Two Brothers

boisterous camaraderie. With each kilometre that passed, the scenes in the streets through which they were being driven grew uglier and more terrifying.

Every street contained at least one shop that had been smashed and set alight. Houses and apartment blocks were being wrecked, too, surrounded by wild mobs.

Pressing his face to the window, Otto saw many beatings. On every corner young men were being kicked on the ground. Girls thrown about by their hair and pushed into gutters. Mothers kicked and punched as they were dragged from their homes, babies screaming in their arms.

The air was very cold outside and with so many lusty voices singing inside the coach the windows were dripping with condensation. To see out, Otto had constantly to wipe a fresh gap in the wet film, and through this cloudy porthole a monstrous tableau of images was revealed.

He saw a man shot and another knifed.

Uniformed police were at the very heart of the disturbances. Over and over Otto watched as terrified young men were thrown into police vans, baton blows raining down on their defenceless heads.

Berlin’s Jews did not live in a ghetto, they were an integrated part of city life, and so the whole town bore witness to the savage, hysterical attacks.

It was an apocalyptic scene.

A pogrom of unrestrained brutality.

Now the Napola coaches were crossing the river Spree, driving over the Moltke bridge, the very place from which Wolfgang had thrown himself the year before. Otto gave that tragedy only a moment’s thought. A brief image of his father, putting his trumpet to his lips and then jumping from the parapet, passed across Otto’s mind but then it was gone. The terror of the immediate blotting out all pity for the past.

Once over the river and through the Tiergarten, although still some way short of the Ku’damm, the school buses were forced to stop. The streets were now so littered with shards of broken glass that the drivers feared their tyres would be shredded. The boys were therefore assembled on the pavement and ordered to make their way on foot to the famous shopping street, and once there to attack anything Jewish at will.

At this point it was a simple thing for Otto to slip away.

They wouldn’t miss him, it was chaos everywhere. The Napola group would never be able to stick together in such a frenzied crowd and he would not be the only straggler.

But Otto didn’t care anyway; he was in a panic to get to Dagmar.

The glass crunched horribly beneath his feet as he ran, pushing his way through the baying, staggering, swaggering gangs of men and women, intoxicated on stolen booze and on power.

Absolute power.

It seemed to Otto as if the whole population was out on the streets, although of course he knew they weren’t. No doubt the majority of Berliners were cowering, ostrich-like, behind their curtains. But there were enough people enjoying the party to make it look like the whole city, every thug, every thief, every bully, every disaffected inadequate with a grievance was on the rampage.

Many times Otto wanted to stop and try to help as pitifully defenceless people fell victim to the depraved savagery of the mob. A mob who had been whipped up into a storm of moral outrage against the ‘crimes’ of the race enemy.

These people deserved what they were getting.

Their attackers were actually the victims.

Forced to act having been goaded beyond endurance.

Torchlight flickered on faces that had become grotesque masks, distorted and bloated with righteous cruelty and untrammelled sadism.

Torch beams crisscrossed streets, searching for loot, for victims. For scurrying children to kick.

In every street Otto saw homes ransacked. He saw clothes torn from young women by mobs who chanted that they were whores. He saw five-and six-year-olds, their mouths so wide with screaming that their entire faces seemed nothing but great black wailing holes.

And other children silent, twitching, staring, dead-eyed and traumatized as their mothers and fathers were beaten in front of them. Killed in front of them.

Otto could not help them.

He scarcely registered them; they passed before his eyes like the disjointed imagery of a nightmare.

A dream.

Just two hours earlier he had been dreaming of Dagmar. Where was she? Was she already suffering at the hands of the mob? Were they pulling at her clothes? Were they beating her? Murdering her?

Desperate fear sent blood pumping through Otto’s body and he ran as he had never run before. Past the old Kaiser’s memorial church, along the Kantstrasse, where mobs of youths were starting bonfires of the Jewish property they did not wish to steal.

The contents of entire shops. Clothes, hardware, office supplies. Otto saw crazed women slashing at shop mannequins with knives. He saw men smashing typewriters and adding machines with sledge hammers. Entire telephone exchange boards torn from walls, hurled out of windows and reduced to splinters.

Snarling shouts and hoarse cries rang in Otto’s ears as he ran.

Berlin’s synagogues were burning, came the shout. The looted treasures of the temples lay scattered before Otto as he ran. Ground underfoot, hurled on to bonfires. Great and venerable leather-bound tomes fluttering like multi-winged moths on their way to incineration. Paintings, statues, carved lecterns, wall hangings and ornate furniture, all food for the flames.

Otto passed a gang of youths dancing about in stolen prayer shawls. They had made a patchwork on the pavement of some sacred embroideries and were forcing elderly Jews to urinate on them while their grey-haired wives stood by and wept.

‘Make ’em wear the piss-soaked rags,’ a teenage girl shouted at the boys, while her friends pushed a wailing old lady towards the scene.

Otto could do nothing.

He cared but he also didn’t care. Because if all this was happening to every Jew he passed, what was happening to Dagmar?

The streets became a little quieter once he entered the expensive district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. There were not as many very rich Jews in Berlin as the Nazis claimed, and Otto ran through whole streets in which there were no disturbances at all.

Here and there a house was under siege, bottles thrown and windows smashed, but there were no random crowds of dazed thugs roaming about the prestigious streets. The police were seeing that better order was kept in so picturesque a suburb.

Briefly Otto dared to hope. Perhaps the madness had not quite arrived in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, perhaps he was still in time.

Hope lasted only a moment. For on turning from one wide tree-lined street into the one on which Dagmar lived, he saw flames ahead and in an agony that made him forget his bursting, aching lungs, he knew that he might already be too late.

The Fischer house was on fire.

A mob were gathered outside it, chanting, singing and dancing. Clearly they had already ransacked the place. Otto saw in one glance across the debris-strewn street many things he recognized from his visits over the years. Pictures, a gramophone player, beautiful cushions, shattered china and vases, small items of furniture, all smashed and scattered on the ground.

As he pushed his way through the crowd he trod on something soft.

Looking down he saw an old and frayed, knitted woollen monkey. Otto had seen that little stuffed toy many times before.

Lying on Dagmar’s pillow. Or propped up on her dressing table, leaning against a tin of talcum powder. Or sitting on a box of tissues.

For all her grown-up sophistication, Dagmar still cuddled that monkey. And now it was in the gutter.

Which meant that they had been in her bedroom.

Her toy was on the street. Where was she?