Two Brothers (25 page)

This impression remained for a moment longer as the uniformed chauffeur got out of the car and, without a glance at the arrogant brown figures, opened the passenger door. Many arms were raised in anticipation of who might get out, only to be dropped again in angry astonishment as the family Fischer, recognizable from numerous slanderous articles in the Nazi press, emerged from the car. Herr Fischer was first, and stepping out behind him Dagmar could see that beyond the SA men the shop staff were already in the shop, looking out through the big central doors in terror. Doors that had been barricaded from without with rubbish bins. There were, as far as she could see, no customers attempting to get in.

There was certainly no sign of the ex-Empress Augusta Viktoria.

‘Good morning,’ she heard her father saying, ‘my name is Isaac Fischer and this is my shop. Where is my banner?’

Now Dagmar noticed that there was no sign advertising discounts hung above the door as Herr Fischer had promised there would be. Nor was there a large and prominent memorial to the war dead.

‘What have you done with my banner, please?’ Fischer asked again.

The Brownshirts began to snigger, one or two of them mimicking Herr Fischer’s cultured accent:
What have you done with my banner, please?
Others were glancing down gleefully at the pavement. Dagmar saw why they were laughing: at their feet was a great quantity of rope and painted cloth. Her father’s proud banners, a war memorial and the notice of a discount sale, torn and shredded amongst the rough hobnailed boots.

‘Oh,’ said one of the thugs, a man who by the badges on his sleeve affected the rank of some kind of sergeant, a
Truppführer
, as the Nazis styled it. ‘So this is
your
banner, is it? Well, I must say, that’s very unfortunate.’

‘Stand out of my way,’ Fischer demanded, ‘all of you. I wish to open my store.’

‘Stand out of your way?’ the
Truppführer
roared in sudden, spitting fury. ‘
Stand out of your fucking way! Who the FUCK do you think you are, you Jew cunt!
’

Fischer stepped backwards as if he had been struck. Dagmar reached out for her mother, who was shaking violently.

To be spoken to in such a manner.

On the
Kurfürstendamm
– outside their own shop.

It was impossible. Unheard of. It could not be happening.

But it was.

The Fischer family of Fischer’s department store of Berlin were discovering that not one single rule of civilization applied to them any more. Their wealth, their accomplishments, their cultured and educated ways counted for nothing. They were without rights and utterly defenceless.

The lead SA man spoke again, or screamed, in fact, in fair imitation of his leader.

‘How
dare
you give orders to a
Truppführer
of the
Sturmabteilung
! You fucking rodent! You fucking
germ
. How about this, Jew boy! How about some of
this
!’

And with that, the young man, who was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, took a step forward and knocked Isaac Fischer, a slight man in his late forties, to the ground. In a single moment he had taken a knuckle-duster from his pocket, slipped it into his clenched fist and slammed it into the side of Fischer’s head, collapsing him, semi-concussed, to the floor. Then the
Truppführer
kicked him, burying his great jackboots into Fischer’s prostrate and undefended body several times.

It was all so sudden, so utterly out of proportion.

Such violence. From
nowhere
, for
nothing
. In
seconds
.

For a moment Dagmar and her mother stood motionless, their reluctant minds struggling to catch up with the evidence of their eyes and ears. Then with guttural screams they both stepped towards the fallen head of their family, the husband, the father. The protector. The man on whom they relied utterly and who they trusted without question.

But they could offer him no comfort or support. Before they could help him they were seized and pulled roughly away by other members of the brown troop. The chauffeur had also leapt in, perhaps hoping to get Herr Fischer back into the car, but he too was grabbed and blows were raining down on him.

As Dagmar struggled in the arms of the laughing SA men, feeling their hands upon her, pulling, it seemed to her, at her coat, their hands everywhere, she saw that across the traffic, in the middle of the wide boulevard, on the central reservation, beneath the row of plane trees, two policemen had stopped to watch. For a moment she imagined that their ordeal was over. She knew the Berlin Police, Paulus and Otto’s grandfather was one. Her father made regular contributions to their benevolent fund. They had kept the peace in Berlin through all the violent years without fear or favour. Surely they must keep the peace now.

‘Are they Jews?’ one of the officers shouted.

‘Yes,’ a trooper replied. ‘Dirty Jews who thought they could order National Socialist comrades around.’

At this the policeman smiled and waved. He and his colleague watched for a moment or two more and then moved on.

Now the SA attackers dragged Fischer to his feet.

The chauffeur they dismissed with a few further kicks but they had not yet finished with the Fischer family.

‘So now,’ the
Truppführer
snarled into Fischer’s face, on the right cheek of which a great swelling was rising. ‘Let’s start again, shall we? You say that this is your banner, is that right, Mr Yid?’

The scene spun and rocked before Dagmar’s eyes. Her ears were ringing, an orchestra seemed to be playing inside her head, an orchestra whose instruments were broken glass and blaring horns, harsh cries and the crunch of steel on stone. She saw a hand thrust forward at her father’s chest. She saw him fall to the pavement for a second time. Then she felt a blow herself, a violent shove in the small of the back, her knees buckling, and then she also was on the pavement, her mother beside her, sprawling amongst the black and the brown boots.

‘If it’s your banner,
cunt
, then you and your bitches need to clean it up,’ she heard the troop leader saying through the strange cacophony that was pounding in her head. ‘It’s littering the street, if you hadn’t noticed.’

Had he said it?

Was it real?

In that moment Dagmar truly felt she had gone mad. She was on the
pavement
on the Kurfürstendamm outside her father’s store. That great castle of commerce of which
she
was the princess. Not
standing
on the pavement, but
sprawled on it
. The breath knocked from her body. Her beloved parents, those symbols of strength and authority to whom she had always looked for comfort and
certainty
, were helpless on their knees beside her. Her father’s face swollen and bruised. His blood was on the stones.

On the Kurfürstendamm.

Minutes earlier, not even as many as three, they had all been driving together in the family Mercedes. In
one
of the family Mercedes. These were the stones across which she had stepped a thousand times. Alone. With her friends. With her parents. Occasionally (and discreetly) with Paulus and Otto, who simply could not believe it when she had been saluted at the door by a smiling doorman.

This was her kingdom. It had been so only yesterday.

‘You’re not cleaning up your dad’s banner, Fräulein Fischer,’ a voice called out, half shout, half sneer. ‘Maybe we should teach you some respect for a German pavement.’

Mechanically Dagmar began to reach out and collect a piece or two of the torn and shredded banners.

She heard a cry beside her. It was her mother, who, having collected a number of scraps, had then had them kicked from her hand.

‘I thought you were told to pick up your rubbish,’ a brown-shirted thug shouted at her. ‘
Pick it fucking up, Jew bitch
.’

They were speaking to her
mother
.

In Berlin.

On the Kurfürstendamm.

Dagmar looked up. She could see that beyond the circle of SA men people were hurrying by. Heads down, faces turned away, seeing no evil. Others stopped, not many but enough, and they had smiles on their faces, one or two held small children up to watch as they shouted encouragement to the troopers.

Make them pay
.

Make them crawl
.

Make those rich fat Jew bastards pay for what they’ve done to us
.

What they’ve done? What
had
she done?

Dagmar felt that she would faint. She
wished
that she would faint.

Die, in fact, that would be a relief.

But she did not faint or die. She remained stubbornly conscious of the fact that she was on her hands and knees, head bowed searching for scraps to pick up. Praying that they would not crush her fingers on the pavement with their boots.

A voice rose above the general hubbub.

It was a passer-by, one of those who had stopped to gloat. A woman, quite smartly dressed.

‘Make them lick it,’ she shouted. ‘Make them lick the pavement.’

And the Nazi young men thought that was a wonderful idea. They must have wondered how it had not occurred to them before.

And so, under threat of further blows, the Fischer family, mother, father and daughter, bowed their heads to the flagstones and putting out their tongues began to lick.

Laughter mingled now with the jeers. Horrible, triumphant, mocking laughter. Somebody tried to start a song, the
Horst Wessel Lied
, of course, ubiquitous marching anthem of the SA. It was inevitable. Did they only know one song?

But the singing did not catch on this time. People were having too much fun to bother singing.

Suddenly Dagmar could bear it no longer. She leapt to her feet, blind with tears, screaming at the top of her voice, and began to run. To her surprise the storm troopers didn’t stop her, perhaps her revolt had been so sudden and her condition so hysterical that they were taken by surprise.

The crowd parted too. She was not yet fourteen, a girl in a sailor dress, wild with terror, possibly they felt pity for her. Possibly they did not wish to be infected by the progeny of subhumans. Either way, she found herself suddenly outside the crowd and running along the wide pavement past the great display windows of the store.

She could hear the sound of her shoes on the pavement. They were beautiful shoes of shiny patent leather.

It was lucky her mother had made her wear flatties. She could never have run so fast in the heels she had begged to wear.

The store was huge. It spanned a whole block along the Ku’damm and stretched back nearly a block behind. It had many entrances, all of which were picketed by SA men.

She was running blindly. Looking down at her shoes, focusing on the black shining uppers as they rose and fell, disappearing under the hem of her dress and then re-emerging.

Had she not been stopped she would undoubtedly have careered into something or somebody or run off the kerb into traffic. But instead brown-shirted arms reached out, gathering her up as once more Dagmar found herself in the clutches of her mortal enemies.

‘Not so fast, little miss,’ a rough voice said. ‘We saw you run. Aren’t you supposed to be helping Daddy clean the street?’

‘Please,’ Dagmar whispered, ‘please.’

But the man did not reply.

Because suddenly and without warning she was back on the ground.

How had it happened?

At first she thought her SA tormentor had pushed her.

But he was on the ground too. Lying beside her, gasping for breath.

Gasping beneath the weight of a boy.

It was Otto Stengel.

The moment that the Stengel twins had put down the phone to Dagmar on the previous evening they had known that she wanted their support. A member of the Saturday Club had been reaching out to them and it was their duty to go to her. Although of course in truth their decision had nothing to do with those solemn weekend oaths of solidarity taken after their music lessons when they were little kids. Dagmar was an obsession for them both, an object of both reverence and desire. They certainly were not going to pass up this excellent and legitimate excuse to seek her out and perhaps do her service.

Therefore, on the following morning, the moment that they had left the Stengel apartment, ostensibly to go to school, Paulus and Otto rushed to the
U-Bahn
and jumped on a train to Bahnhof Zoo. From there they ran the rest of the way and emerged on to the Ku’damm just in time to see what was happening at the entrance to the department store. And Dagmar forcing her way through the crowd that had gathered to watch.