Two Brothers

Jew Catcher Berlin, 1945

THE ATMOSPHERE WAS always heavy in the apartment on the days when Silke’s shadowy Communist friends were due to visit.

Dagmar hated them with the passion of a true blue Conservative. And it was not merely because their presence in her home so dramatically increased her own chances of being detected, she hated them on ideological grounds too. She hated them for her father’s sake. She thought they were nothing but self-righteous fools. A gang of egotists and fantasists who made themselves ridiculous with their solemn clenched-fist salutes, endless bickering over ideological details and expansive plans for future government conducted round a bare kitchen table by the light of a single candle.

Silke seemed genuinely to believe that she and her pathetic little group of unshaven conspirators were actually contributing to the defeat of the Nazis. She claimed that they passed information about police and Wehrmacht activities to the approaching Red Army.

But Dagmar did not believe for a moment that their tiny efforts would make even the slightest difference to the outcome of the war. In fact, she strongly suspected that they ran their little cell for entirely selfish motives.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ Dagmar said when Silke informed her that another meeting of the Kapelle was to be held in the apartment that evening. ‘You’re feathering your nest for after the war. Establishing your credentials. When the Nazis are gone, you and your friends will claim the right to run the country, just like you tried to do the last time when the Kaiser left. When the Red Army arrives you’ll run straight up to them waving your little secret code book and your party cards, shouting, “Comrades, we’re the good Germans. We’re the ones who’ve been sending you all those messages.” And then you’ll all get nice jobs with the party and all of the meat and white bread. I know you Commies. My father sacked enough of you.’

‘Believe it or not, Dagmar, not everyone is motivated entirely by selfishness.’

‘Ha! What could be more selfish than a Communist? You think you can tell everyone in the world how to run their lives and if they won’t do it you shoot them.’

That evening, when the hour of the meeting approached, Dagmar would usually have retreated to her bedroom. But this time she simply could not face being confined once more in the space where she had spent the vast majority of the previous two years. After Paulus had died, Silke had been told that without a husband to look after she had lost the right to employ a maid. The authorities had demanded that the Ukrainian girl Bohuslava whom the Stengels had registered for rations be returned to the employment pool. Silke had therefore been forced to report the fictitious maid as a runaway, and since that moment Dagmar had been truly a ‘submarine’ with no papers or identity whatsoever, surviving in the half light, on food Silke still shared with her for Paulus’s sake.

‘You mustn’t go out!’ Silke said. ‘You’re crazy. You only need to be stopped once.’

‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to, because if I don’t I will go completely sodding mad. The war’s nearly over anyway. Your precious heroic Red Army’s in East Prussia and no doubt we’ll all be Commies in a month.’

‘With any luck we will,’ Silke countered defiantly.

‘Great. I can’t wait to pull on my overalls and go work on a collective farm, but in the meantime I’m going to be a member of the petit bourgeois just one more time. I’m going to pin up my hair, put on some make-up, wear a nice pair of shoes and go for a walk!’

‘For God’s sake, Dagmar, you’re safe inside. Why take the risk?’

‘Because I want to be a fucking human being again!’

‘Keep your voice down!’ Silke hissed. ‘You don’t live here, remember.’

‘You’re all right!’ Dagmar went on, only half heeding Silke’s warning to speak more quietly. ‘You’ve got your stupid politics. What have I got? Nothing. And I haven’t had anything for twelve fucking years.’

‘You had Paulus and Otto!’ Silke snarled back, now raising her own voice.

‘Oh for God’s sake, enough with the Stengel boys,’ Dagmar said, throwing up her arms in exasperation. ‘They loved me, I know. What do you want me to do — whip myself with gratitude? They loved me. They didn’t love you. I’m sorry. No doubt under Communism you could force them to love you, but your revolution’s going to come a bit late for that, isn’t it? Because Pauly’s dead and Otto’s gone!’

‘You’re a real bitch, Dagmar,’ Silke said with tears starting in her eyes. ‘A really mean bitch.’

‘Oh grow up, Silke. I’m going for a walk. And what’s more, if you’ve got any sense you’ll come with me. Because this place is driving us both potty. I am going to go down to the Tiergarten, where I believe they still have cafés, and I’m going to buy a cup or a glass of whatever foul shit they’ll sell me and pretend to be a human being for an hour or two, not a victim of the Nazis. Are you coming?’

‘No, of course I’m not. I have a meeting.’

‘Then goodbye.’

It was the hair and the make-up that were Dagmar’s undoing. Perhaps as Bohuslava the maid in her headscarf, apron and dungarees, she might have passed unnoticed. But Dagmar Fischer always turned heads. Always attracted attention, even as pale and gaunt as she’d become. And she loved it. Basking in the appreciative glances thrown her way by weary soldiers as she swung along the path. And it was good cover too, just what Pauly had advised her to do at the station on the day Otto left. Walk with confidence and nobody will think to question you. It was those who skulked that got caught.

Besides Dagmar felt safe. No German would recognize her as the Jewish heiress who had supposedly killed herself in 1939.

But it wasn’t a German who recognized the beautiful woman who was drawing all the admiring glances as she sat sipping her watery acorn coffee in the rubble of the Tiergarten.

It was a Jew.

‘Hello, Dagmar,’ a voice said. ‘Surely you remember me?’

Dagmar didn’t recognize the voice but when she turned around she knew the questioner immediately and her blood ran cold. The woman smiling at her was one just like herself. A beautiful young woman in her twenties. Another Jewish princess who had faded away in the 1930s. A blonde version of Dagmar, but one whose name was whispered in fear by every submarine in Berlin. Stella Kübler, the Jew-catcher.

The exquisite young woman with her Aryan looks and corn-coloured hair, who bought her life afresh each day by denouncement and betrayal.

The woman known to her Gestapo handlers as ‘Blonde Poison’.

‘I don’t know you,’ Dagmar stammered, attempting to disguise her German. ‘I am Hungarian. A maid.’

‘Come on, Dagmar,’ the Jew-hunter said, ‘the game’s up. We went to half a dozen of the same parties together as girls. We were banned from the same pools. Goodness, my parents even went to your dad’s leaving do at the Kempinski Hotel. I’ve often wondered if you’d ever turn up. Certainly never believed that suicide story, not Dagmar Fischer. You do look well, I must say. How have you managed it?’

There were two men standing behind the sinister beauty, two men in coats and Homburg hats. They stepped forward and laid their hands on Dagmar.

The hiding was over. She was finally a prisoner of the Gestapo.