Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘Personally I preferred their first plan,’ Otto said, ‘the one where you did the dirty work.’

‘Would that make things any better? Shall I sleep with you? I will if you like. I suppose it’s the least I can do.’

A lifetime of faithful passion and pure devotion reduced to the offer of a compensation fuck, with the East German Secret Service recording the event for future blackmail. Otto actually laughed.

‘Don’t hate me, Ottsy,’ Dagmar said once more.

‘What happened, Dagmar? In the war. To my mother. To Pauly. Where’s Silke?’

A CRIPPLED SOLDIER, his feet lost to frostbite, hobbled on his crutches up the steps of a townhouse in the district of Moabit and rang the bell of Paulus Stengel’s apartment. Stitched into the lining of his cap was a letter, a letter from a dead comrade which the crippled man had promised on his life to either deliver or destroy.

‘Paulus was the best of men,’ the soldier said to Silke as he completed his task and turned away. ‘A damn good soldier too.’

It was late January. The army telegram informing Silke of Paulus’s death had arrived just after Christmas. His last letter was dated 6 December 1941.

My darling Mum, my darling Dagmar,

It is minus 40 degrees and we are halted before Moscow. Ivan has finally stopped us in our tracks and now the German Army struggles for its very existence.

We are told that if we can only hold our ground then Germany will survive to fight again next year. That may be so. But I must tell you both that I will not.

You know of course that my plan has been these last two years to be a good soldier of Hitler that I might best be in a position to help you both.

Now I find that I must change my plan. The evil that I have witnessed during these six months of campaigning on the Russian front leaves me no choice. The Devil and the Devil alone could have conceived of what is being done here in Germany’s name.

It is in fact a comfort to be on the front line, dying by inches in a dug-out. For although this is a place of abject terror and quite bottomless misery, it is still preferable to being forced to witness the terrible truth of what is happening in the places we have conquered.

My darlings, this is a depravity beyond imagination. To say that we have laid waste to what we have occupied does not begin to describe the slaughter, the devastation and the endless cruelty.

And yet even now that is not enough to feed the beast that Germany has become. I do not exaggerate when I say that the principal concern of the SS Einsatzgruppen is that they cannot kill people fast enough. They are seeking to industrialize the process.

Language is inadequate. Goethe himself could not find words with which to communicate this unique and perverted slaughter.

Therefore, to come to the point, I have decided that I can no longer fight in this army. Even the love I bear for you cannot excuse me continuing to be a part of the most evil horde that ever made war.

On the pitiful and the defenceless. On the old and the weak. On babies and young children. On humanity itself.

My plan has changed. I will go to my commanding officer and volunteer to make a reconnaissance of the Soviet positions. Such a mission is often fatal.

I intend to make sure that in my case it is.

Thus in the eyes of Germany I will die an honourable, even heroic death, and as such Silke will be accorded the rights, respect and pension of a war widow. I hope in this way that the apartment in Moabit will continue to provide shelter for Dagmar, the only woman I have ever loved, and that also when the time comes Mum will hide there too.

I close by saying that despite this terrible darkness in which we all live, I die happy. Happy that I have been a good son to my mother and father, and that in some small way I have been worthy of Dagmar’s love.

That love is the towering achievement of my life.

Goodbye, Mum. From your son.

Goodbye, Dagmar. From your devoted and loving husband.

‘FRIEDA NEVER DID come to live with us,’ Dagmar explained. ‘She told us that she intended never to go underground but to die with her patients.’

‘Yes,’ Otto replied, hollow-voiced, ‘that sounds like Mum.’

He was trying to focus on the reality of finally knowing how his brother died. Otto had been a soldier himself; he too had crawled on the ground in the night seeking out a shadowy enemy. But not on that front, in minus forty degrees, creeping between the two most bitterly ferocious armies ever assembled on earth. Then standing up, the will to live crushed out of him, inviting the liberating bullet.

Had they shot him clean? Silhouetted against the frozen night sky?

Or had they taken him and butchered him for the devil’s henchman they would have thought him to be?

Otto would never know. But he took some comfort from the knowledge that Paulus had chosen the moment of his departure from the world.

He had died as he lived, according to a plan.

They were still sitting together on the bench in the People’s Park. Otto was vaguely surprised at that. He had been half expecting at every minute to be bundled into a police car by Stasi thugs.

But only children ran past them and in the distance the band played.

The cigarette ends were piling up.

He produced another packet from his case. He had bought a carton of two hundred at Heathrow.

He was beginning to wonder if that would be enough.

‘When the final round-ups began and your mother refused to go underground,’ Dagmar continued, ‘Silke wanted to use the flat to hide others. She thought that she and I should at least share our rooms — there were so many people desperate to hide, you see. That caused plenty of trouble between us, I can tell you.’

‘You didn’t want to do it?’ Otto asked.

‘Do you find that shocking?’ Dagmar replied. ‘Why would I? Tell me? Why would I want to share? Every submarine Jew was a leper, a massive risk both to themselves and others. In constant danger of discovery and arrest. Of betrayal too. Oh yes, believe me, betrayal; dogs eat dogs when the table’s bare. If I’d let Silke bring in even one more like me we’d have been doubling our chances of detection while halving our food and other supplies. We were entering the end game, you see, Otto. The condemned were getting desperate. On both sides, German and Jew alike. The fact that the Nazis couldn’t beat Ivan sent them scurrying for easier victories elsewhere. That meant the Jews. The Final Solution was upon us. They introduced the yellow star and after that, unless you had a guardian angel like I had, there was nowhere to hide. The Gestapo began finally systematically clearing the Jews of Germany. They sent people letters and they just went, down to the station and on to the trains. Sometimes there was no letter, the police just turned up and pulled people out of their beds. Your grandparents went in November ’42. Ordered to be at the station at such and such a time with one small suitcase each. They went, of course. Everybody went. They were told that there were homes waiting for them in the east, whole new towns even; people believed it, or tried to. Even after everything that had already been done to them they tried to deny the unthinkable. They simply could not comprehend that it wasn’t homes but gas chambers that were waiting for them at the end of the line. Even after they’d been stuffed into cattle trucks. Pissing and shitting on each other, dying of suffocation and dehydration in railway sidings, pushing the corpses of babies out through the bars. They still could not quite believe that the Nazis actually meant to murder them en masse . That’s why I have some sympathy for the Germans now when they say they never knew. After all, if the Jews themselves could scarcely believe what was happening to them, then why should the people who hurried by on the other side of the street looking the other way?’