Two Brothers

Family Trees Berlin, 1935

OTTO SPENT THE night on a bench in the People’s Park amongst the fairy-tale statues but the following morning, as dawn broke over the city, he went home. He was cold and stiff and his heart still ached but his tears had dried. He knew that the pain and the confusion he was feeling, the fear of rejection, the isolation and the loneliness, were not his parents’ fault. They were Hitler’s, and the Nazis were now more his enemy than ever.

He climbed the six sets of stairs in order to avoid using the creaking lift at so early an hour, and let himself into the darkened flat. Inside he found his mother sitting exactly where he had left her and where she had clearly sat all night. He rushed forward and threw his arms around her.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be, Ottsy. Don’t be,’ Frieda whispered. ‘Goodness, look at me, crying again. I didn’t think I had any tears left in me.’

She hugged him tight.

‘I’ve been so worried. Pauly looked for you till one in the morning. Wolfgang tried too but he got tired. We called your friends. They all thought you’d been picked up for… for what you did yesterday evening.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Otto repeated. ‘I shouldn’t have run. I just wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘You know that we love you both just the same,’ Frieda went on. ‘You and Paulus, our two boys.’

‘Yeah, I know, Mum. They can’t break us apart,’ Otto said. ‘They never will.’

Silent tears were running in streams down Frieda’s cheeks.

‘Not in our hearts, baby,’ she whispered. ‘Not in our hearts.’

Otto felt the wet tears against his own face as he hugged her. He knew what she was saying, the salty agony glistening on her cheeks confirmed it.

‘Are they going to take me away, Mum?’ he asked.

Frieda could not bring herself to reply.

Wolfgang had appeared at the door of his and Frieda’s bedroom and had been listening.

‘We think so, Otts,’ he croaked through his tobacco-and TB-ravaged voice. ‘We have to presume so. The newspapers say the police are supposed to identify “racially valuable stock”. The SS have been setting up orphanages. Himmler’s collecting kids.’

‘God. What are these people?’ Frieda said under her breath. ‘Can they truly be human?’

Fear replaced grief on Otto’s countenance. His face shining white in the pale dawn that was creeping in at the windows. It was a rare sight for his parents to see. Otto had become so adept at disguising terror over the years that they had imagined him fearless. But the prospect of being put into the care of the SS seemed for a moment at least to overwhelm even him.

‘I’ll hide,’ Otto said finally. ‘If they come for me I won’t be here, I’ll go underground. I’ll hide.’

‘Then they’ll take us.’ It was Paulus who spoke from the twins’ bedroom door.

‘Always the voice of reason, eh, bro?’ Otto replied with a bitter smile.

‘You know it’s true, Otts,’ Paulus said. ‘I don’t like saying it any more than you like hearing it but if they come for you and don’t find you they’ll punish us. I don’t mind. I’ll run, I’ll fight, just like you would. But Dad can’t go back into that camp.’

Otto nodded. He knew that was true.

Wolfgang turned away, ashamed to be identified as the most vulnerable member of the family.

‘You’re right, Pauly,’ Otto said. ‘Obviously. You always bloody are. I’ll let them take me. Then I’ll run.’

‘Well,’ said Frieda, ‘I imagine we have a few weeks to consider things. Let’s try to do it calmly, eh? Hope for the best, plan for the worst as they say. You’ve been out all night, Otts. I’ll make you some toasted bread and cheese and a mug of chocolate.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ Otto said. ‘Best mum in the world.’

The Stengels were not the only people hoping for the best in the weeks that followed the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws. As the long summer of 1935 turned finally to autumn it seemed as if the whole country could speak of nothing else but family history.

The new rules officially defining what constituted a Jew sparked a frenzy of genealogical research. Everybody in Germany was to be racially classified and even the most proudly Aryan types began referring nervously to their family trees in terror that they might find a Jew lurking somewhere on a branch. All across the Reich, church records, parish lists, gravestones, bible inscriptions, ancient deeds and transactions were consulted minutely by both individuals and the police in an effort to establish the racial credentials of the whole population.

Credentials which, as Wolfgang dryly observed, were supposed to be self-evident anyway.

‘I don’t know why they have to go through this fuss,’ he said bitterly, ‘surely all they need to do is look for the hunched figures with sloping foreheads, noses like grappling hooks and dripping knives in their hands and that’ll be the Jews!’

‘It’s horrible,’ Frieda said. ‘All the Aryans are terrified of finding a Jew in their line and all the Jews are desperate to find an Aryan. I’ve been having people come in all day at the surgery asking me for medical records. People are going about praying that their grandma was raped by some bacon butcher because it’s actually better to be descended from an Aryan sex criminal than a Jewish charity worker.’

It was this remark of Frieda’s that led Otto to announce he had had an idea.

The four of them had been discussing the new laws over dinner, as they had done on every evening since the night that Otto and Paulus learnt the truth about their family history.

‘You had an idea, Ottsy,’ Paulus gasped with mock wonder. ‘Is this a first? Should we celebrate?’

Otto punched Paulus. Whatever fears the future might hold for them, the twins were still the twins.

‘Yes, I’ve had an idea,’ Otto said. ‘Why should I wait for the Gestapo to investigate my history? I should do it myself. If I can find a Jew somewhere way back, then they won’t take me away.’

‘Oh, Otto,’ Frieda murmured, ‘that is such a brave and lovely thought.’

Wolfgang stretched his thin bony hand across the table to squeeze Otto’s.

‘Thanks, son,’ he whispered. ‘You’ve got nerve, I’ll give you that.’

Paulus, however, was having none of it.

‘You’re crazy!’ he said, tearing angrily at a piece of black bread as if it was Otto’s head and then drowning it in his plate of goulash. ‘Completely crazy. Every Jew in Germany wants a couple of Gentile grandparents and you’re trying to find a Jew?’

‘That’s right,’ Otto replied, clearly pleased at having for once wrong-footed his know-it-all brother. ‘As far as I’m concerned I am a Jew. I just need a convenient relative to prove it.’

‘You’re not a Jew, Otts!’ Paulus protested. ‘That’s the point! Can’t you see you’re safe?’

‘I don’t want to be safe!’ Otto said. ‘I want to be a Stengel and the Stengels are Jews.’

‘Please tell me this is a joke, Otts,’ Paulus said. ‘It’s perverse. It’s also potentially suicidal. Nobody wants to be a Jew in Germany.’

‘What a shame, eh, Mum,’ Otto said, ‘that it wasn’t the other way around back in 1920 in the hospital. Then we’d have all been happy, wouldn’t we?’

This remark brought Paulus up short. Otto could see that his point had hit home.

‘Well, Pauly?’ Otto pressed on. ‘Would you have liked that? Do you really wish it was you who didn’t have to be a Jew any more? Even if it meant having to leave home and go and live with foster Nazis?’

‘Yes,’ Paulus said firmly. ‘And not because I’d be able to go swimming and study properly again. But because if I had proper rights as a citizen I could help Mum and Dad and Pops and Grandma. And you come to think of it. Things are going to get a lot worse, you know, and having a tame German in the family might be pretty useful. I’d be happy to take the job.’

‘I think that’s a very sensible answer, Pauly,’ Frieda said.

‘Yeah, Mum?’ Otto said, with a touch of a sneer. ‘Well I think Pauly’s famous brain might not be working so well today. Tame Germans! Come on, Pauly, they’re all tame. That’s the bloody problem. We know lots of them, whispering to us that they don’t approve of what’s happening. Apologizing with their eyes for not saying hello to us in the street. What good do they do? Nothing. Bugger all. Just like Silke’s precious bloody Commies! I keep telling you, when things do get worse, the only people who will be able to help us is us. We’re going to need to stick together. Which is why I need to find a kike in my tree.’

‘Well,’ Frieda said, ‘you can have a go, Otto, but I’d be surprised if you’ll find one. I only ever met your birth grandparents once but they looked pretty völkisch to me.’

‘I have to look. I’m going to find some Jew in my blood if it kills me.’

‘Otto, if you do find any,’ Paulus said solemnly, ‘it probably will.’

‘Thanks a lot, Pauly,’ Wolfgang said, refilling his glass with spirits, ‘that really cheers us up.’