My Brother's Secret (13 page)

When he stopped, silence hummed in the room and my brother’s words echoed in my ears.

Stefan took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again he looked at me and shook his head. ‘Please tell me you understand now.’

I nodded, but my mind was spinning with thoughts of guilt and betrayal and the idea that I had been a part of something terrible. I was thinking about how awful Lisa must have felt when her father was taken away; that it was too horrible for her to even talk about, and what must she have thought of me in my uniform? I was thinking about Johann Weber’s tears and about Axel Jung kicking dirt in his face. I was remembering how Stefan had been taken away, and I felt a chill run through me at the thought that he might never have come home. And I was seeing those words, over and over again, spinning in my head. Those white words that had turned blood-red.

Hitler is killing our fathers
.

LEAFLET

I
didn’t mention any of it to Lisa when she came to call for me the next morning. I didn’t know what to say or how to feel; everything was such a muddle in my head. I could hardly even think straight.

‘Good to see you’re not in that uniform again,’ was the first thing she said.

‘Not such a little soldier any more, eh?’ Stefan came up behind me and tousled my hair, making me pull away from him. It was Saturday and he had the morning off work.

‘What’s the matter, little brother? Am I embarrassing you in front of your girlfriend?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend.’

Stefan whistled and raised both hands in surrender. ‘Sor-ry.’ He rolled his eyes at Lisa, which made her giggle.

‘Come on.’ I stepped outside. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ Stefan said before he closed the door on us.

The street was clear, the sky was blue and there was only a wisp of cloud. Everything was so different from how it had been last night; we might have been on another planet. There were no leaflets fluttering about, so someone must have come in the dark and cleared them all away. The only hint that anything had happened, were the odd corners of paper that protruded from the guttering, or the ones that had stuck in the roof tiles and chimney pots.

As we set off, I looked back at the kitchen window to see Mama standing there with Oma. She still looked tired and ill, but at least she wasn’t stuck in her bedroom.

‘Your mama’s feeling better?’ Lisa asked.

‘I think so.’

‘That’s good.’ She smiled. ‘Come on then, let’s go and get your bike. You remember what street it was on?’

I only knew the names of a few streets other than the one I now lived on, so we decided to go back to the school and walk from there.

When we were just past the alley running alongside Oma and Opa’s house, Lisa took my hand and pressed something into it. ‘I brought this for you. Put it in your pocket.’

‘What is it?’ I glanced down at the folded piece of paper.

‘One of those leaflets from last night.’

It was as if she’d given me a small lump of electricity. The piece of paper seemed to come to life and tingle in my palm. I wanted to open it up right then and discover its secrets. I wanted to know what was written on the back and I wanted to see that picture again; the one of the Führer standing among the bodies of our dead fathers.

‘Don’t look at it now,’ she whispered, speaking as if she was trying not to move her lips.

Remembering what Stefan had been so angry about last night, I looked round to see if we were being watched, then jammed the piece of paper into my pocket and stuffed it right down to the bottom where it lay like a dark secret.

‘Don’t you have a meeting today?’ I asked, trying not to think about the leaflet. ‘
Jungmädelbund
?’ It was the girl’s version of the
Deutsches Jungvolk
and they were all supposed to join.

‘There’s one this afternoon, but I could not go if you want.’

‘Not go?’

‘I do that sometimes. ‘

‘Don’t you get into trouble?’

‘Usually, but it’s not too bad. They make us parade up and down the yard for a while if we miss a meeting, but that’s no worse than all that exercising and talking about motherhood.’ She looked at me and pulled a face. ‘Bo-ring. You boys get to play war.’

Ralf and Martin and the others would probably be
playing one of those war games right now, but I didn’t feel as if I was missing out. Not any more.

‘I don’t want to play war,’ I said. ‘I want to fix my bike and go for a ride.’

Lisa smiled at me. ‘Good idea.’

‘But maybe you should go this afternoon,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to get into trouble because of me.’

‘Because of you? Who says it’s because of you?’

‘No one, I just thought …’

‘I’m teasing,’ she nudged me. ‘Of course it’s because of you.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’re funny, Karl Friedmann.’ She laughed and hit my arm saying, ‘Come on,’ then made as if to take off down the street, but I grabbed her sleeve to stop her.

‘Look.’ I said, feeling my mouth go dry. ‘Over there; outside Herr Finkel’s place.’

At the end of Escherstrasse a group of five or six people had gathered close to the shop. By the side of the road was a small grey truck with a hard, enclosed back, and behind it, glinting in the summer sun, Kriminalinspektor Wolff’s Mercedes was hunched at the side of the street.

Just the sight of it made everything Stefan said to me last night come flooding back; the way he had shouted at me about the Gestapo and torture and camps and people never coming home.

‘Something’s happening,’ Lisa said. ‘Something bad.’

A shiver ran through me and my scalp prickled. ‘Like what?’ And even though I wanted to know, I was also afraid to find out.

‘Let’s see.’

As we moved closer, more people began to stop near Herr Finkel’s place. There must have been at least twenty of them on the street now. Frau Amsel and Frau Vogel were there, standing with Frau Oster among the bystanders, shopping baskets in hand and—

We stopped when we saw the SS soldiers.

Two of them; stationed right outside the shop. Tall and menacing in their black uniforms, they stood to attention with submachine guns slung from their shoulders. Their faces were set like stone, their eyes staring straight ahead.

‘You think Herr Finkel’s in trouble?’ There was a tremble in Lisa’s voice.

‘I don’t—’ Then it hit me. After the raid last night, I had seen Herr Finkel pocket one of the leaflets. Perhaps I was not the only one to have seen it. Perhaps someone had reported him.

Without thinking, I put a hand to my pocket, where the folded leaflet lay like a guilty secret.

As I touched it, a voice called from inside Herr Finkel’s shop. The two SS soldiers left their post and entered the building.

For a moment there was an eerie hush over the onlookers, then came the harsh sound of a man’s voice shouting inside.

Nobody dared move on the street, and I felt very frightened for Herr Finkel.

The voice shouted once more, loud and vicious, followed by a brief pause, then the terrible sound of things being smashed. It was impossible to see what was
happening inside the shop, but the noises made my blood run cold; the repeated crashing of glass, the clatter of breakables, and the thunder of wood splintering.

And beneath it all, I was sure I could hear an old man begging to be spared.

The bystanders on the street started to push back, as if the windows might explode outwards at any moment, showering the pavement with glass. Or as if they were afraid they might be drawn into the terrible things happening inside the shop, but then the sounds stopped almost as suddenly as they had started.

A quiet hush fell over Escherstrasse once more.

When the shop door opened, the soldiers re-emerged into the street with Herr Finkel between them.

The shopkeeper’s right leg dragged beneath him as he shuffled across the pavement. His movement was slow and difficult, and when he slipped, the soldiers grabbed him, shaking him and shouting at him.

‘Hurry up!’ they ordered. ‘Walk straight!’

Herr Finkel’s head hung between slumped shoulders as he tried and failed to do as they instructed, and eventually he collapsed to his knees. For a moment he knelt on the hard stones, with his head bowed. He swayed for a moment, then keeled over to one side, hitting his head on the pavement.

‘Stand up!’ the guards shouted at him. ‘On your feet!’

They took hold of him with a tight grip, holding an arm each as if they were going to tear them right out of their sockets, and dragged him to his feet.

That’s when I saw what they had done to him.

Herr Finkel’s left eye was swollen shut and there was blood smeared around his mouth and nose. When I looked closer, I could see spots of it on the pavement where he had collapsed.

‘They’ve beaten him,’ Lisa whispered in disbelief. ‘Beaten him in his own shop.’

Behind the soldiers and poor Herr Finkel, Wolff emerged into the day, dressed in his dark suit, hat placed neatly on his head, and I imagined I could smell his after-shave. He stopped in front of the shop and studied the crowd with his steel-grey eyes.

‘This shop is no longer in business.’ He spoke clearly, so everyone could hear. ‘The contents are now the property of the Reich. Anybody found breaching these orders will be arrested.’

I felt numb. Seeing someone I knew arrested and manhandled out of his own shop was horrible. I’d heard about these things, I knew it happened, but I had never
seen
it. And I always thought it happened to the right people; to people who deserved it. But after what Stefan had said last night, and how angry he was about people being taken away for just saying something or thinking something … Herr Finkel was a
shopkeeper
. He sold chocolate. What could he have done to deserve this? Had it been like this for Lisa’s Papa?

I glanced at her, seeing her watching in a kind of daze, as the driver of the truck jumped down from the cab and hurried round to open the back of the vehicle. A heavy clunking sound drifted to us on the warm breeze as the lock unfastened and he swung the door open.

Then something appeared from the corner of my eye. A flash of movement.

I turned my head to see the two boys run across the road to stand by the truck. They huddled close together, one of them turning his head this way and that, while the other pulled something from his pocket that looked like a brown paper bag. He fiddled with the petrol cap for a second, then tipped the contents of the bag into the fuel tank before replacing the cap. It was no more than a few seconds before the boys had finished whatever they were doing and ran back across the road to stand as they had been, as if nothing had happened.

I watched them for a moment, confused, then looked back at the other side of the street, seeing the soldiers drag Herr Finkel to the rear of the truck.

The old shopkeeper raised his head and looked about as if he were seeing everything for the first time; as if he didn’t know where he was, or why his face was covered with bruises and his nose was bleeding.

With one eye, Her Finkel looked at the people in the crowd – people he had known and served for years. But no one could help him.

We were all too afraid.

‘Take him away,’ Wolff snapped.

The soldiers forced Herr Finkel into the back of the truck and slammed the door shut, and then Herr Finkel was gone.

I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Neither of us wanted to see any more, but it was hard to just walk away, so we stayed for a while as the vehicles drove off,
leaving the two soldiers to close up the shop, hammering boards across the door.

On the opposite side of the street, the two boys hung around for a few minutes. They looked disappointed.

‘We should go now.’ I spoke quietly and turned to Lisa, but she didn’t respond.

The colour was completely drained from her face. Hardly blinking, her eyes welling up, she stood as if rooted to the pavement and stared at the spot in the road where the truck had been parked. She looked, for that moment, as if she were lost to the world.

I watched her, not knowing what to say, and wondered again if it had been like this when her papa was taken away. I wanted to ask, but it didn’t feel right, so I just stood with her.

When the soldiers fixed the last board in place, they shouldered their submachine guns and walked back along the street. The bystanders began to drift away, and soon it was almost as if nothing had happened.

‘Come on.’ I touched Lisa’s arm and she blinked hard, squeezing tears onto her cheeks. ‘We should go.’

She looked at me and nodded, then wiped her eyes with her hands.

By the time we went back to the task of trying to find my bicycle, the only evidence of the event was that Herr Finkel’s shop was boarded up.

And the old shopkeeper’s blood was still on the pavement.

Lisa and I walked in silence as we followed the route I had taken the day I met Wolff. I glanced at her from time
to time, checking she was all right, but she just stared ahead and kept walking, as if she didn’t know I was there.