Two Brothers

could deliver. All three of them, Otto, Dagmar and the SA man, hit the pavement together. Otto on top of the large, pot-bellied, heavily winded thug, and Dagmar sprawling beside them both, her legs in the air and her pretty sailor dress torn and spoiled.

Paulus, who always acted on intellect, had been a step or two behind in the chase. As he brought himself to a skidding halt, barely avoiding tripping over the prostrate threesome, he knew he had perhaps a second and a half at most to consider his plan. After that there could be no doubt that the other Brownshirts would overcome their surprise, pull Otto off their comrade and beat him, very possibly to death.

The trick must be, Paulus thought, in the flash of time available to him, to get his story in first.

‘Bastard!’ he shouted, reaching down and hauling his brother to his feet and putting him into a vicious neck lock. ‘Got you now, haven’t I? You’re mine!’

Then with the arm that was not around his brother’s neck he delivered a rabbit punch to the side of Otto’s head (with what, Otto was later to complain, was unnecessary force).

Paulus then looked up at the Brownshirts who surrounded him.

‘Jews! Jews!’ he shouted in affected semi-panic. ‘Dirty Jews! A pack of them! With a German girl! Round the corner! They have her, it’s revenge! They’re pulling off her clothes! Please. I’ve got this guy, I won’t let him get away, run! You have to help.’

Young though he was and with almost no time in which to think, Paulus had made his pitch brilliantly, appealing to the very heart and soul of the Nazis’ pathological anti-Semitism. That most favourite and well- rehearsed part. The crude and salacious sexual fantasies that made up the majority of the accusations peddled against Jews in Der Sturmer and other Nazi papers.

The men didn’t hesitate. The prospect of being able to intervene violently in a pack rape appealed to so many of their natural instincts and secret fantasies at once that they clattered off immediately in the direction in which Paulus was pointing. This left just their winded comrade who was now beginning to pull himself together, sitting up on the pavement, chin on chest, catching his breath.

This man, Paulus realized, would be highly unlikely to give up his opportunity to avenge himself on Otto, even for the opportunity of seeing a girl having her clothes torn off by Jews. Besides which, it would only be moments before the other Brownshirts reached the corner and realized that they had been tricked. Again Paulus had less than seconds in which to consider his next move and again he was able to find the most promising point of psychological weakness in his still groggy opponent.

‘I’ll get these two across the street!’ Paulus shouted urgently, dragging a dazed Dagmar to her feet with his free arm. ‘My father is a Hauptsturmfuhrer. He is collecting prisoners. He will be very pleased you stopped this swine. I’ll send him over to speak to you personally.’

As a sentence it did not make a lot of sense but what it did do was invoke authority. And if there was one thing that Paulus knew Nazis liked, it was to be told what to do. Nothing seemed to make them more comfortable than following a leader, and if there was a Hauptsturmfuhrer in the vicinity then his will must of course be obeyed.

Paulus did not hang around to find out how long it would take the trooper to ask himself why a thirteen- year-old boy who was not even in a Hitler Youth uniform would be running around the streets collecting prisoners for a Hauptsturmfuhrer SA. Instead he dragged his brother and Dagmar off the kerb and into the road, oblivious to the beeping horns and screeching tyres as he headed for the central reservation where the trams ran constantly up and down the street.

The folding middle doors of an east-bound carriage were just closing as Paulus reached it, but (much to the annoyance of the passengers already on board) he was able to get an arm in and force the doors wide again.

Once they were seated on the tram, Otto took his chance to protest.

‘Shit, Pauly, you didn’t have to whack me in the side of the head!’

‘Never mind that, you arsehole,’ Paulus replied. ‘Are you OK, Dag? What happened?’

But for the time being at least Dagmar was incapable of speech. She simply stared ahead of her, unable even to cry. Simply trying to breathe.

The Banks of the Red Sea Berlin, 1 April 1933

‘EVERYONE IS LOOKING for Moses.’

Frieda smiled as she said it. She felt she had to smile.

The horror and the shock on the faces that surrounded her was so absolute that some show of spirit seemed to her essential. For if Frieda Stengel knew nothing else on that dreadful day, that awful, ill-starred day when the Nazis began truly to show their hand, truly began to give some glimpse of the limitless darkness into which they would be prepared to take their crazed philosophy, she knew that from that point on in all their lives, spirit would be the only thing that could possibly sustain them.

If they were to be sustained at all.

She looked around at the faces assembled in her living room.

Faces that had only recently been familiar but which seemed now to stare back at her as if belonging to new and different people. Blank, bewildered people, lost and helpless. Babies, it seemed to Frieda, born that very morning, ejected screaming from the warmth and comfort of the womb of their previous lives to find themselves blinking and struggling for breath in the harsh and unforgiving glare of a totally alien and entirely brutal new world.

New and different people. Quite literally.

Previously respectable citizens of the German Republic. Parents, workers, taxpayers, war veterans. Human beings.

Now Untermensch. Subhumans. Despised outcasts. Officially despised. Legally outcast. Barred from their businesses. Ejected from their work. Beaten and bewildered, they had come to her, to Frieda Stengel. The good doctor.

Fear twitching in their nostrils. Standing red wet in their eyes.

Wringing, pulling and twisting at their fingers until the knuckles turned white with the effort of self- control.

Katz the Chemist, with his wife and grown-up daughter. The Loebs, who ran the little tobacco and newspaper kiosk at the steps to the U-Bahn. Morgenstern the book dealer. Schmulewitz, a broker of insurance. The Leibovitzes, who owned the little restaurant on Grunberger Strasse. A garbage man. An employee of the wire factory. A brewer’s assistant. Two men currently looking for work. Wives. One or two children too scared to go to school.

The Jews of Friedrichshain.

Citizens yesterday. Today just Jews.

They had gravitated to the Stengels’ apartment in search of some comfort, some meaning. Frieda was a community lynchpin. Loved for her kindness, respected for her intelligence and her tireless energy. Perhaps she would have an answer. Some crumb of comfort to offer, some semblance of an explanation. After all, the good Frau Doktor had always had answers in the past.

But Frieda had no answers this time.

For there were none.

All she could do was smile and find herself, to her surprise, taking refuge in imagery from legends in which she neither believed nor had a spiritual interest and yet which were without doubt appropriate.

‘I guess the poor old tribe is on the move again,’ she said, trying to impose some brightness on her tone. ‘We’re standing on the shores of the Red Sea, chucked out of Egypt for the umpteenth time. Hitler’s just another pharaoh, isn’t he, really? The question is how to save our skins this time? Everybody is looking for Moses.’

But no one knew of a Moses at that point and so, with nowhere to go on a day when their own streets were occupied by the Brown Army, they sat. Strange and stilted. Counting the seconds that led to nowhere.