Two Brothers

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 nothing.

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.

And those on the death side, those who now knew themselves to be Jews, could not help but be bitter, angry and resentful of the status of those on the life side. Those people now called Aryans. And since no Nazi or even silent fellow traveller would speak to them or look them in the eye, they found themselves taking out their feelings on the only ‘Aryans’ who would still acknowledge them, their remaining non-Jewish friends.

So this is what your Mr Hitler thinks, is it?

What will your people decide to do to us next?

Do you really believe we have stolen your homes and jobs?

Schwarzschild did not stay long. He had patients to see, Frieda’s as well as his own. Patients about whom Frieda was already worrying, feeling guilty, despite herself, that she was suddenly absent from their care. A hundred half-finished stories sprang suddenly to her mind as she showed Schwarzschild to the door.

‘I’m concerned about Frau Oppenheim’s boil. I lanced it but it isn’t healing properly and I suspect she’s not cleaning the wound as I instructed. The little Rosenberg boy is still not walking after his accident and it’s because he is not doing his physiotherapy, you must be very firm with his parents… I will write notes for them all. Can you bring me my files? I’m sure that is still allowed. We can go through them. You know that I’m fearful old Bloch might be turning diabetic; you must test his blood sugar.’

Perhaps it helped her. Taking refuge in the responsibilities of a life that was over. Trying vicariously to impose her attentions on people who were now obliged by government decree to shun them.

Wolfgang had watched her from his place at the piano.

‘Why do you still care about those people, Frieda?’ he asked. ‘Do they care about you?’

‘Wolf, I’m a doctor. I do not require my commitment to be reciprocal.’

Wolfgang smiled, a smile and a shrug.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘fair enough. You’re a better person than any of them but we didn’t need the bloody Nazi Party to know that. I, however, am not and if it was up to me I’d say let them rot.’

In defiance or frustration he began to play some Kurt Weill, The Ballad of Pirate Jenny.

‘Wolfgang! Please!’ Frieda said.

He looked up. There was fear on every face.

‘Oh sorry,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not happy with Jew music?’

‘Come on, Wolf,’ Frieda said. ‘The walls aren’t thick and there’s no point provoking them.’

‘That’s what I thought too,’ Wolfgang said. ‘But now I wonder whether it makes any difference.’

‘If we provoke them they’ll kill us,’ Herr Loeb the tobacconist said. ‘We are few and they are many.’

‘They won’t kill us!’ Frau Leibovitz almost pleaded. ‘This is Germany, it’s an aberration, it must be. It must be an aberration.’

Some others agreed. This could not be real. It was simply unimaginable that the National Socialist Government intended to keep this onslaught up.

Again, the formal description. The National Socialist Government. As if somehow, using the Nazi Party’s full name, treating them with formality and politeness, might cause the Nazis to somehow reciprocate.

Other voices took a grimmer view.

‘My son thinks they will keep it up till we are all dead,’ the bookseller Morgenstern observed. ‘He is leaving. He and his fiancée. He has a friend in Zurich who will put them up for a while.’

‘But what will he do? How will he work? Has he a Swiss work permit?’ came the enquiries.

Morgenstern admitted that his son did not.

‘But he’s leaving anyway. He will go on a holiday and then refuse to leave; he says they can shoot him if they wish. His girl agrees. They intend to go within a week.’

This news of course depressed the little gathering further.

Clinging to hope as they were it was terrible to realize that some people had already forsaken it. But everyone knew someone who had already decided the situation was now impossible. The young in particular, those who had least to leave behind, were all making plans to go.

Then the Hirsches, a retired couple from two floors down, arrived with the first edition of the afternoon newspaper. Amongst the crowing lead story reporting the ‘success’ of the ‘spontaneous’ boycott was another headline:

‘Exit Visas Introduced’.

Anybody who wanted to leave Germany had first to get police permission to do so. It was stated that Jews in particular were not simply to be allowed to wander around hostile foreign countries spreading their lies. If they wanted to get out they would have to beg and only then would the authorities take a view.

‘They want to trap us,’ Wolfgang observed and defiantly banged out a few chords of Mack the Knife.

Morgenstern asked if he could use the telephone to discuss the news with his son.

Frieda’s parents arrived.

It almost broke Frieda’s heart to see the old man’s face, a combination of suppressed fury and utter confusion that she’d never seen in him before. Only weeks earlier Captain Konstantin Tauber had been an important senior officer in the Berlin Police. He was a decorated war veteran. A deeply conservative German patriot and champion of the rule of law.

Now he was a non-person. Without status, without a job and without rights.

‘The Sturmabteilung came to our station yesterday afternoon,’ Tauber explained.

Again, the refuge in formality. The Sturmabteilung.

The National Socialist Government.

Herr Hitler.

As if somehow they were dealing with something recognizable and relatable to their previous experience of the world. And not an entirely new, completely alien force, more brutal and more primevally cruel and ignorant than anything they could possibly contain within their understanding.

‘Simply marched in,’ Herr Tauber went on. ‘They have been coming and going as they pleased since Herr Hitler became Chancellor but yesterday they came for me. It’s only weeks since I was arresting these actual same men for violent disturbances. For intimidation. For all sorts of squalid thuggery. Throwing them into the cells night after night. Now they are in charge! They wanted my desk! They took my cap, my side arm. They told me I was not a good enough German to be a policeman. I was a good enough German to be gassed at Verdun, was I not? To sit for three years in a hole in the ground for the Kaiser?’

Herr Tauber lapsed into silence, accepted a cup of coffee and held his wife’s hand.

‘We came over because we read about the decree regarding Jewish doctors,’ Frau Tauber explained. ‘It’s a terrible thing. To stop you caring for your patients.’

‘From two respected professional people in the family to none,’ Captain Tauber growled.

‘Come off it, Pa,’ Frieda said. ‘You never even wanted me to be a doctor.’

‘That was a long time ago. I changed my view. I’ve been very proud of you. Did I never say?’

‘As a matter of fact, no you didn’t.’

Wolfgang broke the silence that followed this.

‘Cheer up, Pop. You’ve still got a musician in the family.’

Tauber merely glared.

Morgenstern, who had been on the phone to his son, approached Herr Tauber to ask a favour.

‘Excuse me, Herr Kapitän,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you still have friends and colleagues at your old station.’

‘Fewer than I might have hoped,’ Tauber said.

‘This business of exit visas, the announcement was only made today. I cannot imagine they could implement it at once.’

‘No, they are not supermen, whatever they might say. Even in these extraordinary times, if they want the border to function as a border they cannot just “will” it, they must have due process.’

‘Would you be kind enough, Herr Kapitän, to be so good as to make an enquiry to find out when these exit visas will be required from?’

‘I’ll try,’ Tauber replied. ‘And it’s just “mister” now, I’m not a captain any more.’

Tauber got up, crossed the blue rug and went out into the hallway to the telephone. Frieda watched as he went. His gait stooped at first, the walk of an old and defeated man. After a few steps, though, he seemed to realize it and straightened himself up. Putting back his shoulders and holding his head a little higher.

That’s right, Frieda thought. We must all keep trying to walk upright. It was what Wolfgang told the boys. If you want to feel tall, you have to walk tall.

The phone rang as Herr Tauber reached for it.

‘Stengel residence,’ he said. ‘Tauber speaking.’

After a moment he turned back into the room.

‘It is Herr Fischer,’ he said, ‘of Fischer’s department store. He is enquiring after his daughter Dagmar.’