Two Brothers

Park Bench Berlin, 1956

‘FRIEDA NEVER DID come to live with us,’ Dagmar explained. ‘She told us that she intended never to go underground but to die with her patients.’

‘Yes,’ Otto replied, hollow-voiced, ‘that sounds like Mum.’

He was trying to focus on the reality of finally knowing how his brother died. Otto had been a soldier himself; he too had crawled on the ground in the night seeking out a shadowy enemy. But not on that front, in minus forty degrees, creeping between the two most bitterly ferocious armies ever assembled on earth. Then standing up, the will to live crushed out of him, inviting the liberating bullet.

Had they shot him clean? Silhouetted against the frozen night sky?

Or had they taken him and butchered him for the devil’s henchman they would have thought him to be?

Otto would never know. But he took some comfort from the knowledge that Paulus had chosen the moment of his departure from the world.

He had died as he lived, according to a plan.

They were still sitting together on the bench in the People’s Park. Otto was vaguely surprised at that. He had been half expecting at every minute to be bundled into a police car by Stasi thugs.

But only children ran past them and in the distance the band played.

The cigarette ends were piling up.

He produced another packet from his case. He had bought a carton of two hundred at Heathrow.

He was beginning to wonder if that would be enough.

‘When the final round-ups began and your mother refused to go underground,’ Dagmar continued, ‘Silke wanted to use the flat to hide others. She thought that she and I should at least share our rooms — there were so many people desperate to hide, you see. That caused plenty of trouble between us, I can tell you.’

‘You didn’t want to do it?’ Otto asked.

‘Do you find that shocking?’ Dagmar replied. ‘Why would I? Tell me? Why would I want to share? Every submarine Jew was a leper, a massive risk both to themselves and others. In constant danger of discovery and arrest. Of betrayal too. Oh yes, believe me, betrayal; dogs eat dogs when the table’s bare. If I’d let Silke bring in even one more like me we’d have been doubling our chances of detection while halving our food and other supplies. We were entering the end game, you see, Otto. The condemned were getting desperate. On both sides, German and Jew alike. The fact that the Nazis couldn’t beat Ivan sent them scurrying for easier victories elsewhere. That meant the Jews. The Final Solution was upon us. They introduced the yellow star and after that, unless you had a guardian angel like I had, there was nowhere to hide. The Gestapo began finally systematically clearing the Jews of Germany. They sent people letters and they just went, down to the station and on to the trains. Sometimes there was no letter, the police just turned up and pulled people out of their beds. Your grandparents went in November ’42. Ordered to be at the station at such and such a time with one small suitcase each. They went, of course. Everybody went. They were told that there were homes waiting for them in the east, whole new towns even; people believed it, or tried to. Even after everything that had already been done to them they tried to deny the unthinkable. They simply could not comprehend that it wasn’t homes but gas chambers that were waiting for them at the end of the line. Even after they’d been stuffed into cattle trucks. Pissing and shitting on each other, dying of suffocation and dehydration in railway sidings, pushing the corpses of babies out through the bars. They still could not quite believe that the Nazis actually meant to murder them en masse. That’s why I have some sympathy for the Germans now when they say they never knew. After all, if the Jews themselves could scarcely believe what was happening to them, then why should the people who hurried by on the other side of the street looking the other way?’

Otto didn’t want to talk about whether the Germans knew or not.

‘And my mother? When did she go?’

‘She lasted another few months. She lost the apartment, of course, just after Pauly died, in fact. No more silly conversation groups with old Jews moaning in English about not being allowed to buy soap or use telephone boxes.’

‘She had a conversation group?’ Otto said, half smiling.

‘That and a hundred other things. She was everywhere, running all over town. On foot after they banned Jews from the trams and took their bicycles. I think she was personally trying to sustain the entire victim population of Berlin. I actually think it was what saved her for so long. The Nazis weren’t stupid. They didn’t want mass panic and they certainly didn’t want resistance. They encouraged leadership amongst the Jews till the last. Your mother got taken to work in what was called the Jewish hospital, which the Gestapo still allowed to operate. They were doing everything they could to make the Jews get rid of themselves, you see. Lying to them, confusing them, sending mixed messages. The hospital Frieda ended up in was part of that. It gave people comfort when they got their movement orders. After all, if the Germans were still maintaining a Jewish hospital in Berlin, then perhaps they were also preparing homes for them in the east.’

Otto knew something of the psychology of Nazi tactics.

‘Mum worked in the Jewish hospital?’

‘I say hospital. It was more of a charnel house really. With no facilities or money whatsoever. And it was only for Mischlinge anyway, and the wives of mixed marriages. Jewesses with Aryan husbands in the army. When their husbands got killed at the front, the wives lost their special status and got shipped straight off to the death camps. Widowed and condemned to death in the same telegram. How’s that for a grim joke?’

So much history all at once. Dagmar seemed to be finding some comfort in sharing it. Otto wished she’d stick to the point.

‘What happened to my mother?’