Two Brothers

God, how she missed Wolfgang. The apartment was more crowded than it had ever been but she was so wretchedly alone. Most of the time she was too busy to think about it, but at home, surrounded by tired, terrified old Jews, it hit her hard. Her whole family was gone. Paulus. Otto.

And Wolfgang.

Her beloved partner and soulmate, lost beneath the cold dark waters of the Spree.

‘We must try to be practical,’ Frieda continued, as always taking refuge in her doctor’s persona. Calm, efficient. Above all active. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for some time. These restrictions are making life very hard but if we organize ourselves they can be tolerated. The evening curfew and the restricted shopping hours certainly present an organizational challenge—’

‘Only between four and five p.m.’ Herr Katz spluttered. ‘Why? Why are we only to be allowed in shops for an hour each day? What possible purpose can it serve?’

‘So that decent Germans may know when to avoid our infection, of course,’ Herr Tauber growled.

‘Well, with the few coupons they allow us and the little money they’ve left us,’ Frau Katz chipped in, ‘an hour is about fifty-nine minutes more than we need to shop anyway!’

‘Please!’ Frieda snapped once again, struggling to remain placid. ‘We’ve moaned enough! I was trying to suggest that we start to organize ourselves better.’

‘Organize, Frau Stengel?’ Frau Katz enquired. ‘What is there to organize?’

‘What is there to organize, Frau Katz?’ Frieda was angry. ‘There is everything to organize. Most of our young people are gone now but we’re all still able-bodied and can help those who aren’t. The old, the sick, the little children and the mothers with young babies. How is a mother with small children and a husband stolen to the camps to get to the bread shop between four and five if the kids are sick? She can’t but we can. You can. The curfew is causing some old people never to leave their homes; we need to find them and take them out. If only for a little walk — the streets are still free to us.’

‘Not all of them,’ Herr Leibovitz interjected.

‘How many do you need for a stroll? You’ve only got two feet, haven’t you! We need to make a list of every vulnerable person we know. And who they know. We need to set up some kind of telephone tree whereby everybody has a number they can call if they need help, even just for the shopping or a bit of company or…’

Then they heard the lift.

The creaking and the clanking as it settled to a halt on their floor.

All froze. It was probably only a late caller. A sick mother looking for Doctor Stengel, too tired to obey the sign in the lift. Or perhaps the gentleman friend of Fraulein Belzfreund.

But a knock at the door was always a cause for fear these days.

Later Frieda wondered at the coincidence that they came just then. Just as she had mentioned a telephone tree. It was almost as if they’d been listening.

Perhaps they really were the devil.

‘It must be a late patient,’ Frieda said. ‘I’ve told them not to use the lift.’

But the sound of stamping boots quickly made it clear that this was no patient. It was a visit from them.

The whole room froze in fear. Even old Herr Tauber looked scared, until he realized this himself and settled his features in a mask of defiance.

There was a loud banging on the door. The usual thunderous clenched-fist assault.

Frieda took a deep breath and went to answer it. Before she had been able to reach the door the banging began again. When the Nazi authorities knocked on a Jew’s door they expected instant access. Another moment and they would have kicked it down.

There were just two of them. A policeman and an SS trooper.

‘Frau Stengel, formerly Frau Doktor Stengel?’ the policeman demanded.

‘Yes,’ Frieda replied. ‘How can we help you?’

‘Your telephone,’ he said.

‘My telephone?’ Frieda asked. ‘What about it?’

‘Hand it over,’ the policeman said. ‘As of this month, July 1940, by order of the Reich Government, Jews are no longer to be allowed to own telephones. All telephones owned by Jews are to be surrendered immediately!’

Frieda wondered if she had turned pale. It certainly felt as if she had. She thought of all the calls she made each day. Working old contacts, begging for drugs, bandages, needles from wherever she could scrounge them. The hours she spent trying to find accommodation for distressed families who had been arbitrarily thrown out on to the streets. Even that day she had put out a dozen feelers and was waiting on return calls that might mean life or death for patients in her care.

Now those calls would never come.

Frieda had only that very moment been explaining how survival could only lie in cooperation. In organization.

Clearly the Nazis understood that too.

Silently, she nodded to the little occasional table by the wall on which her precious telephone stood.

Without a word the SS man went and picked it up, tearing the lead from the wall.

The policeman scribbled his signature on a pad of printed forms, tore the top one off and handed it to Frieda.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘Your receipt,’ the policeman replied.

Frieda turned to the trooper, who was standing holding her stolen telephone. She looked at him intensely.

‘It’s Renke, isn’t it? Thomas Renke.’

The trooper did not reply but it was clear from his eyes that Frieda was right.

‘Your mother brought you to my surgery many times when you were young. Whooping cough, roseola, rubella, measles. Goodness, you had them all. You seem to have turned out well in the end though. Please remember me to Frau Renke.’

The black-clad figure remained silent.

‘Come,’ said the policeman, and the two of them left, SS Trooper Renke taking Frieda’s telephone with them.

Frieda sunk into a chair.

‘Drip drip drip,’ she said.

‘What’s that, my dear?’ her father asked, going over and putting a hand on her shoulder.

‘It’s how they’ve done it, Dad,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Not all at once but one little torture at a time. Ban this, take that. For years even you were sure they would not go so far. But one drip at a time they’ve gone further and further. Further than we ever dreamt they would. Now we are not even to be allowed to communicate with each other. How far will they go? I wonder. Where will this end?’

Recognized Calais, 1940

PAULUS HAD BEEN expecting it.

Every day since he had enlisted he had been on his guard. Certainly he was buried deep, the Nazi military machine was vast, there were millions of Germans now in uniform, and of course that uniform was the very last one anyone might expect the man they had known as Paulus Stengel to be wearing. Nonetheless, amongst those millions were some who would know him, whatever he wore. And who knew what he really was.

Paulus had been alert to such an encounter since the first day he had swapped identities with his brother, and now that moment had arrived.