are Jewish?’ Schmidt said, once more a little embarrassed. ‘Well, yes, of course it is… unfortunate… for you I mean. It must be a very worrying time. But really you mustn’t fret, everybody knows that you are not one of them, Frau Doktor Stengel. The Jews in Berlin are different, aren’t they? I know two or three SA men with Jewish girlfriends.’

Frieda tried to smile. She encountered this same attitude all the time. She was not one of those Jews, the ones Herr Hitler was talking about. The ones depicted weekly in the million-selling Der Stürmer magazine, who drank the blood of Christian virgins to fuel their dark Satanic rituals. Those Jews were somewhere else, out in the countryside perhaps, where the Herrenvolk were already putting banners across the entrances to their villages, saying Jews should keep out or risk the consequences. Here in Berlin people knew Jews. They worked with them, banked with them, bought cakes from them. They knew that it could not be those Jews who spent their time, as Herr Hitler had written, lying in wait for hour after hour in darkened streets stalking pure young Aryan girls in pursuance of a deliberate policy of corrupting their blood through rape.

If Herr Webber the baker or Herr Simeon the jeweller or Wolfgang Stengel the music teacher and jazz trumpeter had been doing that sort of thing, surely people would have noticed.

‘You’re not that sort of Jew,’ Frau Schmidt assured Frieda, clearly under the impression she was being kind. ‘I can’t see how the Führer would object to you.’

‘Well, we shall have to wait and see,’ Frieda replied.

Frieda Stengel did not to have to wait long.

One thing that could not be said of Adolf Hitler was that he did not give the world fair warning. From his very first speeches and writings he had made it absolutely clear what treatment he had in mind for the Jews. On 31 March 1933, having been Chancellor for just sixty days, Hitler showed them that he meant what he said.

Frieda was just completing her notes on Frau Schmidt’s condition when there was a knock at the door.

It was Meyer, Frieda’s co-worker and her least favourite colleague. He was a Communist who believed the clinic should have a political as well as a medical mission and considered it his duty to attempt to indoctrinate his patients. An idea Frieda found both presumptuous and immoral. It was Meyer who had objected to her employing Edeltraud when she was in distress, because it was an action guided by sentiment and not political activism.

Doctor Meyer’s face usually wore a smile. A patronizing, supercilious one which suggested that sooner or later it was historically inevitable that whoever he happened to be talking to would come to understand the wisdom of what he said. This morning, however, Meyer’s face was dark. He was carrying a newspaper that he put down on Frieda’s desk without saying a word. He did not need to, the headline was quite loud and clear enough, announcing as it did ‘necessary’ measures which were to be taken against Jews forthwith. These included an order that Jewish doctors were no longer to be allowed to treat non-Jewish patients.

‘Well, Frau Schmidt,’ Frieda said having read with mounting horror the first few paragraphs of the story, ‘it seems you will have to find another doctor.’ There was a moment’s silence before Frieda added gently, ‘Unless of course you choose to defy these criminals. Obviously I would appreciate it if you did.’

‘Criminals?’ Frau Schmidt replied, her jolly face becoming almost imperceptibly harder. ‘They are the government, Frau Doktor. They cannot be criminals.’

‘The Communists govern in Russia,’ Meyer exclaimed, ‘but your Hitler calls them criminals.’

For a moment there was silence. Frau Schmidt and Meyer glaring at each other, and Frieda, having sunk slowly into her seat, simply staring down at the file to which only a moment before she had been adding case notes.

‘Ten years I have served this community,’ she said quietly, almost to herself. ‘In all that time I knew no Jew nor Gentile, only patients.’

Frau Schmidt began hurrying to finish buttoning her coat and gather up her things. ‘I am sorry for you, Frau Doktor. Truly I am,’ she said, but she was looking anywhere except at Frieda.

‘Have I enriched myself, Frau Schmidt?’ Frieda demanded with sudden passion. ‘Did I put up my doctor’s plate in the Wilhelmstrasse and cheat honest Germans out of fat fees as apparently all Jew doctors have been doing?’

Frieda knew that haranguing this embarrassed, insignificant, working-class woman was pointless, but then what was the point of anything? If a few million like her chose simply to defy the decree then everything would be all right again. Frieda’s anger was rising, the injustice of what was happening was so overwhelming.

‘Or, instead, did I work fifty or sixty hours a week for a government clerk’s pay in this very building, during which time amongst many other things I delivered your bloody babies, Frau Schmidt! Vaccinated them! Saw them through measles and whooping cough and God knows what else!’

‘Your people,’ Frau Schmidt stammered, grabbing up the newspaper from the desk and pointing to its leading article, ‘have been spreading lies abroad. Slandering the Fatherland. See, it says so, it’s a proven fact.’

‘My people? My people? Forgive me, Frau Schmidt, but I had been under the impression that the residents of Friedrichshain were my people or else why have I gone out to them at all hours of the night when they were sick? Was it in order to secretly drink the blood of their children, Frau Schmidt, as I am accused of doing? Have I ever drunk your children’s blood? Please tell me that?’

The woman was embarrassed but neither was she to be cowed. She held the newspaper in her hands as evidence.

‘I know you have not done these things, Frau Doktor, but many of your race have and if you yourselves can’t stop them then Herr Hitler must. Surely you see that. He has been very patient. I know it isn’t you, Frau Doktor, but those others, they must be stopped. They have been slandering Germany abroad and our Jews must be punished so that those Jews will not do it again. We are victims too you know. We have also suffered!’

The victims. Of course. That was how Hitler couched it every time. He and his followers were the injured party. Even as they set up their private concentration camps and torture chambers, they were victims. Acting with heavy heart and in self-defence, having been ‘provoked beyond endurance’.

Frieda wanted to reply but no words came. What could she possibly say? That was the dreadful thing about these incredible lies that were now spouted daily in the national press. Even to deny them gave them credence. To deny to this woman, who had known her for ten years and whom she had seen through six pregnancies, that she was somehow part of a global conspiracy to destroy Frau Schmidt’s ‘race’ and rule the world? What was there to say?

What would there ever again be to say?

Frau Schmidt took up her bag, red faced and unhappy but determined none the less.

‘Herr Doktor Meyer,’ she said, ‘I shall be pleased to be seen by another doctor on my next appointment. As regrettably Frau Doktor Stengel is no longer allowed to treat me.’

Meyer took the newspaper from the woman and pointed to a paragraph buried deep in the article.

‘In fact, Frau Schmidt,’ he said, ‘as you can see, for the time being this boycott is voluntary. It is true that the government has made it clear that it will shortly introduce a law banning Doctor Stengel from practising, but for the time being it remains your decision if she treats you.’

Frieda almost smiled. Funny old Meyer, still the pedantic committee room politician debating subclauses. As if ‘voluntary’ meant anything any more.

It was clear from Frau Schmidt’s face that it did not mean anything to her. She took her leave and waddled from the room as quickly as she could.

After she had left Frieda slumped further into the chair behind the desk that she no longer had any right to use.

‘So it’s really true? I’m to be banned from practising?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Meyer said, his lip quivering with anger. ‘In fact it seems you’re not to be allowed to do anything at all. From tomorrow there is to be a boycott of all Jewish businesses.’

Frieda looked once more at the paper: ‘massed popular demonstrations announced’.

She almost laughed. ‘Funny, eh? How can you announce a popular demonstration? They have to order their protestors to demonstrate spontaneously.’

‘Well, Dr Stengel,’ Meyer began, unable even now to resist the temptation to score a political point, ‘perhaps now you can see why we Communists have always—’

‘You Communists!’ Frieda interrupted furiously. ‘Yes, what about you Communists! Where are you now? A month ago you had millions of members. A hundred deputies in the Reichstag. You had a bloody thug army just like they do. You weren’t much smaller than they are. What happened? Where are they? Where are you? Isn’t anybody going to fight?’

Meyer looked at her coldly. ‘Our leaders have—’ he began.

‘Your leaders have run away to Moscow, looking after themselves while their followers are murdered! Why don’t they “announce” a “popular” demonstration? Why don’t the Social Democrats? The Church? The Army? Why doesn’t anybody! Those fucking Nazi bastards don’t even have a majority.’

Frieda never swore. And even on this desperate morning she felt wrong in doing so. After all, the one thing Hitler should not be able to take away from her was her own personal standards. Only she could give those up.

And in any case her passion served no point. Battering as it did at the deaf ears of a closed mind.

‘I cannot speak for the Capitalist lackeys of the so-called Democratic Socialists, Frau Doktor,’ Meyer replied primly, ‘however, in the case of the KPD, the theoretical position of the Soviet International proscribes that…’

But for once Frieda was to be spared the endless, dry, dialectical parroting of her earnest colleague. The pompous excuses for the Communist Party’s craven inactivity and its blind commitment to the whims of Stalin.

For just then there was a commotion in the outer office.

There were bangs, angry voices. A guttural cry of fear. Then the door burst open and quite suddenly they were there. The unthinkable, the unimaginable. In her surgery.

That sanctuary of care in which Frieda had toiled daily for ten years was in a single moment corrupted and polluted.

Invaded. Violated.

Three men stood before her. Three men in black boots and brown uniforms.

The SA.

Frieda had seen them so many times on street corners, rattling their collection tins. Snarling at those who did not give. Their faces angry, bullying and stupid, playing the poor victim and the superman all at once. She had long since learnt to avoid their gaze and scurry past.

Now the impossible had happened.

They were in her surgery, standing before her desk, faces flushed and triumphant, thumbs stuck in leather belts. Boots spread far apart on the carpet, bellies pushed out in a manner so strutting and so brutish as to be almost a pantomime.

And yet, curiously, for all their swagger, for a moment at least they seemed hesitant, as if they too were aware of the newness of the situation. Aware of how incongruous their huge and brutal presence was in the small room with its various delicate scales and instruments, its anatomical wall charts and posters encouraging women to consider condoms for birth control and also as a barrier to disease. A small, female doctor sitting behind a desk, an open file before her, a pen still in her hand.

They were so terribly out of place. Like a tank in a small garden.

‘This is a doctors’ surgery,’ Dr Meyer protested. ‘A place of healing!’

Frieda admired him for finding his voice although it was clear to her that he was trying to keep from it the terror he felt.

‘The boycott doesn’t commence till tomorrow. What’s more, it’s voluntary. You have no business here. I shall call the police.’ He had broken the spell, but not in the manner in which he would have liked. The SA men openly laughed, it was just what they needed, a good joke to overcome their embarrassment.

‘Herr Doktor,’ the leading trooper said, ‘we are the police.’ Frieda got to her feet. ‘What are you going to do with me?’ she enquired. ‘Am I to be killed?’

‘We aren’t going to do anything with you at the moment,’ the lead man said. ‘You have permission to leave.’

‘Permission to leave my own office?’

‘That’s right, you can get yourself home. It’s him we want.’

The three men turned suddenly towards Meyer.

His face an instant mask of abject terror. He had been so certain they’d come for Frieda.

‘You are the Communist Party Member Meyer.’

‘No! I mean, well yes, I was…’ Meyer stuttered, ‘but the party is banned, therefore of course I am no longer a—’

He got no further. The truncheon smashed across his face and he fell unconscious to the floor.

‘Stick him in the truck,’ the lead SA man ordered.

The other two men each took an arm of the unconscious ex-Communist and began dragging him from the room, leaving a long smear of blood on the floor as they did so.

‘Heil Hitler,’ said the lead trooper, clicking his heels and giving the German salute.

Then they were gone.

Frieda sank back into her seat. Gulping, fearful that she would be sick. Trying to comprehend what had just happened.

Adolf Hitler, the subject of that ridiculous, ubiquitous salute, had been in power for sixty days.

And during that time it had become possible for an entirely innocent and defenceless man to be clubbed unconscious in a doctor’s surgery and then abducted. Not just with impunity but as a matter of state policy.

In sixty days.

And Hitler intended his Reich to last for a thousand years.

Tears began to fall on the notes Frieda had been making. Blue ink dissolving in the splashes, mixing up the sentences concerning Frau Schmidt’s pregnancy. Tiny, salty tributaries to an ocean of sorrow that awaited the world.