Two Brothers

Coffee was served, there were various cakes and small treats which people had brought. Sweet pretzels, Butterstollen, Streuselkuchen. More coffee.

Wolfgang played a little quiet piano. Nothing too mournful, gentle show-tunes mostly.

‘This is rather like how I imagine it was in the last hour on the Titanic,’ he said. ‘Always admired the boys in that band. Never thought I’d be a member myself.’

Frau Katz began to cry at this.

‘Wolfgang, please,’ Frieda admonished.

Wolfgang apologized and returned to his playing.

Occasionally there were exclamations of anger and frustration.

They pushed me.

They spat at me.

Frau So-and-So said nothing.

Herr So-and-So turned away.

I’ve known them years. I gave them credit after the crash. They did nothing when those thugs broke my window. When they shoved the dog’s mess through. Nothing.

But for the most part they made polite conversation. Papering over the chasmic, vault-like, hellish darkness lying just below the surface of every word they spoke.

How are your children?

Is Frau So-and-So recovered from her flu?

Hasn’t the blossom come early in the Tiergarten this year?

While all the time the strained voices and nervous rattle of Frieda’s best china coffee cups screamed WHY? WHY! WHY!

Why us?

And, of course, what next?

Once or twice, non-Jewish friends did drop by to show their support. The chairman of the housing collective. The man who swept the street and who every morning for ten years had stood by his dusty hand barrow as Frieda emerged from her building, leant on his broom and told her how lovely she looked. Wolfgang had always thought this was a bit creepy but he was grateful to the man now.

‘And you look lovely today, Frau Doktor,’ the man said, standing shyly in the doorway, holding his cap and staring at his feet. He had brought flowers which he left on the little table by the door as he hurried away.

Doctor Schwarzschild, a colleague of Frieda’s from the surgery, came in his lunch break. He explained that they had thought about closing the medical centre in solidarity but had decided it would be a counterproductive gesture. Frieda agreed.

‘People still need doctors,’ she said.

‘Just be sure to treat the Jews too, eh?’ Wolfgang added.

Schwarzschild looked confused. ‘Of course,’ he stammered. ‘How could you think otherwise, Wolfgang?’

‘Oh I don’t know, mate,’ Wolfgang replied with a hint of angry sarcasm. ‘Can’t imagine.’

‘Stop it, Wolf,’ Frieda said for the second time. ‘It isn’t Rudi’s fault.’

‘Whose fault is it then?’ Wolfgang asked.

Already a gap was opening up.

And the gap was wide. As wide as that universe that lies between life and death.

And those on the death side, those who now knew themselves to be Jews, could not help but be bitter, angry and resentful of the status of those on the life side. Those people now called Aryans. And since no Nazi or even silent fellow traveller would speak to them or look them in the eye, they found themselves taking out their feelings on the only ‘Aryans’ who would still acknowledge them, their remaining non-Jewish friends.

So this is what your Mr Hitler thinks, is it?

What will your people decide to do to us next?

Do you really believe we have stolen your homes and jobs?

Schwarzschild did not stay long. He had patients to see, Frieda’s as well as his own. Patients about whom Frieda was already worrying, feeling guilty, despite herself, that she was suddenly absent from their care. A hundred half-finished stories sprang suddenly to her mind as she showed Schwarzschild to the door.

‘I’m concerned about Frau Oppenheim’s boil. I lanced it but it isn’t healing properly and I suspect she’s not cleaning the wound as I instructed. The little Rosenberg boy is still not walking after his accident and it’s because he is not doing his physiotherapy, you must be very firm with his parents… I will write notes for them all. Can you bring me my files? I’m sure that is still allowed. We can go through them. You know that I’m fearful old Bloch might be turning diabetic; you must test his blood sugar.’

Perhaps it helped her. Taking refuge in the responsibilities of a life that was over. Trying vicariously to impose her attentions on people who were now obliged by government decree to shun them.

Wolfgang had watched her from his place at the piano.

‘Why do you still care about those people, Frieda?’ he asked. ‘Do they care about you?’

‘Wolf, I’m a doctor. I do not require my commitment to be reciprocal.’

Wolfgang smiled, a smile and a shrug.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘fair enough. You’re a better person than any of them but we didn’t need the bloody Nazi Party to know that. I, however, am not and if it was up to me I’d say let them rot.’

In defiance or frustration he began to play some Kurt Weill, The Ballad of Pirate Jenny.

‘Wolfgang! Please!’ Frieda said.

He looked up. There was fear on every face.

‘Oh sorry,’ he said bitterly. ‘Not happy with Jew music?’

‘Come on, Wolf,’ Frieda said. ‘The walls aren’t thick and there’s no point provoking them.’

‘That’s what I thought too,’ Wolfgang said. ‘But now I wonder whether it makes any difference.’

‘If we provoke them they’ll kill us,’ Herr Loeb the tobacconist said. ‘We are few and they are many.’

‘They won’t kill us!’ Frau Leibovitz almost pleaded. ‘This is Germany, it’s an aberration, it must be. It must be an aberration.’

Some others agreed. This could not be real. It was simply unimaginable that the National Socialist Government intended to keep this onslaught up.

Again, the formal description. The National Socialist Government. As if somehow, using the Nazi Party’s full name, treating them with formality and politeness, might cause the Nazis to somehow reciprocate.

Other voices took a grimmer view.

‘My son thinks they will keep it up till we are all dead,’ the bookseller Morgenstern observed. ‘He is leaving. He and his fiancee. He has a friend in Zurich who will put them up for a while.’

‘But what will he do? How will he work? Has he a Swiss work permit?’ came the enquiries.

Morgenstern admitted that his son did not.

‘But he’s leaving anyway. He will go on a holiday and then refuse to leave; he says they can shoot him if they wish. His girl agrees. They intend to go within a week.’

This news of course depressed the little gathering further.

Clinging to hope as they were it was terrible to realize that some people had already forsaken it. But everyone knew someone who had already decided the situation was now impossible. The young in particular, those who had least to leave behind, were all making plans to go.

Then the Hirsches, a retired couple from two floors down, arrived with the first edition of the afternoon newspaper. Amongst the crowing lead story reporting the ‘success’ of the ‘spontaneous’ boycott was another headline:

‘Exit Visas Introduced’.

Anybody who wanted to leave Germany had first to get police permission to do so. It was stated that Jews in particular were not simply to be allowed to wander around hostile foreign countries spreading their lies. If they wanted to get out they would have to beg and only then would the authorities take a view.

‘They want to trap us,’ Wolfgang observed and defiantly banged out a few chords of Mack the