Prague Fatale Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoulders; it felt thick and heavy, like an old medicine ball.
     
    ‘I feel reassured already.’
     
    ‘You don’t look it,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you, these days, Bernie? You’re a real bat in the balls, do you know that? Whenever you walk in here it’s like rain coming in at the eaves. It’s like you’ve given up.’
     
    ‘Maybe I have.’
     
    ‘Well, don’t. I’m ordering you to pull yourself together.’
     
    I shrugged. ‘Wilhelm? If I knew how to swim I’d first untie the anvil that’s tied around my legs.’
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    Prussia has always been an interesting place to live in, especially if you were Jewish. Even before the Nazis, Jews were singled out for special treatment by their neighbours. Back in 1881 and 1900, the synagogues in Neustettin and Konitz – and probably several other Prussian towns, too – were burnt down. Then in 1923, when there were food riots and I was a young cop in uniform, the many Jewish shops of Scheuenviertel – which is one of Berlin’s toughest neighbourhoods – were singled out for special treatment because Jews were suspected of price-gouging or hoarding, or both, it didn’t matter: Jews were Jews and not to be trusted.
     
    Most of the city’s synagogues were destroyed of course in November 1938. At the top of Fasanenstrasse, where I owned a small apartment, a vast but ruined synagogue remained standing and looking to all the world as if the future Roman emperor Titus had just finished teaching the city of Jerusalem a lesson. It seems that not much has changed since AD 70; certainly not in Berlin, and it could only be a matter of time before we started crucifying Jews on the streets.
     
    I never walked past this ruin without a small sense of shame. But it was quite a while before I realized there were Jews living in my own building. For a long time I was quite unaware of their presence so close to me. Lately, however,these Jews had become easily recognizable to anyone that had eyes to see. Despite what I’d said to Commissioner Lüdtke, you didn’t need a yellow star or a set of callipers to measure the length of someone’s nose to know who was Jewish. Denied every amenity, subject to a nine o’clock curfew, forbidden ‘luxuries’ such as fruit, tobacco or alcohol, and allowed to do their shopping only for one hour at the end of the day, when the shops were usually empty, Jews had the most miserable of lives, and you could see that in their faces. Every time I saw one I thought of a rat, only the rat had a Kripo beer-token in his coat pocket with my name and number inscribed on it. I admired their resilience. So did many other Berliners, even some Nazis.
     
    I thought less about hating or even killing myself whenever I considered what the Jews had to put up with. To survive as a Jew in Berlin in the autumn of 1941 was to be a person of courage and strength. Even so it was hard to see the two Fridmann sisters, who occupied the flat underneath my own, surviving for much longer. One of them, Raisa, was married, with a son, Efim, but both he and Raisa’s husband, Mikhail, arrested in 1938, were still in prison. The daughter, Sarra, escaped to France in 1934 and had not been heard of since. These two sisters – the older one was Tsilia – knew I was a policeman and were rightly wary of me. We rarely ever exchanged much more than a nod or a ‘good morning’. Besides, contact between Jews and Aryans was strictly forbidden and, since the block leader would have reported this to the Gestapo, I judged it better, for their sake, to keep my distance.
     
    After Minsk I ought not to have been so horrified at the yellow star, but I was. Maybe this new law seemed worse to me because of what I knew awaited those Jews who weredeported east, but after my conversation with Commissioner Lüdtke I resolved to do something, although it was a day or two before I figured out what this might be.
     
    My wife had been dead for twenty years, but I still