Two Brothers

Blood Family Saxony, 1935

THE FOLLOWING MORNING they rose with the sun.

Silke took a towel from her bag and a little galvanized tin box with soap in it.

‘I’ll just go and have a wash and stuff,’ she said.

‘Wow. Soap. You never bothered with that when we slept out as kids.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not a kid any more, am I?’ Silke replied, not looking Otto in the eye.

‘I didn’t think to bring any myself,’ Otto admitted.

‘God! Boys!’ Silke said with mock exasperation. ‘Well, you can borrow mine… I mean after.’

‘Yeah. Of course. That’s right. You go first. I’ll wait and go next.’

They smiled at each other. In the past they would have simply gone together. Free and unselfconscious. But now they both understood that the time of innocent intimacy had passed.

‘Back in a minute,’ Silke said.

‘No rush.’

‘I’ve got a little garden trowel and a roll of lavatory paper in my bag, too, if you want to use them.’

‘You’re a good camper, Silks. I didn’t bring anything.’

‘Ah they train us well in the BDM, you know. The Führer watches over us even when we’re squatting in a bush!’

‘Always thought he looked like a pervert.’

After their ablutions and a drink of stream water to wash down the remains of the bread and cheese, they mounted their bikes once more.

‘Ouch!’ Silke said.

‘Me too,’ Otto agreed, ‘but only twenty-five K to go.’

‘Yeah. And then all the way back.’

The hamlet that was their destination was scarcely large enough to even make it on to the map. It was reached by a deeply rutted, hard-to-cycle, unmetalled lane which ran through some small outlying farms and ended up amongst a little group of poor cottages clustered around an algae-covered duck pond.

There was a small wooden chapel and beside that a village pub of sorts which was really just the front parlour of one of the cottages with an old tin Bitburger beer sign hanging outside. This also doubled as a post office and tiny general store, offering a few tinned goods and some grey-looking chocolate. It was here that Otto enquired after the people he was looking for. Herr and Frau Hahn. His maternal grandparents by birth.

He had half feared that in the intervening fifteen years they might have moved on from the village where they had lived when their daughter died, but like most peasants of their generation and of all the many generations that had preceded them, Herr and Frau Hahn were born, lived and would no doubt die in the same few square kilometres of land. Their only trip to Berlin had in fact been for their daughter’s confinement when they had hoped to bring her back and get her wed to a decent farm boy who would accept her bastard child.

That plan of course had never happened and the Hahns’ daughter had never come home. But now her child had and he was standing in their little parlour.

‘You are a fine-looking boy,’ the man said, the deep lines of his weather-beaten old face creasing between tears and a smile.

The old woman was openly crying, dabbing at her eyes with an ancient, yellowing lace handkerchief.

‘Are you truly our Inge’s son?’ she asked.

‘Of course he is,’ the man said, ‘look at him, can’t you see her in him? Can’t you see her now? Standing here in her home as if she’d never left. He has her beautiful eyes.’

The old couple were clearly almost overcome and Otto shifted uneasily. Embarrassed to be the focus of such unbridled emotion from two people who were strangers to him and whom he intended should remain strangers.

‘He is! He’s Inge’s boy!’ the woman said.

‘Please, Frau Hahn…’ Otto began, but before he could finish the stooped little woman had scurried across the room to a dresser on which were arranged their few family treasures. One or two pieces of ornamental china, a music box and some framed family photos.

‘Come see,’ the old lady said, picking up various photographs. ‘Here is your dear mother.’

Otto did not move to join Frau Hahn and view the photo. He was looking at a different picture, hanging on the wall above the display in pride of place, framed by a garland of dried flowers. A picture of Hitler.

‘You are Nazis?’ Otto asked.

Herr Hahn turned to Silke, who was sitting on the only cushioned chair, which the old couple had insisted she occupy, nodding at her BDM uniform.

‘We all serve the Führer,’ he said with a little bow. ‘Just like your charming young friend.’

‘Our Führer was sent to Germany by providence,’ his wife added with an evangelical smile. ‘He watches over us and makes all well.’

Otto was silent, his lip quivering slightly.

‘Never mind that, Otts,’ Silke said quickly. ‘Everyone has that portrait on their wall. Forget about the Führer, come on! Take a look at the photo of your mum!’

Otto turned to Silke. ‘You know who my mum is, Silke, and she’s not in that photo.’

‘Yes of course, Otto, I know that, but all the same you should look.’

Otto stepped forward and looked at the faded photograph of an attractive sandy-haired girl.

‘It was taken in 1919,’ the old farmer said with a touch of bitterness, ‘the year before she met…’

‘My father?’ Otto said sharply, finishing the sentence that the old man had been reluctant to complete.

‘He was a Communist!’ the farmer said, still clearly very angry after sixteen years. ‘He got her with child and then deserted her.’

‘He was murdered,’ Otto corrected. ‘My parents told me. He died in the massacre at Lichtenburg. Murdered by the Freikorps. By the same people who became the Nazis, Herr Hahn.’

The old couple looked confused.

‘Please don’t call me Herr Hahn, my boy,’ the sad-looking peasant begged. ‘I am your grandfather.’

Otto bit his lip.

‘I’ve come to ask you about my family,’ he said. ‘I want to know if there is any Jewish blood in our line.’

The old couple looked shocked for a moment and then smiled. They of course completely misunderstood the purpose behind Otto’s question.

‘Oh you poor boy,’ Frau Hahn exclaimed. ‘Of course, as an adopted child you must be worried about your blood for fear that it isn’t pure.’

‘That some Jew crept over the back fence!’ the farmer grunted.

‘Of course! Of course, my child,’ the woman said, ‘you must be reassured. But look!’

Frau Hahn reached up to the single shelf that hung bracketed to the wall and on which stood just two books. An ancient family Bible and a copy of Mein Kampf. Frau Hahn brought down the Bible and displayed it to Otto. ‘See,’ the old wife said with great pride, ‘our whole family tree laid out for six generations right back to 1790. All good Christian names and every one of them to be found on gravestones here and in nearby villages. None more than ten kilometres from the pure German soil on which we are standing right now. And you will also find every one of the names you see here inscribed in the records of the parish churches here and thereabouts. No Yids and no gyppos in our line, my dear, dear boy.’

Such a sweet-looking lady. And no doubt as kind as she looked. Except when it came to the treatment which she would happily see handed out to any ‘Jews or gyppos’ who dared to come near her exalted ‘stock’.

Otto stared at the handwriting in the Bible. Reading the various names, the last of which was that of Inge Hahn. His mother.

‘And my father?’ Otto asked. ‘What about him? He’s not entered here and there was no name on the adoption certificate either. Do you know who he was? Do you know his name?’

‘Yes,’ the farmer said, ‘we know his name, although I won’t speak it in this house or anywhere else.’ He took some paper from a little drawer in the treasures table and slowly and carefully wrote down a name. ‘But you mustn’t fear, my boy,’ Herr Hahn went on. ‘I know that the man was of good stock for all he disgraced his own family and ours. Inge wrote and told us his father was a minister in the Lutheran Church in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, but he died in the war. His mother may live. We wouldn’t know.’

Otto took the paper and thanked the old couple.

‘We have to leave,’ Otto added. ‘We’ve got a long way to go on our bikes to get home.’

Herr and Frau Hahn were horrified, devastated even. Clearly Otto’s sudden appearance had brought them such hope.

‘But won’t you stay?’ they pleaded. ‘You and your friend? We have food and apple juice. We are so pleased to see you and we have so much to talk about.’

Otto stared down at his boots.

‘No, ma’am,’ he murmured, ‘we don’t.’

‘But yes! Of course we do,’ the farmer’s wife protested. ‘You can’t leave now that you have only just arrived.’

‘I’m sorry, Frau Hahn. But I can’t stay. I really am sorry but I have heard all I came to hear.’ Otto went to the door. ‘Come on, Silke, we need to get going.’

Frau Hahn began crying. Her husband took up the old leather-bound Bible and thrust it towards Otto.

‘Won’t you put your name in our Bible at least?’ the old farmer said. ‘Beneath your mother’s? She is the last one of our family so inscribed.’

But Otto wouldn’t do it.

‘I wish you well, Herr Hahn,’ he said politely. ‘I really do. But you’re not my grandfather and the people in this Bible aren’t my family. I have no place in your book. My family began with the mum and dad you gave me to. And what’s more, they’re Jews. I am a Jew.’

The two old peasants looked dumbstruck.

‘Jews?’ Herr Hahn asked in genuine horror. ‘That doctor gave you to Jews? We let you be taken by Jews?’

‘That’s right,’ Otto replied, ‘you left me with the finest people in Berlin and for that at least I will always be grateful to you. Goodbye.’

With that Otto left the tiny cottage with Silke scuttling after him, mumbling embarrassed farewells on both their behalf.

Otto didn’t look back as they cycled away, but Silke did, and she saw the old couple standing in the doorway staring after them, their faces empty with loss.

When Otto got back to the city, the first thing he did before even going home was to ride to the Lutheran church at Prenzlauer Berg and enquire after the previous minister. The one who had died in the Great War and whose name the peasant farmer Hahn had written down for him.

It was just as old Herr Hahn had said it would be. There was no shadow of Jewry to be found in Otto’s paternal line, any more than there had been in that of his mother.

That news for which every other German longed, to be classified officially as a genuine six-generation ‘pure blood’, left Otto devastated. He really wasn’t a Jew and he could not turn himself into one no matter how much he might want to.

And so, like the Jews he could no longer claim to be, he must be exiled.