My Brother's Secret (30 page)

T
he blast from the bomb swept across the cemetery, flattening shrubs and ancient gravestones. It rushed around tombs and battered the side of the church and the building we had used for cover.

If we had stayed behind the tomb closer to the road, we would surely have died. The shock waves alone would have crushed us.

Behind the stone building, the air was sucked from my lungs in one violent rush, and then more streamed in, hot and heavy with dust. My ears popped, my eyes bulged, my joints screamed in pain, and the cemetery was smothered in a cloud of destruction.

Dirt and branches and pieces of Wolff’s car battered the side of the outbuilding like a hurricane. The tiles blew off the roof above us, breaking into pieces as they disappeared into the storm like a thousand deadly knives. Wreckage smashed against the side of the church, shattering the stained glass windows and bouncing back from the walls, filling the night with a whirlwind of debris.

For that moment, there was nothing but noise and pressure and violence and madness.

It was difficult to tell exactly when the effects of the bomb subsided.

I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t breathe properly, I couldn’t hear, and my whole body hurt.

Dust swirled in the air and my mouth felt gritty, so that when I opened and closed it, I could feel the crunch between my teeth.

The first thing I knew was that someone was shaking me. I was sitting with my back to the wall, hunched into a ball.

The shaking came again and I turned to look at Lisa.

I had to think hard about moving my head. The effort of it was massive. My mind was numb and empty, and when I looked at her, I blinked hard.

She was leaning close and saying something, but all I could hear was a muffled noise and a high-pitched whining. No words. If I hadn’t been so stunned, I might have been afraid that I had lost my hearing, but I was too dazed to think much of anything at all.

Lisa leaned closer and shouted in my ear.

‘… alive?’

I stared at her and focused my thoughts. I wiped my eyes and shook my head.

Lisa spoke again and this time the words were clearer.

‘Are we still alive?’

I nodded and reached out to touch her shoulder, then turned to look at Stefan.

My brother was lying face down on the ground, not moving.

I stared at his body, then shifted forward and crawled towards him.

‘Stefan,’ I tried to say, but my mouth would hardly work. ‘Stefan.’

My arms gave way when I came to him, and I fell forward, pressing my face to his shoulder.

‘Karl?’

I stopped, not sure if I’d actually heard it. My ears were ringing and it might have been my imagination.

‘Karl. You’re hurting me.’

In one sudden movement, I sat back and an overwhelming sense of relief swept over me. ‘Stefan? You’re all right.’

My brother rolled onto his back and looked at me. ‘What the hell just happened?’

RETURN TO HEADQUARTERS

T
here was a large crater in the road, and what was left of Wolff and his car was crushed against the trunk of a sturdy oak, but we didn’t stay to inspect the damage. It took us a while to recover from the blast and by the time we were on our feet, some of the men from Feldstrasse had come to investigate the explosion.

We left the way we had come in, all of us stunned, our ears ringing and our bodies aching.

‘What now?’ Lisa asked.

‘Home?’ I replied. It seemed like the only thing to do.

‘I feel like … like I should … I don’t know,’ Lisa said. ‘Like I should feel worse. That Wolff’s … you know.’

‘Dead?’ Stefan said.

Lisa nodded. ‘It’s our fault.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘But if we’d reported the bomb …’ she said. ‘I don’t feel bad though. Is that wrong?’

‘I don’t feel bad either,’ I said to her. ‘Anyway, you
did
try to tell him, remember? When he caught us outside. You tried to tell him and he should have listened to you.’

Lisa nodded again.

‘So let’s go home.’ I reached out and held her hand.

‘You have to take me back, first,’ Stefan said.

‘What?’

‘You have to come back to Headquarters with me. You have to lock me back in the cell.’

‘No. We—’

‘Don’t you see, Karl? I can’t be out of that cell. They’ll think I escaped and then I’ll have to hide and you’ll still be in danger, and Mama and Oma and Opa …’ Stefan shook his head. ‘I
have
to go back.’

‘I won’t lock you in.’

‘He’s right,’ Lisa said.

‘But what if they do something to you?’

‘I can’t just run away, Karl. They’ll come after me. After you too. And Mama. You need to lock me up so they can release me like they released the others.’

‘What if they don’t?’

‘They will.’

I couldn’t help thinking about how he had been taken away the last time, though. Maybe, if they took him away again, he wouldn’t come back.

‘No one knows what just happened,’ Stefan argued. ‘No one but us. Don’t you see? If I run away, they’ll come after me, but if you lock me back in the cell, no one will
ever
know what happened. They’ll just think Wolff went out in his car and hit an unexploded bomb. You’ll all be safe.’

I tried to argue, but as always, Stefan was right. So we headed back to Gestapo Headquarters and went down into the cellar. Stefan hugged me and returned to his cell.

The key was still in the lock, and the bunch jangled when Stefan helped close the door. He turned and looked at me through the bars.

‘Lock it. Then get your things from upstairs and leave the keys. No one can know you were here.’

‘What if they don’t let you out?’ My mind was filled with doubt. ‘What if they do something to you?’

‘Like what? They’ve already beaten me and shaved my head. What else are they going to do?’

‘I—’

‘Go,’ he said. ‘Now.’

‘Come on.’ Lisa took my arm and pulled me away from the cell. ‘Before someone comes.’

I nodded and wiped my eyes, and followed Lisa up the stairs. At the top, I stopped and turned to look at my brother for what I thought might be the last time. I wanted, more than anything, to let him back out, but that would only lead to trouble for everyone.

He looked so brave when he raised a hand to us and we left him.

‘Get our things,’ Lisa said, heading straight to the front door. ‘I’ll keep watch.’

With a heavy heart, I jogged to Wolff’s office. The Führer watched from his picture on the wall as I collected my bag and shoved everything inside. My hands were shaking and I was fighting back the tears. I couldn’t stop thinking about Stefan in the cell downstairs.

When I had collected everything, I turned to leave, but stopped when something caught my eye. There, on the corner of Wolff’s desk.

Three brown folders.

I hesitated, looking from the folders to the door, then back again.

Take them
.

I ran to the desk and grabbed the folders. I flicked each one open, seeing the arrest forms we had signed, then stuffed them into my bag along with everything else.

And that’s when I had an idea. If only there was enough time.

Do it
.

Rushing around the desk, I pulled open the top drawer on the left and rummaged through the empty brown folders and documents.

Nothing.

‘Hurry up!’ Lisa shouted.

Without pausing, I slammed the drawer shut and yanked open the one below it. Another pile of papers nestled in there, but they were of no use to me.

‘Karl!’

I tugged open the bottom drawer and immediately saw the forms I was looking for. I could hardly believe they were real.

‘Karl! What are you doing?’

I snatched one from the top of the pile and put it on the desktop as I kicked the drawer closed. Leaning down to look at the document more closely, I reached out for Wolff’s pen.

This was my chance to do something right. Perhaps—

‘Quick!’ Lisa ran back from the front door. ‘Someone’s coming. We have to go.’

‘One minute.’ It was a risk, but there might just be time.

‘Now!’ she hissed. ‘I can hear them coming!’

A KNOCK AT THE DOOR

W
e managed to slip from Headquarters without being seen. The soldiers were returning from Feldstrasse, tired and dirty, and we hid in the shadow of the thorny hedge until they had disappeared inside the Gestapo building.

When everything was quiet, we sneaked away from that awful place and Lisa and I finally made it back to Escherstrasse, but our street felt like a different place now.
We
felt different.

As soon as I was home, I washed my hands and face, and hid my dirty clothes before climbing into bed. I didn’t sleep at all. Lying there, staring at the ceiling, ears
ringing, I couldn’t shake the fire and explosions out of my mind, and I kept seeing images of Stefan locked in that horrible cell. His bruises and the dried blood on his face. I was frightened that putting him back behind bars had been the wrong thing; that maybe he would be taken away and I would never see him again.

The next morning, Oma put breakfast on the table in the kitchen. She talked with Mama and Opa about the bombing, and about Stefan, but I kept quiet. I didn’t say a word about what had happened to me last night, even though it pressed down on me like a terrible weight.

I picked at my bread, not feeling hungry. I was too scared to eat anything. Too scared to say anything. All I could think about was poor Stefan, and how I had locked the cell and left him in that horrible prison.

When three knocks came at the front door, my heart jumped.

Everyone looked round at each other, worry and fear clear in their eyes.

The knocking came again and Opa pushed back his chair. ‘I’ll get it.’

Mama stood up too, lifting a trembling hand to her mouth as she spoke. ‘Who is it? Is it him?’

We followed Opa into the hallway and watched him unlock the door.

He glanced back at us before pulling it open.

Standing on the step, flanked by two SS soldiers, Stefan looked even worse in the early morning light than he had in the dull electric glow of the bulbs in the prison last night. His eye was swollen shut, bruises shone on his face, and
his short hair made him look like a prisoner from a camp.

One of the soldiers stepped forward and held out a piece of paper.

Opa took it from him, fumbling it open with shaking fingers. He looked at it for a long moment, then turned to show it to Mama.

‘A release order,’ he said.

Mama let out a gasp and hurried straight to Stefan. She wrapped her arms around my brother and stood there on the step, holding him as if she would never let him go.

‘You’re safe,’ she sobbed. ‘You’re safe.’

The soldiers didn’t say a word. They turned and walked away, boot heels clicking on the pavement.

Opa took Mama’s elbow and guided her inside with Stefan, closing the door before bringing them into the kitchen where he sat them at the table. Oma and Opa then pulled up chairs so that they were all sitting around Stefan. They checked his bruises and asked him question after question. They wanted to know where he had been and what had happened to him.

Stefan looked over their shoulders to see me standing by the door and our eyes met. He nodded once at me and I felt a massive sense of relief. It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my heart.

I watched them fussing over Stefan, then went upstairs and took my copy of
Mein Kampf
from the top of the chest of drawers.

I stared at the face of the man I had come to hate, and thought about all the things that had happened since my twelfth birthday. It had only been a matter of days, but it
felt as if it had been years, and my world was not the same any more. All those games and parades and uniforms and medals weren’t exciting now; they were not things to be proud of, but things to be afraid of. They were the things that had made us laugh at Johann Weber and beat him to the ground; things that caused Stefan to get arrested and Lisa’s father to be taken away.

They were the things that had killed Papa.