Two Brothers

to the point.

‘What happened to my mother?’

The Jewish Hospital Berlin, 1943

IN JANUARY 1943 the Wehrmacht lost the battle of Stalingrad, thereby sealing the fate of the Third Reich. In response to this catastrophe, Josef Goebbels promised Hitler a Jew-free Berlin for his birthday.

Despite the massive strains on the city administration caused by the Allied bombing, the Berlin police authorities determined to make good Goebbels’ promise.

In February 1943 the Gestapo began what was to be their final mass action against Berlin’s Jews. Police supported by the Waffen SS spread out across the city. They smashed down every suspect door and invaded every cellar. They climbed through windows, sledgehammered walls and crowbarred locks. They burst into homes and factories. They opened drains, scoured bombsites and searched sewers. Working from meticulously prepared civil lists and with the aid of a small group of Jewish informers they sought out the last six or seven thousand Jews still living in the city. Scooping them up and taking them directly to a mass ‘transfer site’ on Levetzowstrasse into which they were crammed without toilets or water. This time there was no formal summons. People were simply snatched where they were found, children without their mothers, husbands without their wives. The comforting fiction of allowing people to prepare a bag containing ‘work boots, two pairs of socks and two pairs of underpants etc.’ was a thing of the past. The tactics learnt in Poland and the Ukraine had come home to Berlin.

For the time being, Mischlinge were to be spared, along with a tiny handful of privileged workers employed at the so-called Jewish Hospital. Frieda was one of these workers, but despite her special status she decided on that day in February when the last police action began that her time had come to join her beloved Wolfgang and Paulus.

It wasn’t planned but it happened anyway. She had been outside the hospital, walking in the frozen streets. Taking a few minutes’ break from the nonstop work in which she was engaged.

With her yellow star on her breast she was accosted almost immediately. A van pulled up and she was ordered to get in by a policeman holding a wooden club on which Frieda could see there was encrusted blood along with skin and hair.

Frieda presented her special papers, which were all in order, and she was told that she could go. It was clear to her that some sort of arbitrary round-up was underway and so she began running back to the hospital.

However, on her way she saw another police van, an open lorry this time. It was pulled up outside a building that was clearly being used as a Jewish kindergarten. A terrible scene was unfolding as twenty or so children between the ages of three and eight were dragged by soldiers from the building and thrown physically on to the truck. An elderly woman who must have been the children’s teacher was trying to protest, while all around her the children screamed and fell and soiled themselves.

A soldier began to push the teacher towards the truck, where-upon the old woman turned and slapped him in the face. For a moment the soldier and the old lady stared at each other, both equally shocked at what had occurred. Then the soldier simply drew his gun and shot her. After which he and a comrade hurled her dying body on to the lorry amongst the screaming children.

It was clear to Frieda, watching from the pavement, that the children were now completely alone. Whatever brief time they had left on earth they would spend in absolute terror and utter bewilderment without comfort or guidance.

‘Mummy! Mummy! Mum!’

The small voices bleated for their mothers through terror-twisted mouths set in faces turned to grotesque masks of horror.

The engine of the truck revved up, almost drowning out their pitiful cries. Two soldiers got into the cab while two others mounted the running board.

As a soldier raised himself up, one of the smallest of the children reached out to him, no doubt in the childish belief that grown-ups could be trusted. The little boy’s hand wiped at his wailing face as he stretched his little arms towards the man. There was so much snot, so many tears. The soldier recoiled, disgusted, punching the child away. The little boy fell back on to the dead body of his teacher.

And the children wailed. ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mum!’

The soldiers screamed back. ‘Shut up! Shut your little mouths or we’ll beat you, you Jew bastards! Shut up or we’ll kill you!’

Brutality was their defence. Each young soldier had built a thick wall of cruelty around his corrupted conscience. A wall their leaders called ‘strength’.

But the children didn’t know how to shut up. They hadn’t yet learnt to bow their heads and shuffle.

And so they cried, ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

Frieda heard those cries.

Mum? That was her name. It had been her name since 1920.

She was a mother.

And now she was their mother. Twenty more adoptions, all at once.

‘Stop!’ Frieda shouted at the last of the soldiers who was in the act of boarding the truck. ‘Look! I wear the star! I’m a Jew! Take me! I will keep the children quiet.’

Continued Conversation in the Park Berlin, 1956

‘FRIEDA CLIMBED ON to the truck,’ Dagmar said. ‘Silke got the story from someone who saw it. Your mother couldn’t bear for those children to spend the last hours of their brief lives without love or comfort, so she spent her own last hours giving them hers. She climbed aboard and she got amongst them and put out her arms and held as many of them as she could. Apparently the children clustered to her like bees around a flower. Then as the lorry pulled away she began to sing Hoppe Hoppe Reiter. Hoppe Hoppe Reiter.

Tears were streaming down Otto’s face.

‘She used to sing it to Paulus and me,’ he said. ‘I can hear her voice now.’

‘We heard she was still singing when the truck arrived at the station, but by then somehow your mother had worked the magic that she always did and she had the children singing too. Even as they were pushed into the cattle trucks, crushed in with a hundred other condemned souls. “Hip hop there, rider! Hip hop there, rider!” Your mother went with those children to Dachau that very day. I imagine she led them singing into the gas chamber.’

Otto wept and wept. Thinking of his beloved mother and how brave her end had been.

She had died as she had lived, a beacon of goodness in a sick and dreadful world.

‘And so there was only us left,’ Dagmar went on. ‘Me and Silke.’

Her voice was far away. Through his tears Otto understood that Dagmar needed to tell the whole story.

‘We lived in Pauly’s flat and of course we fought and fought. Two very different girls who never should have roomed together. Silke was trying to establish resistance connections. Can you believe it? Using her cover as a war widow to contact other Communists. She was a part of Die Rote Kapelle. The Red Orchestra — I suppose you’ve heard of it.’

‘Yes,’ Otto said, pulling himself together and blowing his nose on his handkerchief. ‘The Communist-backed resistance. I’ve heard of it.’

‘I warned her,’ Dagmar went on. ‘I told her if she was ever the cause of me getting caught I’d make damn sure she and her bloody idiot friends went down with me. That apartment was my castle. Paulus built it for me. Because he loved me. Me. Not some random bunch of self-righteous Reds.’