My Brother's Secret (26 page)

‘Another one,’ Lisa whispered beside me, but as she spoke, I saw that the men on their hands and knees at the crater were not men at all.

‘Look.’ I nudged her. ‘Hitler Youth.’

Now that some of the men had moved, I could see that the people digging out survivors were dressed in the unmistakeable uniform of Hitler Youth. There were two of them lying on their stomachs, half buried in the rubble. It looked almost as if they were swimming among the bricks and beams, their bodies half under, like they were preparing to dive right down. As I watched, one of the boys completely disappeared from sight. His body slipped away until all I could see were his pale legs, smeared with soot and dirt, and then he was gone.

‘He’s fallen in,’ Lisa said.

I put my hands on the edge of the cart and lifted myself up for a better look.

The other boy at the edge of the crater didn’t appear to be alarmed that the ground had swallowed his comrade. He remained where he was, half in, half out, and I could hear the faint sound of his voice calling. Then he was backing away, pushing up onto all fours, and dragging something from the hole in the wreckage.

At first I thought it was his comrade, but as the object slipped out, I realised what it was.

‘A body,’ Lisa whispered.

I wanted to close my eyes but couldn’t. It felt wrong to be looking at such a thing, but some part of me wanted to see. I wanted to know what it looked like to be dead.

The woman was still wearing her dressing gown. She was face down, arms outstretched, because the boy had hold of her by her hands. He pulled her clear of the hole, then stepped aside while the men came forward and lifted her. The boy didn’t spend another moment looking at the body, but went straight back to his job, lying on his stomach by the hole and calling in to his comrade.

Two men carried the body. One took her feet and the other held under her arms as they struggled through the wreckage. The woman’s head lolled back, her hair hanging down, her arms dangling at her sides. The men took her to a place in the shadows at the far side of the road, close to the houses that had not been damaged. There was another group of survivors huddled there, women and children crying, their moans carrying on the ember-filled breeze. The men lay the body down on the pavement and tried to comfort the survivors, but that’s when I saw the other shapes there, lying in a row. I couldn’t tell how many there were, but there must have been at least ten bodies on the pavement.

I stared at the dark shapes and wondered if that was how Papa had looked when he died. I wondered if he had been laid out in a line with other bodies.

‘… Karl?’

‘Hmm?’ I turned to look at Lisa. ‘What?’

‘I said, they’ve found another.’ She nodded in the direction of the crater and I looked over to see the Hitler Youth boy dragging a girl’s body from the rubble.

When the men took her away, the boy went back to work.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’

SURPRISE IN THE CEMETERY

‘
D
o you still want to do this?’ I asked Lisa as we left the scenes of horror behind us.

‘Do
you
?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t …’ I wasn’t sure what I thought. ‘It’s just that, after the raid and … and
that
…’ I looked behind me and felt as if I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong any more. ‘That could have been my mama,’ I said. ‘Or yours. So maybe it’s not right to do this. I mean, we should stick up for our country shouldn’t we?’

‘Of course we should, but we stick up for
Germany
, not for the horrible people who live here. And there’s nothing we can do about the enemy. I hate them too, but there’s
nothing we can do. Nothing we can even do to show them we hate them. But we can show Wolff that we hate him.’

‘You’re right,’ I said, strengthening my resolve.

‘Of course I am.’

Feldstrasse was close to the church, so we cut through the cemetery, leaving the sounds behind us and making our way into the eerie darkness. The gates were open, just as they had been the other night, so we went straight in, keeping to the road.

‘This place gives me the creeps,’ Lisa whispered. ‘There’s a story about a nun who got walled up inside part of the church and people say you can see her ghost if you come here at the right time. The Shrieking Nun, they call her, because of the noise she makes.’

‘Oma used to bring us through here on the way to the river to catch fish in our nets and Stefan always used to try to scare me with that story. It never worked though; there’s no such thing as ghosts.’ But walking through there in the dead of night, it was easy to believe there might be.

‘I’ve heard noises in the night,’ Lisa said. ‘Like screaming.’

‘Probably just foxes.’

‘They say that if you look into her eyes, she sucks out your soul and you’ll never speak again.’

‘Sounds like rubbish to me,’ I said, but a shiver ran up my spine and I cast a glance over my shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed.

‘I’ve never been in here at night,’ Lisa said. ‘Do you
think we’ll see her?’

‘I’ve been in here at night and I didn’t see her.’ I tried to change the subject. ‘This is where I hid with Jana. Over there, by the graves.’ I pointed into the darkness where the headstones were just visible.

‘Stop!’ Lisa grabbed the back of my jacket.

I was still looking over at the dark shape of the gravestones, and had walked a few paces ahead of Lisa, not noticing that she had stopped.

‘Stay where you are!’ She pulled me to a halt.

‘Why? What’s the—’

‘There,’ she said. ‘Up ahead.’

‘What is it?’ I whispered, almost too afraid to know.

Lisa raised an arm and pointed, and I peered into the darkness ahead, half expecting to see the Shrieking Nun, right there, floating above the ground with her eyes glowing red and her mouth open wide as she prepared to suck out my soul.

But there were no ghosts in the cemetery.

Instead, there was something far more dangerous.

Just a few steps away, right in the centre of the road, there was a dark shape protruding from the ground. It was thick and almost as tall as me, but set at an angle as if it had … as if it had dropped from the sky.

‘You were going to walk right into it,’ Lisa said.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ I took a step closer.

‘
Don’t
,’ Lisa hissed. ‘Stay where you are.’

‘I just want to look.’

‘You might set it off.’

I took another step.

I had seen pictures of bombs at school and I’d heard them whistling in the sky, felt the shudder as they exploded when they hit the ground, but I had never actually seen one close up.

‘Come here,’ I said. ‘You can see it better.’ I held my hand out to her and beckoned. ‘Really. It’s all right.’

She hesitated, shaking her head.

‘I’m not going any closer,’ I told her.

After a moment, she sighed and came to stand beside me.

I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my torch, then pointed it at the unexploded bomb and flicked it on.

‘What are you doing?’ Lisa pushed my arm down so that the beam was pointing at the ground and she looked about in alarm. ‘Someone will see.’

‘There’s no one here.’ I pulled my hand away and shone the torch at the bomb once more, pointing it at the place where it had thumped into the ground and half buried itself. It wasn’t a big bomb; I guessed it would have been about shoulder height to me, but it was probably big enough to destroy a house. As I passed the beam over its length, I saw two words written on the side and, though I couldn’t speak English, I was fairly sure I knew what FOR ADOLF meant.

‘Imagine if it went off now,’ Lisa said. ‘We’d be blown to pieces.’

‘It won’t,’ I said. ‘Just keep still.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off it. In the back of my mind I saw the houses on Feldstrasse, reduced to rubble by one of these bombs, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. I couldn’t move away from it.
All that energy closed up inside that metal shell was hypnotising. And so were those words. It seemed that it always came down to words.

Maybe that’s where the real strength was.

‘What if it’s one of those timer bombs?’ Lisa asked. ‘It might go off at any minute. I think I can hear it ticking.’

I listened carefully, but all I could hear was the distant sound of the rescue operation on Feldstrasse.

‘Please,’ Lisa begged, so we carefully stepped away from the bomb, moving backwards, watching it as if it were a predator waiting for us to let down our guard.

Once we were a safe distance away, we moved onto the grass at the side of the path, intending to carry on with our plan.

‘Shouldn’t we tell someone about the bomb?’ Lisa said. ‘What if someone else walks down here, or comes in their—’

‘We haven’t got time,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it on the way back. We’ll … I don’t know … we’ll think of something, but we need to go now. We need to do this.’ Too much had already interfered with our plan, and I was afraid that we were on the verge of backing out.

A CLICK OF THE LATCH

L
ooming out of the dark, Gestapo Headquarters was even more nightmarish in the dead of night.

The building was silhouetted against the river, silent and unnatural. The trees cast twisted shadows across its bricks and I imagined it to be filled with damp rooms and gloomy corners. There would be tools of torture, blood-stained floors, and monsters like Wolff waiting to hit women and drag boys into the darkness.

‘There must be loads of them work in there,’ I whispered.

Lisa shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Just Wolff and one or two others.’

‘Why is it so big then?’

‘Papa said it used to be a house, the biggest in town, so they took it. He said they always take the best for themselves.’

I stood in the shadow of the wall on the opposite side of the road and stared at the large building. It looked to me like a terrible prison. A place where unspeakable things happened.

When I was in the city, I used to cycle past the official buildings, with Nazi flags draped over them, and hope that one day I would go inside and see the men in their flawless uniforms. I imagined that I would even work in there and that it would be perfect.

Now though, looking at this building, I saw only fear and pain. Nothing here was perfect.

I shivered and tightened my fingers into fists.

‘Shall we do it?’ Lisa looked at me and then leaned out to glance each way along the street. ‘It’s clear.’

My whole body was quaking, but I was determined not to lose my nerve. ‘Yeah. Come on.’

I jogged across the road, where Kriminalinspektor Wolff’s black Mercedes was hunched like a beast waiting to spring, and looked both ways, before heading through the open gate. Lisa kept up with me, and as soon as we were in the garden, I tugged the can of paint from my bag.

Lisa stepped into the shadows at the side of the path and scanned the street and house, while I crouched in front of the building and took a screwdriver from my bag, using it to pry open the lid of the paint can. It came up with a small pop, then I fished the paintbrush out of my
bag and began to work.

The bricks were rough and difficult to paint on, so I had to rub hard with the brush and keep reloading it again and again.

My heart was pounding with excitement and fear. I was so afraid of this place and of being caught, but at the same time it was exhilarating. I was getting my own back. I was doing something. This was my revenge for what Wolff had done to Mama and to Stefan. I was showing them what I thought of them for taking my papa away and letting him die.

In the distance, the faint sounds of activity from Feldstrasse continued, and there might have been a hint of smokiness on the breeze, but mostly I could smell paint and hear the sound of the brush scraping against the bricks.

When I was finished, I replaced the lid on the paint tin and shoved it back into my bag with the brush and screwdriver, then we retreated further along the path and looked up at my handiwork.

This close, the white letters shone in the night. In the morning they would glare brilliantly in the sun, sending their message to anyone who happened to pass.