Two Brothers

The shattered glass that had littered the streets for days had been cleaned up but the burnt-out buildings and windowless shops remained as testimony to the violence of the attacks. The Jews themselves had been forced to clean up the wreckage that had been made of their lives and it had been a slow task, made harder because, as the newspapers were happy to crow, thirty thousand young Jewish men had been abducted from their homes and sent to concentration camps over the two nights of the pogrom.

What was not reported in the papers, but Frieda had ascertained through her medical contacts, was that ninety-one more had simply been beaten to death.

Now, however, everything seemed calm. The Jews were back behind closed doors and the majority of the population were going about their business as if nothing had happened.

Otto bought some nuts and apples for the journey and the three young people took the S- Bahn out to Wannsee. As they rode, the boys attempted to dispel the sadness that still radiated from their friend.

‘Do you remember the swimming gala,’ Otto said, ‘when we took the blame for you breaking the trophy?’

‘And I got four extra whacks because Otto was too bloody stupid to let me think up an excuse,’ Paulus added. ‘Come to think of it, I still owe you for those.’

‘Any time, Pauly,’ Otto replied, flexing his muscles. ‘You’re most welcome to try.’

The boys tried hard to be cheerful, and as the once-familiar stations passed by it seemed to have some effect. Dagmar almost smiled as they recalled the music lessons and the Saturday Club, and how angry Silke had been when Dagmar first turned up.

‘Poor Silke,’ Dagmar said. ‘I don’t blame her for being jealous. I know I’d have been if it had been her that you boys were chasing in the Marchenbrunnen. Do you remember how you used to trap me between Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood and try to steal kisses?’

And so they talked and even laughed a little together, revisiting the happy country of their youth, as the rain lashed on the windows of the train.

But then of course they ran out of happy memories.

Or, at least, while there were still some, any recollections of laughter and friendship that had occurred after 1933 were so entwined with darker experiences, of pain, loss and humiliation, that the three of them felt their smiles vanish from their lips.

‘They took our youth, didn’t they?’ Dagmar said quietly. ‘They stole our youth.’

There was thunder in the air and the rain came down in squalls as the venerable old train shuddered to a halt at Wannsee. As Dagmar had predicted, the three of them were the only passengers to disembark.

‘You’re braver than I am, kids,’ the ticket collector remarked as they made their way through the barrier of that much loved little station, where Berliners had been disembarking with such excitement and departing with such regret for fifty years.

Paulus managed a smile in reply, his eyes flicking briefly to take in the first of numerous signs announcing that Jews were banned from the beach and its facilities.

The wet, windswept steps down from the ticket office boasted none of the festive garb that the three trippers remembered from happier visits. It being late November there were no flowers in the station windowboxes. No balloon-seller or ice-cream stand. The little wooden pretzel wagon was boarded up and padlocked and there was no accordion player in Bavarian costume with his feathered hat filled with coins.

But the sun peeped through the clouds momentarily, as it was supposed to do at Wannsee, and if they half closed their eyes and imagined that the limp and sodden swastika banners hanging from the lamp-posts were strawberry bunting, they could almost visualize the summer of 1930 when the great Strandbad Wannsee lido had been brand new. When Dagmar and her parents, stately in first class, and the Stengel twins with Wolfgang and Frieda in third, had joined the tens and tens of thousands of other holiday-makers thronging on to this very platform, all eager to see the gift to the people of Berlin from their municipal council. The new restaurant, the changing facilities, the easy access to the longest inland beach in Europe and, most important of all to the civilized citizens of Germany’s capital, the splendid public lavatories.

The three of them made their way over the little railway bridge that crossed the platform and descended the worn-down old stone steps on the lakeside of the station to the promenade.

Of course every few metres they had to pass another sign forbidding Jews to visit, but in Otto’s company Dagmar and Paulus felt relatively safe. They were young, fit and attractive, filled with life and vitality. It would have been a very great leap of the imagination for one of the ubiquitous police spies who hung about in the parks and pleasure palaces even in bad weather to mistake such a good-looking trio for any of those grotesque caricatures that featured in the pages of Der Sturmer or in the editorials in the Volkischer Beobachter.

The fat, top-hatted, hook-nosed gargoyle with its greedy, bulging eyes, grinning over money bags stuffed with Yankee dollars. Or the cadaverous figure with the hammer and sickle on its forehead, dragging a helpless maiden by the hair with one hand and holding a dripping knife in the other, a desecrated church left burning in its wake.

‘Streicher and Goebbels might get mistaken for those people,’ Dagmar said bitterly as they passed a poster depicting just such a wicked duo, ‘but not us.’

‘How do they do it?’ Paulus said. ‘How do they get away with these unbelievable pictures? I never saw anybody remotely like that in my life. Not even in a pantomime. Do people really believe they exist? I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad but Adolf’s entire gang are such a pathetic, weasel-faced bunch of cunts themselves.’

The next poster along was for the Hitler Jugend and the Bund Deutscher Madel, which of course depicted the inevitable ideal of Nazi youth staring upwards with distant inspiration in their eyes. The funny thing was that, blonde hair aside, Paulus and Dagmar could quite easily have modelled for the poster. The two of them looked as fine and upstanding an example of German youth as any two eighteen-year-olds could be, and had Hitler been passing by in his open-top Mercedes, he would without doubt have nodded with approval and shaken them all sternly by the hand. Goebbels probably would have done more than shake Dagmar’s hand. His reputation as a sexual predator was already well established and his particular taste was for sophisticated and glamorous young women with filmstar beauty. Dagmar would have caught his eye immediately.

Dagmar caught the eye of most men. Heads always turned to admire the tall, long-legged beauty when she walked about town, always elegantly turned out, with the handsome Napola Jungmann on her arm. None of those who grinned and nudged their friends and even wolf-whistled at her shapely behind as it swung past would ever dream that this lovely-looking Berlin girl was the same spoiled, cruel and wicked Jewess heiress of Goebbels’ hysterical editorials, the pariah daughter of the Jew capitalist Isaac Fischer.

Dagmar had only been thirteen, still a girl, when she was forced to retreat from her life. The young woman who had emerged a few years later courtesy of Otto’s Aryan ancestry was a very different creature.

But there were no passers-by to wolf-whistle Dagmar at Wannsee on that wet November day as they made their way down from the amenities blocks to the beach.

‘Where shall we set ourselves up?’ Dagmar asked.

The boys grinned at each other.

As if Princess Dagmar Fischer would have allowed them to choose. She had always decided where to sit, right back to the first days of the Saturday Club.

‘Well, we’ve certainly got plenty of room,’ Otto said.

The Wannsee beach was well over a kilometre long and they were the only people on it.

‘But I think we should move along a bit,’ he added, ‘up towards the Glienicker bridge.’

Despite her current misery Dagmar found herself giving him a playful punch.

‘I know where you mean,’ she said, ‘and we are certainly not going there.’

They all laughed. Otto was referring to the notorious nudist section of the beach, which had become even more popular under the Nazis, in their obsession with health and beauty.

‘I’m not going nude in this temperature anyway,’ Paulus said. ‘My dick will disappear.’

‘Not much to disappear if you ask me,’ Otto remarked, chucking a handful of sand.