Two Brothers: A Novel

by Ben Elton

  My darlings, this is a depravity beyond imagination. To say that we have laid waste to what we have occupied does not begin to describe the slaughter, the devastation and the endless cruelty.

  And yet even now that is not enough to feed the beast that Germany has become. I do not exaggerate when I say that the principal concern of the SS Einsatzgruppen is that they cannot kill people fast enough. They are seeking to industrialize the process.

  Language is inadequate. Goethe himself could not find words with which to communicate this unique and perverted slaughter.

  Therefore, to come to the point, I have decided that I can no longer fight in this army. Even the love I bear for you cannot excuse me continuing to be a part of the most evil horde that ever made war.

  On the pitiful and the defenceless. On the old and the weak. On babies and young children. On humanity itself.

  My plan has changed. I will go to my commanding officer and volunteer to make a reconnaissance of the Soviet positions. Such a mission is often fatal.

  I intend to make sure that in my case it is.

  Thus in the eyes of Germany I will die an honourable, even heroic death, and as such Silke will be accorded the rights, respect and pension of a war widow. I hope in this way that the apartment in Moabit will continue to provide shelter for Dagmar, the only woman I have ever loved, and that also when the time comes Mum will hide there too.

  I close by saying that despite this terrible darkness in which we all live, I die happy. Happy that I have been a good son to my mother and father, and that in some small way I have been worthy of Dagmar’s love.

  That love is the towering achievement of my life.

  Goodbye, Mum. From your son.

  Goodbye, Dagmar. From your devoted and loving husband.

  Park Bench

  Berlin, 1956

  ‘FRIEDA NEVER DID come to live with us,’ Dagmar explained. ‘She told us that she intended never to go underground but to die with her patients.’

  ‘Yes,’ Otto replied, hollow-voiced, ‘that sounds like Mum.’

  He was trying to focus on the reality of finally knowing how his brother died. Otto had been a soldier himself; he too had crawled on the ground in the night seeking out a shadowy enemy. But not on that front, in minus forty degrees, creeping between the two most bitterly ferocious armies ever assembled on earth. Then standing up, the will to live crushed out of him, inviting the liberating bullet.

  Had they shot him clean? Silhouetted against the frozen night sky?

  Or had they taken him and butchered him for the devil’s henchman they would have thought him to be?

  Otto would never know. But he took some comfort from the knowledge that Paulus had chosen the moment of his departure from the world.

  He had died as he lived, according to a plan.

  They were still sitting together on the bench in the People’s Park. Otto was vaguely surprised at that. He had been half expecting at every minute to be bundled into a police car by Stasi thugs.

  But only children ran past them and in the distance the band played.

  The cigarette ends were piling up.

  He produced another packet from his case. He had bought a carton of two hundred at Heathrow.

  He was beginning to wonder if that would be enough.

  ‘When the final round-ups began and your mother refused to go underground,’ Dagmar continued, ‘Silke wanted to use the flat to hide others. She thought that she and I should at least share our rooms – there were so many people desperate to hide, you see. That caused plenty of trouble between us, I can tell you.’

  ‘You didn’t want to do it?’ Otto asked.

  ‘Do you find that shocking?’ Dagmar replied. ‘Why would I? Tell me? Why would I want to share? Every submarine Jew was a leper, a massive risk both to themselves and others. In constant danger of discovery and arrest. Of betrayal too. Oh yes, believe me, betrayal; dogs eat dogs when the table’s bare. If I’d let Silke bring in even one more like me we’d have been doubling our chances of detection while halving our food and other supplies. We were entering the end game, you see, Otto. The condemned were getting desperate. On both sides, German and Jew alike. The fact that the Nazis couldn’t beat Ivan sent them scurrying for easier victories elsewhere. That meant the Jews. The Final Solution was upon us. They introduced the yellow star and after that, unless you had a guardian angel like I had, there was nowhere to hide. The Gestapo began finally systematically clearing the Jews of Germany. They sent people letters and they just went, down to the station and on to the trains. Sometimes there was no letter, the police just turned up and pulled people out of their beds. Your grandparents went in November ’42. Ordered to be at the station at such and such a time with one small suitcase each. They went, of course. Everybody went. They were told that there were homes waiting for them in the east, whole new towns even; people believed it, or tried to. Even after everything that had already been done to them they tried to deny the unthinkable. They simply could not comprehend that it wasn’t homes but gas chambers that were waiting for them at the end of the line. Even after they’d been stuffed into cattle trucks. Pissing and shitting on each other, dying of suffocation and dehydration in railway sidings, pushing the corpses of babies out through the bars. They still could not quite believe that the Nazis actually meant to murder them en masse. That’s why I have some sympathy for the Germans now when they say they never knew. After all, if the Jews themselves could scarcely believe what was happening to them, then why should the people who hurried by on the other side of the street looking the other way?’

  Otto didn’t want to talk about whether the Germans knew or not.

  ‘And my mother? When did she go?’

  ‘She lasted another few months. She lost the apartment, of course, just after Pauly died, in fact. No more silly conversation groups with old Jews moaning in English about not being allowed to buy soap or use telephone boxes.’

  ‘She had a conversation group?’ Otto said, half smiling.

  ‘That and a hundred other things. She was everywhere, running all over town. On foot after they banned Jews from the trams and took their bicycles. I think she was personally trying to sustain the entire victim population of Berlin. I actually think it was what saved her for so long. The Nazis weren’t stupid. They didn’t want mass panic and they certainly didn’t want resistance. They encouraged leadership amongst the Jews till the last. Your mother got taken to work in what was called the Jewish hospital, which the Gestapo still allowed to operate. They were doing everything they could to make the Jews get rid of themselves, you see. Lying to them, confusing them, sending mixed messages. The hospital Frieda ended up in was part of that. It gave people comfort when they got their movement orders. After all, if the Germans were still maintaining a Jewish hospital in Berlin, then perhaps they were also preparing homes for them in the east.’

  Otto knew something of the psychology of Nazi tactics.

  ‘Mum worked in the Jewish hospital?’

  ‘I say hospital. It was more of a charnel house really. With no facilities or money whatsoever. And it was only for Mischlinge anyway, and the wives of mixed marriages. Jewesses with Aryan husbands in the army. When their husbands got killed at the front, the wives lost their special status and got shipped straight off to the death camps. Widowed and condemned to death in the same telegram. How’s that for a grim joke?’

  So much history all at once. Dagmar seemed to be finding some comfort in sharing it. Otto wished she’d stick to the point.

  ‘What happened to my mother?’

  The Jewish Hospital

  Berlin, 1943

  IN JANUARY 1943 the Wehrmacht lost the battle of Stalingrad, thereby sealing the fate of the Third Reich. In response to this catastrophe, Josef Goebbels promised Hitler a Jew-free Berlin for his birthday.

  Despite the massive strains on the city administration caused by the Allied bombing, the Berlin police authorities determined to make good Goebbels’ promise.


  In February 1943 the Gestapo began what was to be their final mass action against Berlin’s Jews. Police supported by the Waffen SS spread out across the city. They smashed down every suspect door and invaded every cellar. They climbed through windows, sledgehammered walls and crowbarred locks. They burst into homes and factories. They opened drains, scoured bombsites and searched sewers. Working from meticulously prepared civil lists and with the aid of a small group of Jewish informers they sought out the last six or seven thousand Jews still living in the city. Scooping them up and taking them directly to a mass ‘transfer site’ on Levetzowstrasse into which they were crammed without toilets or water. This time there was no formal summons. People were simply snatched where they were found, children without their mothers, husbands without their wives. The comforting fiction of allowing people to prepare a bag containing ‘work boots, two pairs of socks and two pairs of underpants etc.’ was a thing of the past. The tactics learnt in Poland and the Ukraine had come home to Berlin.

  For the time being, Mischlinge were to be spared, along with a tiny handful of privileged workers employed at the so-called Jewish Hospital. Frieda was one of these workers, but despite her special status she decided on that day in February when the last police action began that her time had come to join her beloved Wolfgang and Paulus.

  It wasn’t planned but it happened anyway. She had been outside the hospital, walking in the frozen streets. Taking a few minutes’ break from the nonstop work in which she was engaged.

  With her yellow star on her breast she was accosted almost immediately. A van pulled up and she was ordered to get in by a policeman holding a wooden club on which Frieda could see there was encrusted blood along with skin and hair.

  Frieda presented her special papers, which were all in order, and she was told that she could go. It was clear to her that some sort of arbitrary round-up was underway and so she began running back to the hospital.

  However, on her way she saw another police van, an open lorry this time. It was pulled up outside a building that was clearly being used as a Jewish kindergarten. A terrible scene was unfolding as twenty or so children between the ages of three and eight were dragged by soldiers from the building and thrown physically on to the truck. An elderly woman who must have been the children’s teacher was trying to protest, while all around her the children screamed and fell and soiled themselves.

  A soldier began to push the teacher towards the truck, where-upon the old woman turned and slapped him in the face. For a moment the soldier and the old lady stared at each other, both equally shocked at what had occurred. Then the soldier simply drew his gun and shot her. After which he and a comrade hurled her dying body on to the lorry amongst the screaming children.

  It was clear to Frieda, watching from the pavement, that the children were now completely alone. Whatever brief time they had left on earth they would spend in absolute terror and utter bewilderment without comfort or guidance.

  ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mum!’

  The small voices bleated for their mothers through terror-twisted mouths set in faces turned to grotesque masks of horror.

  The engine of the truck revved up, almost drowning out their pitiful cries. Two soldiers got into the cab while two others mounted the running board.

  As a soldier raised himself up, one of the smallest of the children reached out to him, no doubt in the childish belief that grown-ups could be trusted. The little boy’s hand wiped at his wailing face as he stretched his little arms towards the man. There was so much snot, so many tears. The soldier recoiled, disgusted, punching the child away. The little boy fell back on to the dead body of his teacher.

  And the children wailed. ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mum!’

  The soldiers screamed back. ‘Shut up! Shut your little mouths or we’ll beat you, you Jew bastards! Shut up or we’ll kill you!’

  Brutality was their defence. Each young soldier had built a thick wall of cruelty around his corrupted conscience. A wall their leaders called ‘strength’.

  But the children didn’t know how to shut up. They hadn’t yet learnt to bow their heads and shuffle.

  And so they cried, ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

  Frieda heard those cries.

  Mum? That was her name. It had been her name since 1920.

  She was a mother.

  And now she was their mother. Twenty more adoptions, all at once.

  ‘Stop!’ Frieda shouted at the last of the soldiers who was in the act of boarding the truck. ‘Look! I wear the star! I’m a Jew! Take me! I will keep the children quiet.’

  Continued Conversation in the Park

  Berlin, 1956

  ‘FRIEDA CLIMBED ON to the truck,’ Dagmar said. ‘Silke got the story from someone who saw it. Your mother couldn’t bear for those children to spend the last hours of their brief lives without love or comfort, so she spent her own last hours giving them hers. She climbed aboard and she got amongst them and put out her arms and held as many of them as she could. Apparently the children clustered to her like bees around a flower. Then as the lorry pulled away she began to sing Hoppe Hoppe Reiter. Hoppe Hoppe Reiter.

  Tears were streaming down Otto’s face.

  ‘She used to sing it to Paulus and me,’ he said. ‘I can hear her voice now.’

  ‘We heard she was still singing when the truck arrived at the station, but by then somehow your mother had worked the magic that she always did and she had the children singing too. Even as they were pushed into the cattle trucks, crushed in with a hundred other condemned souls. “Hip hop there, rider! Hip hop there, rider!” Your mother went with those children to Dachau that very day. I imagine she led them singing into the gas chamber.’

  Otto wept and wept. Thinking of his beloved mother and how brave her end had been.

  She had died as she had lived, a beacon of goodness in a sick and dreadful world.

  ‘And so there was only us left,’ Dagmar went on. ‘Me and Silke.’

  Her voice was far away. Through his tears Otto understood that Dagmar needed to tell the whole story.

  ‘We lived in Pauly’s flat and of course we fought and fought. Two very different girls who never should have roomed together. Silke was trying to establish resistance connections. Can you believe it? Using her cover as a war widow to contact other Communists. She was a part of Die Rote Kapelle. The Red Orchestra – I suppose you’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Otto said, pulling himself together and blowing his nose on his handkerchief. ‘The Communist-backed resistance. I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘I warned her,’ Dagmar went on. ‘I told her if she was ever the cause of me getting caught I’d make damn sure she and her bloody idiot friends went down with me. That apartment was my castle. Paulus built it for me. Because he loved me. Me. Not some random bunch of self-righteous Reds.’

  Her voice was starting to grate on Otto.

  Incredible.

  That same voice that had been nothing but music to him all his life. The voice he’d wrestled the telephone receiver from his brother’s hand to hear, watching the clock, waiting his turn, jealous of every missed syllable.

  Now it was actually starting to grate.

  ‘Paulus may have loved you, Dagmar,’ Otto said, a little more harshly perhaps than he had intended, ‘but only because you lied to him.’

  ‘That is a damned lie! He loved me because he loved me. Full stop. Just like you did. I didn’t ask him to. I didn’t ask either of you to, so don’t start playing the victim now. If the bloody mad Stengel twins devoted their lives to me, it was because they chose to. What’s more, I kept my half of the bargain with Pauly. We lived together in that flat as man and wife for the little time he had. That was what he wanted and that was what he got.’

  ‘You fucked him. So what?’

  ‘I made love to him, Otto, and never say I didn’t! And he died believing in my love, which was just the way he wanted to die.’

  ‘He didn’t want to die at all!’

  ‘Really? He a
lways told me he’d rather die having won my love than live a life without it. How about you, Otto? How’s the last seventeen years been for you? I never would have picked you to fossilize in a government office. You were always going to be a knight in armour. Wouldn’t you rather have been a knight in armour? I think you would.’

  Otto was stunned. She could always run rings round him. Fossilize.

  She had his number all right.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t suppose I have any right to judge you.’

  ‘No one has any right to judge me for anything I did, Otto. Because of what Hitler did to me.’

  She stood up, lighting her umpteenth cigarette with a hand shaking with emotion.

  Something in what she said and the vehemence with which she said it brought Otto’s thoughts back to the present.

  ‘Dagmar,’ he said, ‘where’s Silke?’

  She turned and looked down at him. Her lip curling along with the smoke that drifted from it.

  ‘God, Ottsy,’ she said, ‘didn’t you work it out yet? Pauly would have got it at the airport. I’m bloody Silke.’

  Jew Catcher

  Berlin, 1945

  THE ATMOSPHERE WAS always heavy in the apartment on the days when Silke’s shadowy Communist friends were due to visit.

  Dagmar hated them with the passion of a true blue Conservative. And it was not merely because their presence in her home so dramatically increased her own chances of being detected, she hated them on ideological grounds too. She hated them for her father’s sake. She thought they were nothing but self-righteous fools. A gang of egotists and fantasists who made themselves ridiculous with their solemn clenched-fist salutes, endless bickering over ideological details and expansive plans for future government conducted round a bare kitchen table by the light of a single candle.