Two Brothers

‘I don’t know. I asked, but the agency said they didn’t discuss those things.’

They were silent once more. Wondering if weeks before there had been children forced with clubs and rifle butts from the very room in which they were standing.

‘I saw a lot of that in Poland, you know. Forced evictions,’ Paulus said. ‘It was just dreadful. Thousands of Polish families, not just Jews either, torn out of their homes in an instant. The radio left on, food still on the cooker, it was that brutal.’

‘Come on,’ Silke said. ‘We don’t want to be late for our wedding, do we?’

Paulus put Silke’s bags in her room and took up his brand new SS forage cap from the little table in the hallway.

‘Silke,’ he said hesitantly, ‘it’s an amazing thing you’re doing, you know. A wonderful generous thing you’re doing for Dagmar.’

‘I’m not doing it for Dagmar, you silly arse!’ Silke laughed. ‘I’m doing it for you. And for Otto. For the Stengel twins! Both of you. Because you want to do it for her. Because being men you both fell in love with the prettiest girl you knew, but she’s a Jew so now we’ll all have to spend the war looking after her.’

‘And what about you?’ Paulus asked. ‘It means an empty sort of life for you. Married but not married. I mean, you can’t build a life for yourself.’

‘Bit late to try and talk me out of it now.’

‘I’m not, it’s just…’

‘Look, SS Sturmmann Stengel,’ Silke said, putting aside the little posy of primroses she was carrying and taking Paulus’s hands, ‘I want to do this. For a number of reasons. And it isn’t just the Saturday Club or the fact that you and Otto have always meant everything to me. This is a good life, actually. It means I can leave compulsory domestic service, for a start, which believe me is no small thing. And marriage to a serving man, a serving SS man, brings lots of perks too. I’ll eat well, I’ll sleep comfortably. And most important of all, this isn’t just good cover for Dagmar, you know. It’s good cover for me.’

Paulus knew what she meant and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

‘You mean as a Communist?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I thought your lot were Hitler’s friends now,’ Paulus said.

A spasm of sadness passed across Silke’s features.

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 had devastated what little remained of the underground German Communist movement.

‘Stalin took a tactical decision,’ Silke said defensively. ‘He’s buying time, I’m sure of it. One day there will be resistance again, and when there is, I want to be a part of it.’

Paulus didn’t reply. There was nothing he could say. He was using her, he could scarcely object that she wanted to use him. They were all dependent on each other.

They left the apartment and took a taxi together to the Moabit town hall on the Tiergarten.

‘We mustn’t keep Herr Richter waiting.’

‘Booking him must have taken some nerve,’ Silke said, whistling through her teeth.

‘Yeah. A bit,’ Paulus conceded.

A week previously Paulus had put on his new Waffen SS uniform, marched into the local Gestapo station and asked to see the senior officer present.

Then, with great audacity, he had requested the Gestapo chief, whom he had never before met, to officiate at his wedding.

‘I am the racially pure, adopted child of Jews, sir,’ he said, ‘hence I have no family and am all alone. My life and my marriage belong to the Fuhrer. I wish to have the most authoritative witness to that fact. Therefore I am respectfully asking you to bear witness at my wedding.’

It was a brave and brilliant idea, which tied the local Gestapo into his name and his address, and indeed his life. Making the chief personally bonded to them.

As always, Paulus’s tactical planning was faultless.

As Richter stood beneath the portrait of the Fuhrer solemnly intoning the various oaths to State and Leader that a Nazi wedding required, he could not in his wildest dreams have imagined the truth. That the fine and upstanding young soldier standing before him and making those oaths would in a few short hours be grinding a glass beneath his boot in the presence of his mother and grandparents as he took part in a second marriage that day. This time to the woman he loved, who, like him, was a Jew.

Old Friends Berlin, 1956

LOOKING OUT OF the window of his Deutsche Lufthansa flight, Otto was struck by the fact that viewed from the air the layout of Heathrow formed an almost perfect Star of David.

He wondered if that was ironic. The British were supposed to be famous for their irony but he had never met a single one who could give him a clear definition of the word. Most of them seemed to think it just meant bad luck.

Otto decided that it was ironic. That shape, which had meant absolutely nothing to him until he was thirteen years old, and which thereafter had come to mean violence, abuse and death, was the last thing of Britain he saw as his plane disappeared into the clouds.

On his way back to Berlin. Where they had no doubt stitched that very same shape to the coats of his mother and his aged grandparents in order to mark them down for murder.

The stern-looking male attendant interrupted his reverie, handing out the complex and lengthy landing forms for the German Democratic Republic.

East Germany.

Otto folded down the little table on the back of the seat in front of him and took out his passport. Pausing for a moment to stare at it. He always paused for thought when holding his passport.

Such a precious document. So stately and imposing with its stiff, royal blue jacket. The copperplate text on the inside cover archaically stern and censorious. ‘Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…’ It sounded good even with the Suez debacle only just concluded. Even with every editorial in the land screaming that Her Britannic Majesty was not in any position to request and require anything from anybody unless the Americans said she could.

Lots of people said Britain was sunk.

But those people were idiots, as far as Otto was concerned. Being British still meant an immeasurable amount. You just had to be born somewhere else to appreciate it.

Otto finished his forms. The first German document he had filled in for seventeen years, and the first he had ever seen which did not require him to state whether he was Jewish. He put away his passport and took a pull of scotch from his hip flask. He had not expected the airline to offer anything as bourgeois as an in-flight drink and so had come prepared.

He lit up a Lucky Strike, took another pull of whisky and tried to relax.

The pilot’s voice came over the tannoy announcing that they had crossed the Channel and were flying over Holland.

Otto found himself smiling.

Holland. He had only been there once, passing through on a train. But he had lost his virginity there at a hundred kilometres an hour, so he always felt benevolent about the place.

He’d been with the girl whom he must shortly confront.

What would she look like now? he wondered.

Silke Krause.

Would her hair and skin still be golden? Or had a decade of service to the puppet masters in the Kremlin turned her pale and grey? She was only thirty-five of course, a year younger than him, but Otto had met Stasi