Two Brothers

Beached Dolphin Berlin, 1935

SHORTLY AFTER THE edict was issued segregating school classrooms, Jews were banned from using public swimming pools.

This was a particularly cruel blow for Dagmar Fischer. Swimming had always been central to her life, and since her father’s death she had taken refuge in the isolation and anonymity of the water more and more. The beautiful public pool at Charlottenburg and the vast swimming lake at Wannsee had become her sanctuary. Here she found peace and solace. Churning through the cool water at race-winning speeds she could for a moment blot out the agony of her father’s arrest and murder. Diving, dipping and scissor-kicking in elegant precise balletic display for no one but herself, she could briefly wash the taste of the Ku’damm pavement from her memory.

‘In a way I’m glad that Papa isn’t here to see us banned from pools,’ she said to the Stengel boys, fighting back tears as ever when thinking of her murdered father. ‘He taught me to swim almost before I could walk. I was two, we were at Lake Como in Italy. He used to call me Dagmar the Dolphin. He was so proud of me.’

Dagmar was far and away the best swimmer in her school. A true athlete, slim and strong, and as she grew into adolescence her coaches had felt that she had real potential.

‘When they announced that the Olympics would be coming to Berlin, Papa and I actually danced together! We did, you know. I know it seems funny to think of, he was normally so stern and formal. But that day he grabbed me and we danced. He already had me winning gold for Germany! Of course that was before the Nazis. Now I’m not even allowed to train, let alone compete. What do they think? That somehow a bit of my Jewishness will dissolve in the water and get up their precious pure German noses?’

Then the tears came properly and the boys looked at each other helplessly as they always did when Dagmar cried.

‘They should be so lucky,’ Otto growled. ‘Don’t forget, Dags, they’re only doing this because they know we’re so much better than them. It’s why they hate us.’

‘That is so stupid!’ Paulus gasped in frustration. ‘Just listen to yourself. They think they’re the bloody master race, we think we’re the chosen people. Fuck the lot of them, I say. I’m me. That’s all. Just me.’

‘Yeah and you’re a twat,’ Otto replied.

He was communicating in breathless grunts while doing sit-ups on Dagmar’s pink fluffy rug. Otto rarely let any moment pass in physical repose; he was always exercising. Training for the battles to come.

It was a Sunday afternoon, the most boring time of the week. Paulus and Otto were sitting with Dagmar in her bedroom, one of the few places in Berlin from which they weren’t barred.

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t think ourselves special, Pauly,’ Dagmar interjected, stretching out on the bed and blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘After all, we have to put up with enough because of it.’

‘Because, Dags,’ Paulus replied, ‘going on about being the chosen people is just the same elitist racial bullshit that they spout. People are people and we all started out as monkeys anyway. Otto’d probably have been a Nazi if he wasn’t Jewish.’

‘Fuck you,’ Otto grunted, hands behind his head, red-faced and bulging-veined.

‘Oh, very erudite, I must say,’ Paulus sneered. ‘“You’re a twat.” “Fuck you.” Brilliant argument, Ottsy. I can see how you got to be one of the chosen people. It must have been your language skills.’

‘Ninety-two. Ninety-three,’ Otto gasped.

‘Whoopee, the ape can count,’ Paulus said.

‘One hundred!’ Otto gasped triumphantly, lying back, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. ‘I’m just saying, Pauly,’ he went on, ‘that the reason they won’t let Dag swim is because they’re scared she’d win.’

‘Of course I’d win!’ Dagmar said angrily. ‘I always do… Or I always did. Now what do I do? I can’t run at the track, I can’t swim at the pool or the lakes. I’ll just get fat and old sitting in this bloody house!’

Dagmar and her mother still occupied the same big house in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf that they had lived in before the Nazis, although now many of the rooms were shut up and Frau Fischer employed a much reduced staff, Jews being no longer allowed to employ Aryans.

The big house had become a prison. Ever since her husband’s death, Frau Fischer had been trying desperately to get their aborted immigration back on track. But while they still had an entry visa for the USA, their German exit visas had been withdrawn. The Nazis were nothing if not vindictive and they had decided that, for Isaac Fischer, paying with his life was not a sufficient punishment for telling the truth about the German state, his family would have to suffer also. Only the previous week Frau Fischer had received another rejection to her application to leave the country. A rejection made all the more sad and wearisome because she had queued for six hours at the offices on the Wilhelmstrasse to make her application.

‘They say we’ll spread lies about them so they’re not going to let us go,’ Dagmar explained miserably.

‘Well, maybe it’ll work out for the best in the end, eh?’ Otto said, still lying on his back while bench-pressing Dagmar’s dressing-table chair, ‘because you can come with me to Palestine.’

‘Palestine?’ Dagmar asked in some surprise, having never heard Otto even mention the place before.

‘Oh yes,’ Paulus said with heavy sarcasm, ‘haven’t you heard? Otto’s a Zionist now. Fuck, Otts, you don’t even know where Palestine is!’

‘Yes I do!’ Otto protested. ‘It’s the next one down after Turkey — sort of. Isn’t it?’

‘It’s in the Middle East and it’s already full of Arabs,’ Paulus said.

Otto’s recent announcement that he had decided to become a Zionist had both amused and frustrated his brother. Lots of Jews in Berlin had begun talking about trying to get to Palestine. The Nazis themselves even raised the idea as a possible way of dealing with their ‘problem’.

‘It’s our homeland,’ Otto continued defiantly, ‘that’s all I need to know about it. Next year in Jerusalem!’

Even Dagmar giggled at this. In the past there could have been no less political individual than Otto Stengel. And no less a religious or spiritual one either for that matter. Otto was an archetypal teenage boy. His interests were sports, machines, food, music and Dagmar. At school the only classes he had ever enjoyed were woodwork and art, and the only remotely reflective pursuit he indulged in was music. Now, having picked up a few illegal pamphlets in Jewish coffee shops, Otto had suddenly begun using the language of Zionist politics.

‘Homeland!’ Paulus protested. ‘Homeland? Two thousand years ago, Otts! Believe it or not, mate, things have moved on. Palestine is now the homeland of — who? Oh, let me see. Oh yes, I remember: the Palestinians. Get it? The Palestinians live in Palestine. There’s a clue in the names. And I don’t think they will take very kindly to a fifteen-year-old German Jew boy turning up and saying he owns the place.’

‘We’ll take it back,’ Otto said darkly. ‘We have no choice.’

‘Great!’ Paulus snapped. ‘And when you do maybe you can ban all the Arabs from using the parks and swimming pools.’

This point reminded Dagmar of her own more immediate distress.

‘Ten years I’ve been using our local pool,’ she said bitterly. ‘Since I was five. I know every attendant, most of them have made passes at me. And then yesterday they told me I couldn’t swim. It was a school trip too. I had to wait in an office with two other Jewish girls while my class all went in. It was so humiliating. Girls used to beg to be on my squad. And the school got all the team cossies from Daddy’s store at cost. They’re still wearing them!’

And she cried once more. Desperate helpless tears.

Even aside from the dreadful blow of her father’s death, the change in Dagmar’s circumstances had been steeper and more brutal than it had been for most of Berlin’s Jews. They, like any ordinary people, had at least some experience of the petty restrictions, humiliations and disappointments of existence. Dagmar’s life, however, up until 30 January 1933, had been almost uniquely fabulous and blessed. The beloved only daughter of enormously wealthy and doting parents living at the very heart of the most exciting city in Europe. Few girls on earth were so cosseted and few could look forward to a future more exciting or glamorous. Now the glittering memory of that life taunted Dagmar. Every day she encountered someone or other who had once fawned upon her and whom she now suspected of gloating at her distress.

Dagmar wiped the tears from her eyes, looking for a handkerchief and pretending to sneeze.

‘You see,’ Otto muttered, casting a dark glance at Paulus. ‘You see what’s happening? They’re grinding us down. We need to do something.’

‘I am doing something,’ Paulus said.

‘What? Studying?’

‘Yes. Studying.’

‘Ha! What bloody good is that? Jews have always studied! Study study study! Mum never shuts up about it. Why? What good has it done us? Fuck that. You want to be a lawyer? What a joke! What’s the law to us? It’s the law that’s fucking us. Besides, Jews aren’t allowed to be lawyers, are they? Or any sort of decent job. You’re just going to end up a really really well-qualified beggar!’

‘Yeah, well, let me tell you this,’ Paulus replied. ‘When I get out of this country, whether it’s Palestine, London or Timbuktu, I’ll be ready. I’ll have skills to offer. It’s all very well you lifting weights and going about with a knife in your pocket, but you can’t fight them all. You need to plan.’

Paulus might have continued his lecture but he was sitting on the floor with his back against the end of Dagmar’s bed. She had stretched out her long legs so that her bare feet were hanging over the edge, quite close to Paulus’s face, and even his analytical mind was incapable of remaining focused while in such proximity to any part of Dagmar’s naked skin.

‘I hate school now,’ she said kicking her feet and wiggling her toes in frustration, ‘now that they’ve started making us sit separately.’

Paulus wasn’t listening. He was drinking in the sight of her pretty painted toes and shapely ankles dangling so close. Otto was staring too.

Both boys simply aching to kiss those feet.

‘Me and the two other Jewish girls,’ Dagmar went on, addressing the ceiling, for once oblivious to the stupefying effect that any part of her exposed self had on the Stengel boys, ‘stuck in a shameful little corner. We weren’t even friends before. They’re scholarship kids who don’t pay fees. I used to secretly look down on them, which seems funny now. Now that I’m getting looked down on myself.’

‘Personally I don’t give a stuff about sitting apart,’ Paulus said, sliding away from the end of the bed, unable to take the pressure and frustration of Dagmar’s crimson-tipped toes any longer. ‘Why would I care? I’m there to work, not talk. Sod ’em, I say. If they stop being my friends because of a law then they were crap friends anyway. I just don’t let it bother me.’

Dagmar swung her legs off the side of the bed, four hungry eyes following her every move. She took a packet of cigarettes from the little drawer in her bedside table.

‘Blimey, Dags, you’re chaining it,’ Paulus said. ‘Won’t your mum smell it?’

‘She will, but so what? I used to do what she said but now that Daddy’s gone it’s all different. I don’t even bother to open a window any more. To be honest I don’t think she cares anyway.’

The boys nodded but they did not really understand. The ongoing misery of their own father’s incarceration in a concentration camp had of course hugely affected their family life but it had not changed their basic attitude to their mother’s authority. Perhaps it was because she had always been more of a boss in the home than Wolfgang had anyway.

Dagmar offered the boys cigarettes.

‘They’re French,’ Dagmar said. ‘Gitanes. I have a French pen pal who sends me them.’

The three of them smoked for a little while in silence.

‘I think I’ll do what you did, Otts,’ Dagmar said with sudden venom. ‘Chuck in school. I just hate it now. The way they all look at me. It’s like, it’s like I’m sick or something. Most of them are trying to be nice but actually that just makes it worse. I’m the poor little kid with the incurable Jew disease. And then there’s him. He’s there, always there.’

‘Who?’

‘Him, of course. That man! Everywhere, hanging up in every single classroom. Staring out like the complete bloody nutcase that he is. The man who killed my dad. The man who won’t even let me go swimming. What is wrong with him? Why does he care if I go swimming or not!’

Dagmar smoked ferociously in an effort not to begin crying again.

Paulus and Otto looked at each other, helpless in the face of her distress.

‘Don’t chuck in school,’ Paulus said gently. ‘Don’t let them beat you.’

‘Bollocks,’ Otto snorted, ‘give it up. Screw them, why should you sit there while they sing the bloody Horst Wessel song? I know why Pauly studies all the time. It’s so he can write you those stupid letters in Latin that he thinks are so clever!’

Paulus was aghast. ‘You’ve been looking in my notebook, you bastard!’

‘Yeah, and what a load of crap! Pulchra es amo te — I looked it up. Oh you’re so beautiful, Dags and he loves you! Oculi tui sicut vasa pretiosa — your eyes are like precious jewels! Ha ha! What a lot of big hairy balls!’

Paulus was crimson with fury, his fists clenched.

‘Fuck you, Otts!’ he said, leaping to his feet.

‘And fuck you double,’ Otto replied, getting up from the little pink and gold dressing-table chair on which he’d just sat down and squaring up to his brother.

‘You’re not to fight in here, boys!’ Dagmar cried but with a rare smile — the rivalry between the twins for her affections always cheered her up a little. ‘I have all my special things and you’re such great big lumps these days you’ll break everything. Anyway, Ottsy, I like Pauly’s Latin letters.’

‘I wanted to do something for you that was difficult,’ Paulus muttered defensively, crimson with embarrassment, ‘so you’d know I’d made an effort and be impressed.’

‘Why don’t you chisel her a letter on the Brandenburg Gate? That’d be an effort.’

‘I am impressed, Pauly,’ Dagmar said. ‘I love your letters. For one thing they make me pay attention in class so that I can actually read them. My friends can’t believe I have a boy who writes to me in Latin… Or a boy who writes me songs, Ottsy.’

‘Songs?’ Paulus exclaimed. ‘Has he been writing you songs?’

‘Yes, didn’t you know?’ Dagmar grinned. ‘They’re so sweet.’

‘You sneaky bastard! When have you been doing that then?’

‘While you’re at school being an idiot and studying, mate.’

‘You mean he’s snuck round here without me and been playing you songs?’

‘Well, just once or twice,’ Dagmar admitted coyly.

‘You see, Pauly,’ Otto crowed. ‘Just because you study hardest doesn’t mean you’re cleverest.’

‘No need to be jealous, Pauly,’ Dagmar said soothingly. ‘You know I love you both.’

‘Yes, well, one day you’re going to have to choose, you know,’ Paulus blurted. ‘You know we’ve always told you that.’

‘Yeah. That’s the one thing him and I agree on, Dags. You’ll have to choose some time.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll choose the one who can get me out of this country,’ Dagmar said.

She said it jokingly but there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in the jest. The pressing challenge of survival was never far from any of their minds.

‘I’ll get you out, Dags,’ Paulus said firmly.

‘No, Dags, I’ll get you out.’

‘Well then?’ Dagmar said cheerfully. ‘It looks like the three of us will be leaving together. Won’t that be fun?’