Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  ‘Please, ma’am,’ Frieda asked, ‘are we not even to know where Otto will live?’

  ‘That information is of no concern to you,’ the woman replied sharply. ‘Your parenthood of this boy is illegal under the law and you no longer have any rights or interest in him whatsoever. You are to have absolutely nothing to do with him from this moment forth. Come, Otto.’

  ‘He is our son!’ Frieda cried, finding it difficult to keep control. ‘He has lived in this same apartment for all of his fifteen years.’

  ‘That has been his misfortune,’ the woman said, ‘but his Jew nightmare is over. He is a German now.’

  Otto went to the door without even glancing back. It had already been agreed between him and Paulus that he would show no regret or affection for fear of provoking the Gestapo.

  As the door of their apartment closed behind Otto, Frieda literally sank to the floor. Her still lovely face, habitually lined with care. Now contorted with grief.

  It occurred to Frieda that her heart had been broken in this same place before. Leaving a sadness so great and all-consuming that the empty space it made would remain empty all her days.

  When had that been?

  Of course she remembered. In the hospital, in 1920 when the old nurse had taken away the little shrivelled grey bundle. Then she had felt as she felt now.

  And it had happened again. Once more she had lost a son, and for the second time Paulus had lost his twin.

  Outside in the corridor Otto said nothing as he entered the familiar, creaking, clanking lift with the woman and policeman and descended to the ground floor. Still silent he walked with his captors out of the front door and into the well of the building.

  ‘What about my bike?’ he asked, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Perhaps it will be sent for,’ the woman said. ‘I do not know.’

  Otto got into the police car and allowed himself to be driven away.

  He did not speak again as the car traversed the familiar streets through which the Saturday Club had roamed on so many happy yesterdays.

  ‘Cheer up, son,’ the policeman said. ‘A year from now you’ll have forgotten you ever knew those Jews.’

  Otto waited until they were completely out of Friedrichshain before he acted but then he did so decisively. As the car pulled up at some lights, he simply opened the door and jumped out.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen and fuck you,’ he said and ran.

  He didn’t know where he was going and he did not expect to get far. It was the principle of the thing. The first protest. From day one Otto wanted them to know that they had made a mistake. That they had caught a live one and that their lives would have been easier if they’d left him where he was.

  As he ran a whistle blew behind him. The copper had leapt out of the car and was shouting that the boy should be stopped. Almost immediately Otto found himself confronted by diligent citizens responding to the policeman’s call. Otto smashed his fist into the face of the biggest person blocking his way and as the man staggered back Otto buried his boot between the same unfortunate citizen’s legs. By which time the policeman had caught up. As he reached out to grab at Otto he too got a fist in the face.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Otto shouted once more.

  The other passers-by who had been intent on stopping Otto fell back. Anybody who was prepared to physically attack a police officer in broad daylight was clearly out of control and they did not want to be the next person in his line of fire. Otto may have been only fifteen but he was very strong and an experienced fighter. He was also motivated by a blind fury which was plain for all to see. People stood aside and let him pass.

  Otto ran on, pushing his way through the busy street, turning blindly left and right. It could not last long of course. Pretty soon other local beat officers responding to the whistles and the hubbub had joined the pursuit and before long Otto was surrounded and subdued.

  They took him to the cells of the local police station where they beat him up pretty badly, but when he was brought before a judge Otto was let off with a caution. The council woman explained the situation and it was decided that you could not expect a lad brought up by vermin to become civilized in a single morning.

  There was, however, no question of Otto going to a foster home now. It was clear that the Jews had turned him into a savage beast and that no normal family could control him. The party, however, could and would, and it was decided between the court, the Friedrichshain council and the local SS that Otto would be sent to a Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt, or Napola for short, an institute for National Political Education. This was a grouping of supposedly ‘elite’ boarding schools, the purpose of which was to educate the Nazi officials and administrators of the future.

  These academies had been set up shortly after the Nazis came to power and had immediately gained for themselves a fearsome reputation for fitness and toughness. The court considered such a school would be the best means by which Otto would receive the discipline and indoctrination he needed in order to become a good German.

  ‘He is of the purest Saxon peasant stock,’ the SS officer attached to the court insisted. ‘The most valuable type of German of all. This is one we can’t afford to lose.’

  When they told Otto the news in his cell, he was fearful that they would be sending him far away, but fortunately a Napola school had been established the previous year in the Spandau district of Berlin. The headmaster had already been contacted and had, Otto was assured, accepted ‘with relish’ the ‘challenge’ of making an elite German from a boy raised by Jews.

  ‘This really is very fascinating,’ the SS man explained when he visited Otto in his cell. ‘It’s the same as with these wolf boys one occasionally hears about. Feral children raised by a different species who must somehow be brought home to their race. A wonderful opportunity, lad, for which I am confident you will one day be truly grateful.’

  Otto spent that night in the police cells before being taken directly to his new school the following morning. It was an intensely lonely night, an isolation of which he had no experience and for which he had prepared no strategy. It was almost the first time in his life that he had not gone to sleep to the sound of his brother breathing just a few feet away, and although the cells were noisy and the nearby traffic constant, to Otto the long hours seemed heart-breakingly silent and empty.

  Still he did not cry. Some inner defence instinct told him that were he to give himself over to despair he would be lost. It was quite clear to Otto that this was only the beginning of the nightmare and young as he was he recognized that he must hoard jealously his store of emotional strength.

  Hatred would be the staff on which he leant.

  So instead of crying that night, Otto exercised. Performing push-ups and sit-ups in his little cell until exhaustion let him sleep. He knew he must stay fit because he was quite resolved that he would be in another fight within a very short time and would be fighting constantly after that. They thought their Napola could bend him to their will. Well, his fists would tell them a different story.

  The school in Spandau had been set up in an institution that had until the previous year been the Prussian Academy of Gymnastics teacher training school.

  ‘Good facilities,’ the SS man assured his silent and sullen charge as they drove across the city. ‘Plenty of sport. As the Führer has said so often, it is the body which must be trained first. Above all, he wants boys who are fit! Book learning is a lesser issue. We do not much trust those so-called “clever” gentlemen. Wasn’t it them who ruined Germany?’

  Otto did not reply but for the first time since being taken from his home he almost found himself smiling. How often had he wished for a school which didn’t like books? Now that he’d found one it was run by bloody Nazis.

  The first thing that Otto was subjected to after he had been delivered to his new school was a ‘medical’ examination to determine scientifically and mathematically the exact nature of his ‘race’. It seemed that even amongst t
hose of ‘pure German’ blood there was an enormous variation in blood ‘value’ and a strictly annotated pecking order of racial superiority.

  Two other boys, a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old, were taking the same tests as Otto, both hoping they possessed the correct shape of skull and right length of nose in order to be judged worthy of an elite education.

  ‘Why would you want to come anyway?’ Otto asked the older of the two as together they stripped to their underpants in a sports changing room.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ the thirteen-year-old replied. ‘This is it! The elite. Have you seen the uniforms! The parade one’s black. It looks amazing! And when we get out, we’re the bosses. The future Gauleiter. My HJ leader says we get to rule Germany, and when Germany rules the world, we’ll rule that too.’

  The younger boy was trying to look brave but seemed a lot less sure this was all a good idea.

  ‘I liked my old school,’ he said, ‘but the Napola are free and my mum and dad are a bit poor, you see. My dad’s a miner and he doesn’t want me to have to work like he does. They can’t believe that I can get a private education in a top school and the Government pays. They really really want me to get in so I have to try hard to, I suppose.’

  ‘No snobbery any more,’ the first boy said with brash self-confidence. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re a lord or a peasant in Germany now. Not to the Führer. He knows it’s not class that counts but blood! We’re all Germans together.’

  Otto wished the lad had been older so that he could have punched him.

  The three boys were summoned into the gymnasium and told to sit on a bench that had been placed in front of a table on which lay a selection of strange and scary-looking objects: a pair of very long metal callipers, which looked like an insect’s antennae, and a couple of instruments that reminded Otto of the sort of clamps he had used in woodwork at school. There were also a series of wooden sticks from which were hung many locks of hair of varying colours and textures. Most intimidating of all was a sinister-looking display box from which thirty or forty different coloured glass eyeballs stared blindly upwards, all laid out neatly in little compartments.

  ‘Wow, creepy,’ the older boy laughed. ‘Looks like a morgue after the post-mortem’s finished.’

  ‘This is not a morgue, boy!’ a voice barked as a white-coated figure entered the room. ‘It is a laboratory dedicated to the science of racial truth. Stand up!’

  The two other boys leapt to their feat. Otto rose more slowly. He had decided in his own mind that he must gauge his next protest in order to make the maximum impact. This he decided was not the right time. The only witnesses would be the white-coated figure and the two other boys who were much younger than him.

  ‘Good morning,’ the man in the white coat said. ‘I am Doctor Huber of the SS Central Office for Race and Colonization. You are all three of good German lineage or you would not be here. However, the Napola require more than that. Only the best and noblest of blood can be educated here and I shall decide whether it flows in your veins or not. We recognize five Germanic types. The finest of which, the Herrenmensch, is of course Nordic. After that comes Falic, then Dinaric, West Germanic and finally Balto Slavic. Only the first two racial types are guaranteed places here. However, despair not, boys, if you have a Polish great-granny lurking in your line. The majority of the Jungmannen we see here are a mixture of the five types and we require only that applicants are predominantly Nordic. Step forward, Stengel!’

  Otto stood up and stepped forward.

  He was weighed and then measured and subjected to the various tests. The size of his ears and his skull was determined using the long callipers, and the distance from his chin to the bridge of his nose was measured with the clamp-like devices. Swatches of hair were held up and compared with Otto’s thick, sandy thatch and various glass eyeballs were placed against his temples that a match might be found for his pale grey eyes. His pants were pulled to his knees and his penis was held and closely inspected. The foreskin which his mother had denied to Rabbi Jakobovitz during the Kapp Putsch of 1920 was rolled back and forth over Otto’s glans.

  All the while Dr Huber barked out a bewildering series of numbers and letters which an orderly with a clipboard diligently recorded on Otto’s form.

  When the examination was over, Otto was told to sit back down while Huber pored over the form, tallying up the columns of figures and applying them to various charts.

  ‘Congratulations, lad,’ Huber said finally and with much solemnity, ‘you are of pure Falic blood.’

  A term Otto had never before heard in his life.

  ‘A rare and fine thing indeed,’ the doctor went on. ‘You are second only to pure Nordic and to Nordic/Falic in the great German family of races. You are truly a son of German soil and will be admitted to this academy this day.’

  Otto absorbed this news in silence and was irritated to receive a slap of congratulation on the back from the older of his two fellow candidates.

  Then it was the turn of the other boys. First, the younger one was subjected to the same bewildering series of measurements, comparisons and numerical diagnoses, before finally being graded as an acceptable mix of Falic and Dinaric. Like Otto, he was told he would be entering into the school, an honour Otto felt the little boy received with distinctly mixed emotions. The thirteen-year-old, however, the one who had been so enthusiastic about joining a Napola, was rejected. He was informed that his ‘rounded’ cranium was ‘pure Balto Slavic’ and hence he was racially unfit to study alongside the purer-blooded boys.

  ‘Cheer up, lad,’ the doctor said as it was clear the boy was fighting back tears. ‘You’re a good German, no doubt about that. Just not one of the best, that’s all. The Wehrmacht will be delighted to have you when you are older and you may serve the Führer as a soldier.’

  When the three boys returned to the changing room, Otto and the younger boy found that their civilian clothes had already been removed and replaced with a school uniform in which they were told to dress.

  Otto felt as if he was in a dream as he buttoned up the brown shirt and knotted the brown tie, then pulled on the black trousers and lace-up boots. The jacket was also black with a swastika armband stitched to the sleeve, with a diamond-shaped design rather than the traditional circular motive. There was a shiny black belt, shoulder belt and epaulettes. There were white gloves and a little black forage cap with an eagle and swastika badge.

  Apart from the cap and the boots, the whole ensemble looked exactly like the SS uniforms that Otto had first seen worn by the men who had come to take his father to a concentration camp. On the night he and Paulus had killed the would-be rapist Karlsruhen.

  Otto looked at the little eleven-year-old. He was dressed in the same way except that his boots were knee-length, laced all the way up and had caused the little boy considerable trouble.

  He looked ridiculous, like a little Nazi doll.

  The other boy had already left. Hurried out by the school orderlies while still buttoning his shirt. He was a bad smell that could not be mentioned and must be quickly dispersed. Then the eleven-year-old was collected to join his year group and Otto was brought before the headmaster.

  The principal of the school was a big, quite jolly-looking man who nodded with approval at Otto’s uniform, even leaning forward to adjust Otto’s tie.

  ‘You wear it well,’ the principal said. ‘You’re not tall, I admit, but you’re strong. A fighter I’m told. Well there’s no better uniform to fight in.’

  ‘Where are my clothes?’ Otto asked.

  The principal flinched slightly to be so perfunctorily addressed, but then smiled indulgently.

  ‘You won’t be needing civilian clothes any more, boy,’ he said. ‘From this day forward you will wear only uniform. A school uniform to begin with but after that who knows? A party uniform in some important Gau? Or an SS one? A member of the black knighthood? Perhaps as an officer of the Wehrmacht if you choose a military career. Although I t
hink that by the time you are of age the Waffen SS might well have seen off those old army Junkers, eh? No matter, army or party you will live your life in uniform, my boy, for you are now a servant of the state. Give thanks, boy! Give thanks! For from this day forward you belong to the Führer. He who knows all, sees all and loves all. All that is German.’

  If the head teacher had imagined that this little speech would inspire Otto then he was immediately disappointed, for Otto had decided the time had come to make his feelings felt.

  ‘Speaking of the Führer,’ he said.

  ‘I did not give you permission to speak, lad,’ the head replied sternly. ‘I forgave that once, but not a second time. Be quiet.’

  ‘I was just wondering what sort of racial mix he is?’ Otto went on, ignoring the headmaster’s order. ‘Some people say he looks Jewish but we wouldn’t have him. I’d say he was about half prick and half arsehole – what do you reckon, sir?’

  Otto knew exactly what he was doing.

  He truly didn’t care if they killed him. His life was over anyway.

  Everything that he loved was lost to him. His home. His family. And his beloved Dagmar.

  They were all that mattered in his life and they had been stolen from him. In exchange he had been given a Nazi uniform. An SS uniform in all but name. Had there ever been an irony so cruel? A fate so despicable and low? To be in amongst the Devil’s own? Welcomed as a prodigal son?

  Otto would quite happily have taken his own life but he did not want his enemies to be able to say that his Jewish family had turned him into a coward. Therefore he had resolved that he would see if he could force them to do the job for him.

  ‘A half prick, half arsehole Untermensch, that’s your Führer, sir.’

  The principal didn’t rant and rail as Otto had expected him to. He didn’t beat him or shoot him on the spot. Instead, the big friendly-looking face broke into a smile.

  ‘Well, I must say, lad,’ he boomed good-humouredly, ‘those Jews certainly didn’t manage to knock the spirit out of you, did they? You’ve got balls, my fine young man. Big proud German balls.’