Then mayhem ensued.
It is true that some of the ‘German’ boys found Otto’s protest funny and had laughed, one or two even banged their desklids. But a sufficient number were outraged and formed an instant squad of retribution. Eight boys in all leapt to their feet and piled on to Otto. Even with such weighted odds the attackers didn’t have it all their own way. Otto was solid muscle and due to his boxing lessons knew how to use it. Also the space was limited and obstructed by desks so the full force of the attackers could not be brought to bear. The first two boys were knocked down before the others were able to close on Otto and drag him to the floor. Meanwhile Paulus had leapt to his feet and was attempting to fend off other boys who had made their way around the desks in order to attack the twins from the flank. Paulus knew of course that there was no way of his keeping out of the fight. Since kindergarten everyone in the school had recognized that the Stengel boys came as a pair.
It took the master and two more teachers from next-door classrooms to break up the mêlée and then only by wading in and flailing about themselves wildly with their canes. When some order had been restored Otto was hauled to the front of the class, where he stood, wiping blood from his face and staring down his attackers through swollen eyes with fierce belligerence.
‘You will attend the headmaster’s office immediately, Stengel,’ the master shouted, ‘where I have no doubt you will be beaten and then expelled.’
‘Too late,’ Otto spat back through his bloody lips, ‘I quit! Otto
erwacht
!’ he shouted in imitation of the Germany Awake slogan so beloved of the Nazis. ‘You stole my father! You’re not keeping me.’ And with that Otto walked out of the classroom, never to return.
The master turned to Paulus, his lip trembling with fury at this Jewish affront.
‘Well, Paulus Stengel?’ he said. ‘Have you anything to add?’
‘No, sir, absolutely not, sir!’ Paulus replied, snapping to attention. ‘I am very happy to sit in whichever seat the school chooses in its generosity to allow me, sir! Also I apologize unreservedly for my brother’s disgraceful display. He is stupid and hot-headed but he will learn his place, I swear, and until then I beg that you forgive him his foolishness.’
‘Well then, Jew,’ the master said, pleased as ever to be grovelled to, ‘you may return to your books.’
Beached Dolphin
Berlin, 1935
SHORTLY AFTER THE edict was issued segregating school classrooms, Jews were banned from using public swimming pools.
This was a particularly cruel blow for Dagmar Fischer. Swimming had always been central to her life, and since her father’s death she had taken refuge in the isolation and anonymity of the water more and more. The beautiful public pool at Charlottenburg and the vast swimming lake at Wannsee had become her sanctuary. Here she found peace and solace. Churning through the cool water at race-winning speeds she could for a moment blot out the agony of her father’s arrest and murder. Diving, dipping and scissor-kicking in elegant precise balletic display for no one but herself, she could briefly wash the taste of the Ku’damm pavement from her memory.
‘In a way I’m glad that Papa isn’t here to see us banned from pools,’ she said to the Stengel boys, fighting back tears as ever when thinking of her murdered father. ‘He taught me to swim almost before I could walk. I was two, we were at Lake Como in Italy. He used to call me Dagmar the Dolphin. He was so proud of me.’
Dagmar was far and away the best swimmer in her school. A true athlete, slim and strong, and as she grew into adolescence her coaches had felt that she had real potential.
‘When they announced that the Olympics would be coming to Berlin, Papa and I actually danced together! We did, you know. I know it seems funny to think of, he was normally so stern and formal. But that day he grabbed me and we danced. He already had me winning gold for Germany! Of course that was before the Nazis. Now I’m not even allowed to train, let alone compete. What do they think? That somehow a bit of my Jewishness will dissolve in the water and get up their precious pure German noses?’
Then the tears came properly and the boys looked at each other helplessly as they always did when Dagmar cried.
‘They should be so lucky,’ Otto growled. ‘Don’t forget, Dags, they’re only doing this because they
know
we’re so much better than them. It’s why they hate us.’
‘That is so
stupid
!’ Paulus gasped in frustration. ‘Just
listen
to yourself.
They
think they’re the bloody master race,
we
think we’re the chosen people. Fuck the lot of them, I say. I’m me. That’s all. Just me.’
‘Yeah and you’re a twat,’ Otto replied.
He was communicating in breathless grunts while doing sit-ups on Dagmar’s pink fluffy rug. Otto rarely let any moment pass in physical repose; he was always exercising. Training for the battles to come.
It was a Sunday afternoon, the most boring time of the week. Paulus and Otto were sitting with Dagmar in her bedroom, one of the few places in Berlin from which they weren’t barred.
‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t think ourselves special, Pauly,’ Dagmar interjected, stretching out on the bed and blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘After all, we have to put up with enough because of it.’
‘Because, Dags,’ Paulus replied, ‘going on about being the chosen people is just the same elitist racial bullshit that they spout. People are people and we all started out as monkeys anyway. Otto’d probably have been a Nazi if he wasn’t Jewish.’
‘Fuck you,’ Otto grunted, hands behind his head, red-faced and bulging-veined.
‘Oh, very erudite, I must say,’ Paulus sneered. ‘“You’re a twat.” “Fuck you.” Brilliant argument, Ottsy. I can see how
you
got to be one of the
chosen
people. It must have been your language skills.’
‘
Ninety-two. Ninety-three
,’ Otto gasped.
‘Whoopee, the ape can count,’ Paulus said.
‘One hundred!’ Otto gasped triumphantly, lying back, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. ‘I’m just
saying
, Pauly,’ he went on, ‘that the reason they won’t let Dag swim is because they’re scared she’d win.’
‘Of course I’d win!’ Dagmar said angrily. ‘I always do … Or I always did. Now what do I do? I can’t run at the track, I can’t swim at the pool or the lakes. I’ll just get fat and old sitting in this bloody house!’
Dagmar and her mother still occupied the same big house in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf that they had lived in before the Nazis, although now many of the rooms were shut up and Frau Fischer employed a much reduced staff, Jews being no longer allowed to employ Aryans.
The big house had become a prison. Ever since her husband’s death, Frau Fischer had been trying desperately to get their aborted immigration back on track. But while they still had an entry visa for the USA, their German exit visas had been withdrawn. The Nazis were nothing if not vindictive and they had decided that, for Isaac Fischer, paying with his life was not a sufficient punishment for telling the truth about the German state, his family would have to suffer also. Only the previous week Frau Fischer had received another rejection to her application to leave the country. A rejection made all the more sad and wearisome because she had queued for six hours at the offices on the Wilhelmstrasse to make her application.
‘They say we’ll spread lies about them so they’re not going to let us go,’ Dagmar explained miserably.
‘Well, maybe it’ll work out for the best in the end, eh?’ Otto said, still lying on his back while bench-pressing Dagmar’s dressing-table chair, ‘because you can come with me to Palestine.’
‘Palestine?’ Dagmar asked in some surprise, having never heard Otto even mention the place before.
‘Oh yes,’ Paulus said with heavy sarcasm, ‘haven’t you heard? Otto’s a
Zionist
now. Fuck, Otts, you don’t even know where Palestine is!’
‘Yes I do!’ Otto protested. ‘It’s the next one down after Turkey – sort of. Isn’t it?’
‘It’s in the Middle East and it’s already full of Arabs,’ Paulus said.
Otto’s recent announcement that he had decided to become a Zionist had both amused and frustrated his brother. Lots of Jews in Berlin had begun talking about trying to get to Palestine. The Nazis themselves even raised the idea as a possible way of dealing with their ‘problem’.
‘It’s our homeland,’ Otto continued defiantly, ‘that’s all I need to know about it. Next year in Jerusalem!’
Even Dagmar giggled at this. In the past there could have been no less political individual than Otto Stengel. And no less a religious or spiritual one either for that matter. Otto was an archetypal teenage boy. His interests were sports, machines, food, music and Dagmar. At school the only classes he had ever enjoyed were woodwork and art, and the only remotely reflective pursuit he indulged in was music. Now, having picked up a few illegal pamphlets in Jewish coffee shops, Otto had suddenly begun using the language of Zionist politics.
‘Homeland!’ Paulus protested. ‘Homeland?
Two thousand
years ago, Otts! Believe it or not, mate, things have moved on.
Palestine
is now the homeland of – who? Oh, let me see. Oh yes, I remember: the
Palestinians
. Get it? The Palestinians live in
Palestine
. There’s a clue in the names. And I don’t think they will take very kindly to a fifteen-year-old German Jew boy turning up and saying he owns the place.’
‘We’ll take it back,’ Otto said darkly. ‘We have no choice.’
‘Great!’ Paulus snapped. ‘And when you do maybe you can ban all the Arabs from using the parks and swimming pools.’
This point reminded Dagmar of her own more immediate distress.
‘Ten years I’ve been using our local pool,’ she said bitterly. ‘Since I was five. I know every attendant, most of them have made passes at me. And then yesterday they told me I couldn’t swim. It was a school trip too. I had to wait in an office with two other Jewish girls while my class all went in. It was so
humiliating
. Girls used to beg to be on my squad.
And
the school got all the team cossies from Daddy’s store at cost. They’re still wearing them!’
And she cried once more. Desperate helpless tears.
Even aside from the dreadful blow of her father’s death, the change in Dagmar’s circumstances had been steeper and more brutal than it had been for most of Berlin’s Jews. They, like any ordinary people, had at least some experience of the petty restrictions, humiliations and disappointments of existence. Dagmar’s life, however, up until 30 January 1933, had been almost uniquely fabulous and blessed. The beloved only daughter of enormously wealthy and doting parents living at the very heart of the most exciting city in Europe. Few girls on earth were so cosseted and few could look forward to a future more exciting or glamorous. Now the glittering memory of that life taunted Dagmar. Every day she encountered someone or other who had once fawned upon her and whom she now suspected of gloating at her distress.
Dagmar wiped the tears from her eyes, looking for a handkerchief and pretending to sneeze.
‘You see,’ Otto muttered, casting a dark glance at Paulus. ‘You see what’s happening? They’re grinding us down. We need to
do
something.’
‘I
am
doing something,’ Paulus said.
‘What?
Studying?
’
‘Yes. Studying.’
‘Ha! What bloody good is that? Jews have always studied!
Study study study!
Mum never shuts up about it. Why? What good has it done us? Fuck that. You want to be a lawyer? What a joke! What’s the
law
to us? It’s the
law
that’s fucking us. Besides, Jews aren’t allowed to
be
lawyers, are they? Or any sort of decent job. You’re just going to end up a really really well-qualified beggar!’
‘Yeah, well, let me tell you this,’ Paulus replied. ‘When I get out of this country, whether it’s Palestine, London or Timbuktu, I’ll be ready. I’ll have skills to offer. It’s all very well you lifting weights and going about with a knife in your pocket, but you can’t fight them all. You need to
plan
.’
Paulus might have continued his lecture but he was sitting on the floor with his back against the end of Dagmar’s bed. She had stretched out her long legs so that her bare feet were hanging over the edge, quite close to Paulus’s face, and even his analytical mind was incapable of remaining focused while in such proximity to any part of Dagmar’s naked skin.
‘I
hate
school now,’ she said kicking her feet and wiggling her toes in frustration, ‘now that they’ve started making us sit separately.’