Two Brothers

New Laws Berlin and Nuremberg, 1935

WOLFGANG DID NOT die in Nazi captivity.

The concentration camps the SA set up in such haste during their first orgy of power were not yet the death factories that they would later become under the SS. Wolfgang came home, just as Paulus had said that he would.

‘It’s the Olympics next year,’ a guard sneered, as Wolfgang and a group of other prisoners hobbled, limped and even crawled through the wood and wire gate. ‘Got to look dainty for the world, haven’t we? Maybe you lot can form a relay team.’

The joke was not lost on the hollow-faced skeletal figures as they staggered towards a kind of freedom. The health of anyone who had survived a year or so in the care of the Sturmabteilung was certain to have been completely broken and Wolfgang was no exception. The starvation diet, harsh physical labour and exposure to the elements had brought his primary organs to the point of near collapse. He had become rheumatic and his liver and kidneys were weak; he had also contracted TB. This last of course meant that he could no longer play his beloved trumpet for more than a few minutes at a time.

‘Like cutting off a footballer’s feet,’ he said.

He could, however, still play violin and piano, having done everything in his power to protect his hands during captivity.

‘I used to clench my fists when they beat me,’ he told Frieda, ‘and when they knocked me down I kept my hands under me. The guards used to like to stamp on people’s fingers, so I kept mine out of the way. Most blokes protected their balls, I looked after my fingers.’

‘Thanks a lot!’ Frieda tried to joke. ‘Not thinking of me then!’

‘Don’t worry, baby,’ Wolfgang smiled. A hollow-cheeked, gap-toothed smile. ‘My balls are made of steel, you know that. The SA used to break their toes on them.’

Wolfgang liked this joke and he made it often in the weeks after his return, always causing Paulus and Otto to grimace, Silke also, who continued to spend as much time at the Stengel apartment as she could.

‘We don’t really want to hear about you and Mum and that sort of thing,’ Paulus said.

‘Yeah,’ Silke agreed, ‘it is pretty yucky hearing old people talk about sex and stuff.’

Wolfgang smiled. ‘It’s hard to think of you kids being squeamish about anything any more,’ he said, ‘not now.’

Wolfgang glanced at the floor.

At the space where previously the thick blue rug had been.

Of course one of the first things Wolfgang had learnt on his return from prison camp had been about what had taken place in the apartment on the night of his arrest. How his wife had nearly been raped and his two thirteen-year-old sons aided by Silke had bludgeoned and then suffocated Frieda’s attacker to death on the very floor on which they were now standing.

‘Please, Wolf,’ Frieda said, a shadow passing across her face, ‘I try never to think of that.’

‘I know, Freddy,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘It’s a terrible thing but I’m still so proud of the boys and Silke. I only hope I’d have the guts to do what they did.’

‘You would have, Dad,’ Otto assured him.

‘Yeah,’ Paulus agreed. ‘You wouldn’t have thought about it. We didn’t.’

The three young people exchanged glances. They rarely spoke of, or even referred to what had happened on that dreadful night, but it was always with them and often in their dreams.

If the subject was broached openly it tended to be on the occasions when Dagmar was making one of her increasingly rare visits. The fact that the other three members of the Saturday Club had gone through such a brutal and life-changing experience together was something of which she always seemed a little jealous. For all the fact that the twins loved her and her alone, she understood that Silke still shared one thing with them that she did not.

‘I’d have done it,’ she always insisted. ‘I’d have killed him, or at least I’d have done as much as Silke did.’

‘I helped roll him up!’ Silke would snap back defiantly. ‘And I helped chuck him in the river!’

‘Maybe you should tell your friends in the BDM about it,’ Dagmar remarked one day when, despite Frieda’s protests, the subject had arisen once more. ‘It could be one of your cosy campfire stories.’

Silke reddened; she was wearing her Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform. She always felt selfconscious when visiting the Stengels in her Nazi regalia but she had little choice. Like many working-class girls, her BDM uniform was by far the smartest and most serviceable outfit she owned. Besides which, on this occasion she was on duty, having come around to say goodbye before departing for the 1935 Nuremberg Rally.

‘I can’t believe they’re making you leave now, Silke,’ Frieda said, happy to find a way to change the subject. ‘The rally isn’t for another month.’

‘I know. But guess what? We’re walking there. It’s true! From Berlin to Munich. Kids are expected to do it from all over the country. Apparently it shows how tough and united we all are.’

‘They’re taking children away from their families for a month?’

‘Haven’t you heard the joke? What with the HJ and the BDM and the SA and the Women’s League, the only time a good German family meets up these days is at the Nuremberg Rally.’

Frieda smiled a sad smile. ‘And what about school?’

‘The party doesn’t care about education. Only loyalty.’

‘I do think,’ Dagmar sniffed, ‘that you might at least take off the armband when you visit. This is, after all, one of the few places in Berlin where we don’t have to look at swastikas.’

Silke certainly cut an incongruous figure in the Stengel living room, her thick blonde pigtails clamped beneath a jet black beret and a swastika emblazoned on the arm of her brown blouse.

‘It’s stitched on,’ Silke protested, ‘and don’t sneer like that. It isn’t my fault.’

‘No, of course it isn’t. None of this is anybody’s fault except the Jews themselves, is it?’

‘Come on, Dags,’ Paulus said. ‘Just because she’s in the League of Nazi Maidens doesn’t mean she’s a Nazi.’

‘I doubt she’s a maiden either,’ Dagmar observed.

‘Dagmar!’ Frieda protested.

‘I’m not a Nazi,’ Silke claimed hotly. ‘I’m a Communist, you know that.’

‘They’re the same thing,’ said Dagmar.

‘That is just a pig ignorant thing to say,’ Silke replied. ‘We Communists hate the Nazis.’

‘You don’t know anything about Communism,’ Dagmar replied loftily.

‘I know a lot more than you,’ Silke said. ‘I’ve been reading. We did a book burning and I pinched some Marx and Lenin. Lots of kids stole books. A friend of mine grabbed something called The Well of Loneliness because it’s about lesbians and she thinks she is one. Not all the BDM girls are Nazis, you know. Lots of us just have a laugh.’

‘What? Marching about?’ Dagmar snapped. ‘Sounds hilarious.’

‘We don’t do so much marching,’ Silke replied, her usual good humour returning. She rarely allowed Dagmar’s snootiness to irritate her for long. Partly out of sympathy for everything Dagmar had lost, and also because she had long since realized that the twins, whose approval she craved, would always take Dagmar’s side in the end. ‘There’s a fair bit of chucking medicine balls and jumping through hoops in your knickers and waving scarves about,’ Silke went on, ‘but it’s not like the Hitler Jugend. They’re not trying to turn us into soldiers. It’s much looser in the BDM because basically the party doesn’t really care about girls.’

‘You sound as if you actually like being in the BDM.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact I do. We do lots of camps and trips and I’ve learned to knit too.’

‘Yes, well, lucky for some,’ Dagmar commented dryly. ‘I must say it would be nice to go on a camp or an outing some time but you see we’re not allowed to go anywhere.’

‘Yeah, I know that, Dags,’ Silke said hotly. ‘And I’m sorry and all that but don’t forget you went on plenty of holidays before. I never went on one, not one. I got my first ever holiday with the BDM. Working-class people didn’t get that chance before…’ She stopped, slightly embarrassed. ‘I mean, not that I’m saying it’s better now. You know I don’t think that… It’s just, actually, it’s better for me, that’s all.’

‘I’m thrilled for you,’ Dagmar replied.

Frieda interjected, ever the peace-maker.

‘Well,’ she said gently, ‘I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time on your walk, Silke, and the rally will be very… interesting. The newspapers keep saying it’s going to be even bigger than last year, although I really don’t see how it can be. There were seven hundred thousand at the last one.’

The 1934 rally had been made into a hit movie called Triumph of the Will chronicling for the entire world the incredible scale of Nazi triumphalism. Frieda had gone to see the film out of a sort of grim fascination. No identification was required to buy a ticket. Nobody imagined a Jew would want to attend.

‘All those hundreds and thousands of rows of people,’ she said, ‘standing in perfect lines. Where did they all go to the toilet?’

‘You just pee where you can,’ Silke explained, ‘round the edges, sometimes even where you stand. In your pants if you’re up the front, those poor people were waiting for eight hours and more. The stink in the latrine areas was just awful but of course you don’t get that on the film. It might have been a triumph of will but it wasn’t a triumph of plumbing. This year I’m going to make sure I don’t drink anything on the morning of the parade.’

As it turned out the 1935 rally was bigger than its famous predecessor and for Germany’s Jews at least it was much more significant.

There were to be new laws. Laws that would formalize the anti-Semitic discrimination that was already central to German National life.

The Nuremberg Laws, as they came to be known.

Silke, who was there, could not understand what was being said, standing as she was eighty rows back and squirming for the toilet. To her the blurred rasping voice echoing across the vast parade ground sounded like a dog yapping from inside a barrel.

But listening on the radio in Berlin Frieda could make out the Leader’s voice very clearly and understood what it meant for her family.

For her sons.

‘Wolfgang,’ she whispered, ‘we have to tell the boys.’

Wolfgang had been struggling to avoid drawing the same conclusion.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘These laws don’t seem to be much different to what’s been going on already.’

‘I know, Wolf,’ Frieda replied, ‘but don’t you see? They’re making it all legal now. Slowly but surely they’re putting us in a position where the law not only won’t protect us but it will actually destroy us… legally. It’s like they’re building a gallows bit by bit, plank by plank, so that by the time they come to stand us on the trapdoor and put our heads in the noose it will seem inevitable, proper, the correct thing to do. Finishing us off will be a legal requirement. An administrative matter. Beyond their control. Sorry and all that but it’s the law!’

‘Bastards,’ was all Wolfgang could find to say.

‘But of course,’ Frieda went on, her voice filled with emotion, ‘it’s only the law for three of us.’

For a moment there was silence between them.

A mutual acknowledgement of the secret they had shared for fifteen years.

A secret that had once been just a family affair.

A matter of private feelings. Something they knew they would one day have to address but which they intended to do in such a manner that the four members of the Stengel family might continue as before.

In fact, in earlier years, when Frieda and Wolfgang had discussed how they would eventually tell the boys about the adoption, they had fixed upon the plan that at first they would only tell them that one of them had been adopted and not reveal which of them it was. Saying that it was a matter of no consequence and that they might or might not tell them the full story later.

Because it really was impossible to tell.

Neither boy seemed any more or any less a child of their parents than the other. Paulus was studious and dedicated like his mother. Otto wilder and less diligent like his father. Otto was the musical one, taking after Wolfgang, while Paulus was planning a career, a career in which he hoped one day to be able to help people, just as his mother did. He was darker coloured like Frieda while Otto shared the same sandy hair and tendency to freckle like his father.

‘If ever there was an interesting experiment in nurture over nature,’ Frieda had frequently observed during the carefree years, ‘it’s our boys. I may write a paper on it one day.’

But in Hitler’s Germany, the nature and nurture debate was long since dead. Something called ‘blood’ was everything.

‘Blood’ that man screamed over the radio.

German ‘blood’ which must be protected at all costs.

Every person in the country was to have their ‘blood’ categorized to determine how much ‘German’ blood they possessed and how much ‘Jew’.

The secret which had begun at the Berliner Buch medical school in 1920 could be a secret no longer.