My Brother's Secret (22 page)

‘When he was arrested last year,’ Oma said. ‘You reported him. It was you.’

‘What? No I—’

‘We all know it was you.’

Oma’s words were like bullets; each one punching through my heart. Each one letting me know what a terrible,
terrible
person I had been.

All I could do was stand there, mouth opening and closing, because she was right and I didn’t know what to say.

I had betrayed Stefan. My own brother. He had spent a week in boot camp and come home with his head shaved because
I
had reported him.

Me
.

‘Why did you do it, Karl? What could you have been thinking?’

I sat down as the overwhelming mixture of feelings drowned my anger. My guilt was coupled with regret, the fear of having been found out, the realisation of why no one trusted me, and the relief of finally being able to let go of my secret.

‘Stefan knew it was you.’ Oma looked at me. ‘The interrogators taunted him with it. They laughed at him for being reported by his own brother. He said it wasn’t your fault, though. He forgave you. He knew the Nazis were in your head.’

‘Not any more.’ I put my hands over my face and bit my lip to stop the tears. ‘Not any more. I wouldn’t do it again.’

‘You didn’t say anything to Wolff?’

‘No. I promise.’ My eyes began to well over. ‘I’ve changed. Everything’s different now. Everything.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ I sobbed. ‘I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Stefan. I
wouldn’t
. I
promise
.’

‘I believe you,’ Oma said, coming round the table to hug me. ‘I really do.’

As she held me, I tried to overcome the terrible knowledge that my own secret was no longer a secret. Everyone knew what I had done. Everyone knew that Stefan had been in trouble because of me. I was afraid that maybe I
had
let something slip this time, that maybe I
had
given Wolff a reason to come looking for Stefan. And I kept thinking about how the leaflet was mine – if I hadn’t kept it, Stefan would still be at home.

Some time later, the key rattled in the lock and the front door opened, bringing in a waft of cool night air.

Oma and I hurried into the hall and Mama was there, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t help myself from rushing over to hug her.

Her skin was pale and her head was swathed in the biggest bandage I’d ever seen. She looked like a wounded soldier. There wasn’t any blood on her face now, and someone must have washed it from her arms, but there were still crusty bits stuck in the skin of her knuckles and around her fingernails. The front of her nightdress was caked with it, too. A reddish-brown mess that would probably never come out.

Mama hugged me back and we stood like that for a while before Oma told me to let go of her.

‘You don’t want another fall,’ she said.

Once Mama was sitting down, Opa explained that
they’d been to Gestapo Headquarters on the way back from the hospital. He wanted to bring Mama home first but she was insistent.

‘Of
course
I was insistent. I want to find out where my son is and I want everyone to see what that man did to me.’

‘Was he there?’ I asked, trying not to think about Herr Finkel and about Lisa’s papa. ‘At Headquarters?’ Just thinking about the place made me feel sick, and I was terrified for my brother.

‘He’s there,’ Opa said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘As sure as I can be. They wouldn’t let us see him, though. No one would even talk to us, but I saw them bring in two others. A boy and a girl.’

‘Do you know who they were?’ I asked, wondering if they had caught Jana.

‘I didn’t get much of a look at them,’ Opa said.

‘And how did they know?’ I was sure that the Hitler Youth boys couldn’t have identified us. It was too dark. ‘How did they know about Stefan? Who told them?’

Opa gave me a suspicious look, as if he wasn’t sure what to say, but I knew what he was thinking.

‘No,’ Oma told him. ‘We’ve had a talk. It wasn’t Karl.’

‘Good.’ Opa let out his breath and nodded. ‘Good. Well. They just want to scare him, I expect. After that they’ll send him home. Stefan will be here in the morning.’

‘Do you really think so?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ Opa replied, but he didn’t sound as if he really believed it.

HELPLESS

W
orry and fear kept us all awake that night. In the early hours I climbed into bed with Mama, because I couldn’t sleep. She stroked my hair and we both lay there without speaking, lost in our own troubled thoughts. All I could think about was Gestapo Headquarters, the grey building by the river. I kept seeing Wolff’s grin, and my brother being dragged inside, taken into a dark, damp room, and the door slamming shut behind him.

First thing in the morning, Opa and Mama went to that place again to find out if Stefan was there. After all the visions I’d had last night, I couldn’t settle until they returned, and when they did, Opa stormed into the
kitchen and tore the Nazi party badge from his shirt. He threw it down on the table, saying, ‘Barbarian!’

‘What is it?’ Oma asked. ‘What happened?’

‘He won’t tell us anything. It’s as if we’re speaking a different language.’

‘Nothing at all?’ Oma asked.

‘Nothing.’ Mama pulled out a chair and sat down. She picked up Opa’s badge and held it out to him. ‘Put it back on,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to lose anyone else.’

The grown-ups talked and talked until there was nothing else to say, then they went about doing the things they would usually do, but there was a restless tension that fizzed through the house. It was as if we were sitting on top of a bomb that might blow up at any minute. We all wanted to know what had happened to Stefan, but at the same time, we were afraid to know.

I went upstairs to my bedroom and looked at the books sitting on the chest of drawers.

Mein Kampf
was still there, face up, the Führer looking at me with a stern expression.

‘It’s your fault,’ I said.

The picture just stared. The Führer’s gaze burned through me as if he were there in the room, watching me.

‘I hate you.’ I turned the book face down. ‘I hate you.’

Downstairs the murmur of voices, and the clatter and scrape of housework and cooking went on, but when I heard the front door close, I went to the window to see Opa striding along the street, and guessed he was going to Headquarters again, to see if he could find out anything.

I glanced across at Lisa’s house and wished she were here. I had waved at her when she left for school and I could hardly wait for her to come back. I wanted to get out of the house, but didn’t want to go out alone, and I had so much to tell her about what had happened. I hadn’t known her for very long, but somehow, it felt as if she was the only person I would be able to talk to properly about everything.

After school, Lisa came straight round. I’d spent all day stuck in the house, thinking about what had happened to Stefan and Mama, and about the conversation I’d had with Oma last night, so it was a relief to jump on my bike and ride away from the town.

‘Everyone was talking at school,’ Lisa spoke as she pedalled alongside me. ‘They said some people were in trouble with the Gestapo last night. I don’t know what they did, though. Someone said they got caught helping an escaped prisoner, then Ilse said it was because they were—’

‘It was Stefan,’ I said, almost bursting to tell her. ‘Stefan and Jana. He and some of the others were putting leaflets through letterboxes. You know, the ones that fell from the plane the other night.’

‘So it was Edelweiss Pirates?’

‘Yes. And I went out after them and we got chased by Hitler Youth boys and I didn’t warn them in time and—’

‘Wait, slow down.
You
were there when he got caught?’

‘Yes. Well, no. Well … oh, it’s all my fault.’

As we cycled out of town, I told Lisa everything that
happened last night – about sneaking around in the dark and my brother putting things through letterboxes and about the chase and the hiding, and Wolff coming to the house and Stefan being there after all, but then Wolff finding the leaflet in my book.

Lisa didn’t say anything; she just listened to the whole story.

After a few minutes, we had left the houses behind us. If I’d been at home, in the city, it would have taken much longer. There, the buildings went on for ever and we would have passed the anti-aircraft guns and the sandbags and the walls draped with Nazi flags. Here, though, everything looked just about normal.

It was as if there wasn’t a war at all.

We took the wide road through the cemetery, cycling in the cool of the church’s shadow, and I showed Lisa the place where Jana and I had hidden last night. It all felt as if it had happened a long time ago.

Heading along the road by the river, we came to a stop opposite the large grey stone building that had filled my nightmares since Wolff took Stefan away.

Gestapo Headquarters.

There were five shuttered windows on the first floor, and at ground level a heavy door was set into a shallow porch and flanked by two arched windows on either side. To the right of the building, was a lawn, edged by shrubs and trees. A gate in the thorny hedge hung open, and a path led to the door beside which a Nazi flag hung like a limp handkerchief.

Looking at it now made my skin tingle and my hairs
stand on end, and I had to push away images of my poor brother lying curled in the dark somewhere inside.

‘Do you think Stefan’s in there?’ I couldn’t help whispering.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe I should go and ask?’ I was desperate to know if my brother was safe, but I wasn’t sure I had the courage to even knock on the door of that place.

‘No,’ Lisa said. ‘Leave that to your opa. You’d only get into more trouble.’

As we cycled away, I tried not to imagine Kriminalinspektor Wolff watching us from one of the windows, and I pedalled faster to put the place behind me as quickly as possible.

We rode past the train station, through the tunnel and out into the country, continuing for a mile or so before we followed a track down to an orchard.

There were lines of trees as far as I could see, so we propped our bikes against the nearest one and sat down in the long grass to take off our boots and socks.

The sun was warm and the sky was clear, and the air was so clean and fresh that it felt like we were a world away from everything.

‘I would have come out with you,’ Lisa said. ‘You should have told me.’

‘I didn’t know he was going, and … where do you think he is? Why won’t they tell us?’

‘They didn’t tell us anything when they took Papa last year. That’s the worst thing; not knowing where he is. And not being able to do anything.’

‘That’s exactly how I feel,’ I said. ‘It makes me …’ I tried to think of the right word. ‘Angry. Like I could explode. I don’t know where Stefan is, and even if I did, there’s nothing I could do about it. There should be something I could do, but I’m just me and they’re the Gestapo and the SS and the army. They just do whatever they like and we have to put up with it and it’s not fair.’

Lisa listened and nodded and then turned to stare out at the meadow on the other side of the road.

‘It’s not fair,’ I said again. ‘I thought everything was going to be so good and now everything’s turned so bad, and it’s all my fault.’ I grabbed a fistful of long grass and twisted until my palm was wet with its juices.

‘I used to think it was my fault,’ Lisa said. ‘When they took Papa. I thought I must have done something. But it isn’t my fault. It isn’t your fault either, you know – about Stefan, I mean.’

‘So why did Wolff come to our house? How did he know Stefan is an Edelweiss Pirate? He said someone told him and I keep thinking I must have let something slip … maybe that day when he saw us at the parade.’

‘You didn’t tell him anything. I was there, remember?’

‘So how did he know, then?’

‘Someone else must have told him.’

‘Like who?’

‘I don’t know. He could have been lying. Maybe no one told him anything. Maybe he knew because he’d seen Stefan with other Edelweiss Pirates. Maybe he just wanted you to
think
someone told him. But it isn’t your fault,’ Lisa insisted, ‘it can’t be.’

‘I don’t know. If I hadn’t kept that leaflet in my book, Wolff would never have found it and Stefan would still be at home.’

‘Then you could just as easily say it was my fault,’ Lisa argued. ‘I gave you the leaflet.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘It isn’t your fault, Karl Friedmann. If it wasn’t for Wolff and the Hitler Youth and that horrible man Hitler,
none
of this would have happened.’

I ripped the fistful of grass from the ground, pulling a clump of earth with it. The soil was dry and showered across my leg as I struggled with what I was going to say next. The words didn’t want to come out. They seemed to lodge in my throat, making me feel sick, but I plucked up all my courage and forced them out, because I
had
to say them. I
had
to tell Lisa what I had done.