Ben Elton - Two Brothers

‘Did you tell them you were a Jew?’ Otto asked.

‘I tried once or twice but either they didn’t care or they didn’t believe me. All the German Jews they’d seen had been skeletons.’

Otto opened his suitcase and reached in for a third packet of Lucky Strikes. He could scarcely believe it, they’d smoked twenty each already.

‘And how did it end?’ he said.

‘They started to get lazy and didn’t bother to tie us up any more. I think they almost started to think of us as sort of wives. War wives, of course, but wives nonetheless. Sometimes they brought chocolate and one of them even made paper flowers to put in our vase. Of course that didn’t stop him putting down his scissors and his coloured paper to rape us when his turn came around. They thought we were their right, you see. They didn’t think we had any business complaining after what Germany had done to them. One night Silke had had enough. One of them had fallen into a drunken sleep right on top of her and was snoring in her face. Their breath was always indescribable. Onion and rotting gums. Silke squeezed herself out from under him, crept to where he’d left his belt on a chair and took his gun. I watched beside my own sleeping Russian as she started to put on her clothes. I can see her body now, white in the moonlight, black bruises on her breasts where one of them liked to squeeze her. I don’t know what her plan was, she kept looking at me and putting her fingers to her lips. Anyway, she never got a chance to do anything. Two more came in, getting impatient to have their turn at us. Silke pointed the gun at them but the poor silly fool couldn’t bring herself to fire. She always was a sweet girl and those boys were even younger than we were. So they shot her instead. Right there and then. I don’t know what they did with the body — nothing much, I imagine. There were thousands of dead bodies lying around Berlin. And that was the end of Silke Krause, proud founding member of the famous Saturday Club.’

Otto wanted to say something but could think of nothing remotely adequate. More tobacco was the only comfort he could offer.

‘If only she could have waited,’ Dagmar went on. ‘It only lasted another day or two, although it was a hard two days for me with twice as many soldiers coming at me as before. But after that they just went away. Simply walked out and never came back. Moscow had finally decided that enough was enough and had sent in the military police to restore discipline. Believe it or not, the soldiers left me some rations and a bottle of vodka. My pay, I suppose. What they thought a German girl was worth for more than a fortnight of pack rape. That and gonorrhoea. Thank God for penicillin, say I. I understood, of course. They were peasants, and after what the Nazis had done in the east I couldn’t really blame them for wanting to rape a few German girls.’

‘And you were left alone?’ Otto said.

‘Yes, all alone. And do you know what I asked myself?’

‘No.’

‘I sat there and I asked myself what Pauly would have done.’

Otto laughed. Dagmar laughed too, and their laughter sounded sadder to them than tears.

‘Pauly would have made a plan,’ Otto said.

‘Exactly,’ Dagmar replied. ‘I needed a plan. The Russians were all over Berlin. This was way before the Allies arrived. Germany hadn’t even surrendered. I was hungry and all alone. And I was scared too.’

‘Of the soldiers?’

‘Not so much, that period seemed to have passed. I was scared of what I’d done. Betraying Silke and her comrades. I couldn’t know for sure who’d survived and who hadn’t. Who might have seen me at that police station. And there was the report the Gestapo had written. Had it been destroyed? I hoped so but I didn’t know. I was destitute and without protection. The Russians didn’t like Jews and they didn’t like millionaires’ daughters either. I was alone and dazed from hunger and weeks of rape. I needed food and I needed to find a way to make my home secure. Dagmar Fischer couldn’t get those things from the Soviets, but it occurred to me that Silke Stengel probably could. What was more, Silke Stengel had not been written up by the Gestapo as a traitor. On the contrary, Silke was a hero of the Rote Kapelle . Those two red soldiers had killed the wrong girl.’

‘Wow, Dags,’ Otto said, almost in awe. ‘You really are something.’

‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’ Dagmar replied. ‘I searched the apartment and found all the stuff that poor old Silke had tried to show to the soldiers. It was all there, scattered about, her whole Red Orchestra identity. Even her pre-war secret party card. Everything I needed to be a Communist heroine. It was a risk, I knew, but not so great a one. I was pretty certain Silke’s stepfather would be dead, and if her mother was alive she’d have gone back to the countryside, where she came from. Silke had always told me that the Orchestra acted in cells. Only her immediate comrades would have known what she looked like, and they’d all been killed by that lucky Allied bomb. So I made myself look as pretty as I could and I took my evidence to the Red Army authorities. I demanded that I be clothed, fed and given status befitting my lifetime’s commitment to the German Communist Party. Pauly’s rules, you see, walk with confidence. I guessed that they’d be looking for German Reds to help them run things, and I was right. They sent me straight to a German KPD man, who’d just arrived from Moscow as part of the team charged with re-establishing the party and making sure it got its people into the places that counted before the West could do anything about it. Astonishingly, this man knew of Silke. He’d been her Moscow control right back to the days when she’d been a young girl posting off Rote Hilfe reports wrapped up in women’s magazines.’

Otto closed his eyes. Remembering the happy golden-haired girl who’d lain beside him near the stream on the night of their great bicycle adventure. She’d tried to tell him about the Red Help then. That had been twenty-one years ago.

Good old Silke.

Poor old Silke.

‘Of course, he’d never seen her,’ Dagmar went on, ‘although being a man he’d fantasized that she would be a peach, and I could see how pleased he was when that’s exactly what she turned out to be. I became his lover that night and he saw to it that I was given a new party card and a rank that reflected my long and heroic service.’

Otto stared up at the darkening clouds.

It was beginning to get late. They’d finished the whisky and his head was starting to ache. There had been so much to take in. And so many cigarettes. But of course the story wasn’t over or he would not have been lured to Berlin.

‘And you’ve been Silke all these years?’ he said. ‘It’s… it’s astonishing.’

‘Not really. Can you even begin to imagine how many lives got reinvented or stolen in Year Zero? A whole continent had something to hide. I wasn’t alone in keeping secrets, Ottsy. When the Allies arrived and the big four divided up Berlin, I could see I was better off where I was. My apartment, which, of course, as Silke Stengel I legally owned, was just inside the Russian zone and it was all I had. There was nothing for me in the West. Nobody was talking about compensating Jews then. There was nothing to compensate them with. This was the end, not the beginning. Germany was completely destroyed and utterly destitute. In the West I’d have been a homeless, penniless refugee alongside a million others, and of course there was still that Gestapo report to worry about. If it ever came to light I’d be put on trial for sure. So I bided my time in the East, which was when I was approached to join the newly formed, Soviet-run German police. I was the perfect candidate, of course. Silke Stengel, née Krause, Red spy since 1935. So I grabbed it. And for the first time in my adult life, I was in control. Overnight I had security, status and power. Imagine how that felt, Otto, to a Jew in Berlin in 1945. A Jew who’d been through what I’d been through.’