My dad’s dead too. You got them both.
Otto grabbed her hand. He didn’t think there was much chance of her being heard by the mob at the front of the house, but it would only take a few of them to decide to have a look in the back garden for him and Dagmar to be discovered.
Or she might run round to the front. With the wild way she was screaming and twitching there was no telling what she would do.
Otto could scarcely imagine what her mental state was after what she had been through. Only minutes before she had been resigning herself to being burnt alive.
He tried gently to pull her away but she wouldn’t move. She simply stood, staring at her burning house.
‘They kicked down the front door,’ she said, quieter now but shaking terribly, her face and body flickering orange in the light of the fire. ‘They went all through the house. They slapped and hit us. They tore pictures off the wall and pissed on the rugs. They took what money and jewellery they could find and smashed everything else…’
‘Dagmar,’ Otto whispered, gently tugging at her sleeve, ‘we have to get out of here.’
‘Mama was hysterical,’ Dagmar went on. ‘Beating her fists against her own head, that made them laugh. I locked myself in the lavatory and they left me alone in there. Thank God for the laws on racial purity, eh?’
Dagmar actually smiled at that thought, but it was a shocking, mad smile.
‘Dagmar,’ Otto urged again, ‘we have to—’
‘Then they went away and we thought it was over and we sat together amongst the chaos they’d made —’
‘Dagmar—’
‘Mummy was trying to gather up all the photos and albums that had been thrown around. By the time I realized they’d set the house on fire it was too late to get out. The hallway was burning and the only place to go was upstairs. I ran but she must have been trying to bring her photo albums. I only realized when I turned back at the top of the stairs that she wasn’t following me. I could see her trying to pick up photographs and albums and bits of memories and then dropping it all as she reached out to try to gather more. I screamed at her to get out but it was too late, by the time she realized how close the danger was it was too late. All the papers and pictures around her were already burning. Then the ones she had gathered in her arms… her past life was her funeral pyre.’
‘Dagmar,’ Otto said, firmly now, ‘we have to get moving. They’re out for blood. You need somewhere to hide.’
But Dagmar wouldn’t move. She was simply frozen with horror. Having found the strength to get out of the burning house she now had none left to flee. The sight of the flames had transfixed her.
Then Otto remembered her toy. The stuffed monkey he had picked up in the street and which he knew had been with her all her life. Taking it from his pocket he pressed it into her hand.
‘How…?’ she murmured, looking down at it.
‘It was outside, on the road. I picked it up.’
Dagmar put the little woollen object to her face and breathed deeply, taking in its smell.
Somehow it seemed to help her. Otto’s desperate effort at providing a distraction had worked.
‘Where will you take me?’ she asked in a steady voice.
Relieved, Otto led her by the hand to the back of the garden where there was a gate into an alleyway behind.
‘I know how to get away from here,’ he said.
Paulus and Otto had never told Dagmar but years before, when they had first fallen in love, they had sometimes made their way right across town together in order to creep into that same back alley and stare up at Dagmar’s window. Hoping to catch a glimpse of her shadow on the blind.
‘We’ll go to my mum’s place,’ he said. ‘There are no other Jews in our block so at least they won’t have burnt it. There’s a big order gone out about not damaging German property.’
‘An order?’ Dagmar said, almost to herself.
‘Come on,’ Otto instructed, ‘we need to get a move on.’
The distance from the Fischer house to the Stengel apartment was a good eight kilometres clean across the centre of the city. A city they had known all their lives but one that had been transformed utterly into the most dangerous of jungles in which gangs of wild and merciless predators pack hunted Jews.
‘We’ll have to avoid the Ku’damm,’ Otto said, as they hurried along. ‘My school mates are all over it. I’m supposed to be a part of all this.’
‘You mean… it’s been planned?’ Dagmar said in astonishment.
‘Oh it’s been planned. They read out an SS order, signed by Heydrich himself. The police have been told not to intervene.’
They were hurrying along through the crowded streets. Streets that appeared to be in the grip of some bizarre sort of carnival in which joyful revellers perambulated from one bloody entertainment to another.
‘They’re going to kill us all,’ Dagmar said in a voice that sounded as if she was already dead. ‘They’re going to kill us all tonight.’
Otto kept firmly hold of Dagmar’s hand and pulled her forward.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should be able to grab a tram at Zoo.’
With the town in the grip of a riot and the fire brigade at full stretch trying to contain the many and various blazes being set, it took them almost three hours to get to Friedrichshain. When they got there, however, the district was much quieter than the centre of the city had been. There were still screams and bangs and the smell of fire was everywhere, but the street on which the Stengels lived was free from hooligans.
Otto and Dagmar ran into the well of the apartment building and got into the lift which for once was at the right end of the shaft. They stood for a moment in silence as it began its noisy, ponderous way to the sixth floor.
‘Dagmar,’ Otto said falteringly, ‘I’m so sorry — about Frau Fischer. About your mum.’
The words seemed so supremely inadequate that he wished he’d said nothing.
‘I envy her,’ Dagmar said, her voice hollow and empty like a freshly dug grave. ‘Not the way she died, of course. But being dead.’
‘No, Dags! Please,’ Otto protested.
‘It was what she wanted anyway. She talked about it so often that these last few months it’s as if she’s
The lift crawled its way up the building. Otto struggled to think of something to say.
‘You know I haven’t been in this lift since I was fifteen,’ he remarked.
‘Should you risk it now?’ Dagmar asked. ‘You know you’re banned from ever coming back here.’
‘Fuck them. They don’t know where I am.’
‘Won’t they miss you?’
‘It was a free-for-all, I’ll say I got separated. That I was chasing Jews,’ he said, almost with a smile, ‘which of course I was. I bet I’m not the only one of the older boys to have grabbed the opportunity to go off and please himself.’
Finally they arrived at the old familiar corridor.
There was no light on in the apartment and Otto of course no longer had a key.
‘Oh shit,’ he said, ‘please don’t tell me they’re out.’
He knocked on the door and then whispered: ‘Paulus… Paulus, are you there?’
After a moment they heard Paulus’s voice from within.
‘Who are you?’ the voice demanded. ‘What do you want?’
‘It’s
The door swung open and within a moment all three were in each other’s arms, hugging as if their lives depended on it.
‘Fuck, Ottsy,’ Paulus said eventually, ‘look at you! You’re huge.’
‘Where’s Mum?’ Otto replied.
‘She’s everywhere,’ Paulus said, ‘the phone hasn’t stopped ringing. There’s so many people hurt. It’s like they’ve actually declared war on us.’
‘They have,’ Dagmar whispered, cupping her hands around a mug of beef tea that Paulus had been preparing
