Two Brothers

‘We don’t do so much marching,’ Silke replied, her usual good humour returning. She rarely allowed Dagmar’s snootiness to irritate her for long. Partly out of sympathy for everything Dagmar had lost, and also because she had long since realized that the twins, whose approval she craved, would always take Dagmar’s side in the end. ‘There’s a fair bit of chucking medicine balls and jumping through hoops in your knickers and waving scarves about,’ Silke went on, ‘but it’s not like the Hitler Jugend. They’re not trying to turn us into soldiers. It’s much looser in the BDM because basically the party doesn’t really care about girls.’

‘You sound as if you actually like being in the BDM.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact I do. We do lots of camps and trips and I’ve learned to knit too.’

‘Yes, well, lucky for some,’ Dagmar commented dryly. ‘I must say it would be nice to go on a camp or an outing some time but you see we’re not allowed to go anywhere.’

‘Yeah, I know that, Dags,’ Silke said hotly. ‘And I’m sorry and all that but don’t forget you went on plenty of holidays before. I never went on one, not one. I got my first ever holiday with the BDM. Working-class people didn’t get that chance before…’ She stopped, slightly embarrassed. ‘I mean, not that I’m saying it’s better now. You know I don’t think that… It’s just, actually, it’s better for me, that’s all.’

‘I’m thrilled for you,’ Dagmar replied.

Frieda interjected, ever the peace-maker.

‘Well,’ she said gently, ‘I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time on your walk, Silke, and the rally will be very… interesting. The newspapers keep saying it’s going to be even bigger than last year, although I really don’t see how it can be. There were seven hundred thousand at the last one.’

The 1934 rally had been made into a hit movie called Triumph of the Will chronicling for the entire world the incredible scale of Nazi triumphalism. Frieda had gone to see the film out of a sort of grim fascination. No identification was required to buy a ticket. Nobody imagined a Jew would want to attend.

‘All those hundreds and thousands of rows of people,’ she said, ‘standing in perfect lines. Where did they all go to the toilet?’

‘You just pee where you can,’ Silke explained, ‘round the edges, sometimes even where you stand. In your pants if you’re up the front, those poor people were waiting for eight hours and more. The stink in the latrine areas was just awful but of course you don’t get that on the film. It might have been a triumph of will but it wasn’t a triumph of plumbing. This year I’m going to make sure I don’t drink anything on the morning of the parade.’

As it turned out the 1935 rally was bigger than its famous predecessor and for Germany’s Jews at least it was much more significant.

There were to be new laws. Laws that would formalize the anti-Semitic discrimination that was already central to German National life.

The Nuremberg Laws, as they came to be known.

Silke, who was there, could not understand what was being said, standing as she was eighty rows back and squirming for the toilet. To her the blurred rasping voice echoing across the vast parade ground sounded like a dog yapping from inside a barrel.

But listening on the radio in Berlin Frieda could make out the Leader’s voice very clearly and understood what it meant for her family.

For her sons.

‘Wolfgang,’ she whispered, ‘we have to tell the boys.’

Wolfgang had been struggling to avoid drawing the same conclusion.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘These laws don’t seem to be much different to what’s been going on already.’

‘I know, Wolf,’ Frieda replied, ‘but don’t you see? They’re making it all legal now. Slowly but surely they’re putting us in a position where the law not only won’t protect us but it will actually destroy us… legally. It’s like they’re building a gallows bit by bit, plank by plank, so that by the time they come to stand us on the trapdoor and put our heads in the noose it will seem inevitable, proper, the correct thing to do. Finishing us off will be a legal requirement. An administrative matter. Beyond their control. Sorry and all that but it’s the law!’

‘Bastards,’ was all Wolfgang could find to say.

‘But of course,’ Frieda went on, her voice filled with emotion, ‘it’s only the law for three of us.’

For a moment there was silence between them.

A mutual acknowledgement of the secret they had shared for fifteen years.

A secret that had once been just a family affair.

A matter of private feelings. Something they knew they would one day have to address but which they intended to do in such a manner that the four members of the Stengel family might continue as before.

In fact, in earlier years, when Frieda and Wolfgang had discussed how they would eventually tell the boys about the adoption, they had fixed upon the plan that at first they would only tell them that one of them had been adopted and not reveal which of them it was. Saying that it was a matter of no consequence and that they might or might not tell them the full story later.

Because it really was impossible to tell.

Neither boy seemed any more or any less a child of their parents than the other. Paulus was studious and dedicated like his mother. Otto wilder and less diligent like his father. Otto was the musical one, taking after Wolfgang, while Paulus was planning a career, a career in which he hoped one day to be able to help people, just as his mother did. He was darker coloured like Frieda while Otto shared the same sandy hair and tendency to freckle like his father.

‘If ever there was an interesting experiment in nurture over nature,’ Frieda had frequently observed during the carefree years, ‘it’s our boys. I may write a paper on it one day.’

But in Hitler’s Germany, the nature and nurture debate was long since dead. Something called ‘blood’ was everything.

‘Blood’ that man screamed over the radio.

German ‘blood’ which must be protected at all costs.

Every person in the country was to have their ‘blood’ categorized to determine how much ‘German’ blood they possessed and how much ‘Jew’.

The secret which had begun at the Berliner Buch medical school in 1920 could be a secret no longer.

Romantic Gesture Berlin, 1935

UP UNTIL THE age of fourteen and a half, Otto and Paulus had done pretty much everything together. Laughed together. Fought together.

Fallen in love with the same girl together.

And killed together.

The last and most terrible of these bonds had of course been born of urgent necessity; they had had no choice. When Otto decided to attack again, forming what he called his retribution squad with a view to mugging a storm trooper, the brothers parted company.

‘We’ve done worse before,’ Otto said darkly when Paulus expressed his complete opposition to the plan. ‘You’ve done worse, you know that.’

‘Shut up about that, you stupid bastard!’ Paulus hissed. ‘We should never talk about that outside, do you hear?’

‘I’ll talk about what I like,’ Otto replied, ‘and I’ll do what I like. And I’m going to do this.’

‘Then you’re completely crazy,’ Paulus said. ‘You’ll be killed and it’ll break Mum’s heart.’

But Otto was adamant. The time had come to fight back. A line had to be drawn, a counter-attack mounted. No matter how minor or insignificant a gesture it was, somebody had to do something.

Dagmar loved the idea.