‘
‘No!’ Frieda wailed.
‘That’s just stupid!’ Paulus said. ‘So what if you’re not a Jew?’
‘I am a Jew,’ Otto protested. ‘I don’t
‘Because you were going to find out anyway,’ Frieda said. ‘You have to see that, Otts. The Gestapo is going to go through every detail of every single person in Germany. Everyone is going to be categorized. Your history is documented. The adoption forms are at the hospital. Your birth certificate is at the town hall. We had to tell you and we have to make a plan…’
‘Plan! What plan?’ Otto said through tears. ‘There is no plan! Because there’s no me! There’s no Otto Stengel. He never existed. I don’t exist.’
Otto grabbed his coat and once more made for the door.
‘Otto! Please!’ Frieda cried, tears running down her face.
‘Otto, stop,’ Paulus demanded, ‘you have to stop.’
‘Who are you shouting at?’ Otto said with a wild and angry snarl. ‘Who are you giving orders to? You’re not my brother!’
Family Trees
OTTO SPENT THE night on a bench in the People’s Park amongst the fairy-tale statues but the following morning, as dawn broke over the city, he went home. He was cold and stiff and his heart still ached but his tears had dried. He knew that the pain and the confusion he was feeling, the fear of rejection, the isolation and the loneliness, were not his parents’ fault. They were Hitler’s, and the Nazis were now more his enemy than ever.
He climbed the six sets of stairs in order to avoid using the creaking lift at so early an hour, and let himself into the darkened flat. Inside he found his mother sitting exactly where he had left her and where she had clearly sat all night. He rushed forward and threw his arms around her.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be, Ottsy. Don’t be,’ Frieda whispered. ‘Goodness, look at me, crying again. I didn’t think I had any tears left in me.’
She hugged him tight.
‘I’ve been so worried. Pauly looked for you till one in the morning. Wolfgang tried too but he got tired. We called your friends. They all thought you’d been picked up for… for what you did yesterday evening.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Otto repeated. ‘I shouldn’t have run. I just wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘You know that we love you both just the same,’ Frieda went on. ‘You and Paulus, our two boys.’
‘Yeah, I know, Mum. They can’t break us apart,’ Otto said. ‘They never will.’
Silent tears were running in streams down Frieda’s cheeks.
‘Not in our hearts, baby,’ she whispered. ‘Not in our hearts.’
Otto felt the wet tears against his own face as he hugged her. He knew what she was saying, the salty agony glistening on her cheeks confirmed it.
‘Are they going to take me away, Mum?’ he asked.
Frieda could not bring herself to reply.
Wolfgang had appeared at the door of his and Frieda’s bedroom and had been listening.
‘We think so, Otts,’ he croaked through his tobacco-and TB-ravaged voice. ‘We have to presume so. The newspapers say the police are supposed to identify “racially valuable stock”. The SS have been setting up orphanages. Himmler’s collecting kids.’
‘God. What
Fear replaced grief on Otto’s countenance. His face shining white in the pale dawn that was creeping in at the windows. It was a rare sight for his parents to see. Otto had become so adept at disguising terror over the years that they had imagined him fearless. But the prospect of being put into the care of the SS seemed for a moment at least to overwhelm even him.
‘I’ll hide,’ Otto said finally. ‘If they come for me I won’t be here, I’ll go underground. I’ll hide.’
‘Then they’ll take us.’ It was Paulus who spoke from the twins’ bedroom door.
‘Always the voice of reason, eh, bro?’ Otto replied with a bitter smile.
‘You know it’s true, Otts,’ Paulus said. ‘I don’t like saying it any more than you like hearing it but if they come for you and don’t find you they’ll punish us. I don’t mind. I’ll run, I’ll fight, just like you would. But Dad can’t go back into that camp.’
Otto nodded. He knew that was true.
Wolfgang turned away, ashamed to be identified as the most vulnerable member of the family.
‘You’re right, Pauly,’ Otto said. ‘
‘Well,’ said Frieda, ‘I imagine we have a few weeks to consider things. Let’s try to do it calmly, eh? Hope for the best, plan for the worst as they say. You’ve been out all night, Otts. I’ll make you some toasted bread and cheese and a mug of chocolate.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Otto said. ‘Best mum in the world.’
The Stengels were not the only people hoping for the best in the weeks that followed the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws. As the long summer of 1935 turned finally to autumn it seemed as if the whole country could speak of nothing else but family history.
The new rules officially defining what constituted a Jew sparked a frenzy of genealogical research. Everybody in Germany was to be racially classified and even the most proudly Aryan types began referring nervously to their family trees in terror that they might find a Jew lurking somewhere on a branch. All across the Reich, church records, parish lists, gravestones, bible inscriptions, ancient deeds and transactions were consulted minutely by both individuals and the police in an effort to establish the racial credentials of the whole population.
Credentials which, as Wolfgang dryly observed, were supposed to be self-evident anyway.
‘I don’t know why they have to go through this fuss,’ he said bitterly, ‘surely all they need to do is look for the hunched figures with sloping foreheads, noses like grappling hooks and dripping knives in their hands and that’ll be the Jews!’
‘It’s horrible,’ Frieda said. ‘All the Aryans are terrified of finding a Jew in their line and all the Jews are desperate to find an Aryan. I’ve been having people come in all day at the surgery asking me for medical records. People are going about praying that their grandma was raped by some bacon butcher because it’s actually better to be descended from an Aryan sex criminal than a Jewish charity worker.’
It was this remark of Frieda’s that led Otto to announce he had had an idea.
The four of them had been discussing the new laws over dinner, as they had done on every evening since the night that Otto and Paulus learnt the truth about their family history.
‘
Otto punched Paulus. Whatever fears the future might hold for them, the twins were still the twins.
‘Yes, I’ve had an idea,’ Otto said. ‘Why should I wait for the Gestapo to investigate my history? I should do it myself. If I can find a Jew somewhere way back, then they won’t take me away.’
‘Oh, Otto,’ Frieda murmured, ‘that is such a brave and lovely thought.’
Wolfgang stretched his thin bony hand across the table to squeeze Otto’s.
‘Thanks, son,’ he whispered. ‘You’ve got nerve, I’ll give you that.’
Paulus, however, was having none of it.
‘You’re crazy!’ he said, tearing angrily at a piece of black bread as if it was Otto’s head and then drowning it in his plate of goulash. ‘Completely crazy. Every Jew in Germany wants a couple of Gentile grandparents and you’re trying to find a Jew?’
