My Brother's Secret by Dan Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

slowed down and read them as I passed.

    IS
    These letters were bigger.
    KILLING
    Written in the same white paint.
    OUR
    Shining as if they were still slightly wet.
    FATHERS
    My heart lurched at the message and then tightened at the sight of the symbol painted at the end of the slogan. As big as the letters, it clung to the wall like a giant full stop.

    It was crude, not a very good painting, but I recognised the shape.
    It was the same as I had seen on Stefan’s jacket.

    Once again, I squeezed my brakes and came to a standstill. I stared at the flower, realising that these words had probably not been written by Jews. If they had been, then the symbol would have been a Star of David, not a flower. The star was their emblem.
    I tried to make sense of it. It had to mean something. It had to.
    And my brother Stefan was connected to it in some way.
    I leaned my bike against the kerb and stepped closer to the wall where I could smell the paint. I put out a hand and touched the centre of the flower. The paint was still tacky and when I pulled away, there were white spots on my fingertips. It was fresh; someone had just done this.
    If I was quick enough, I might be able to see them.
    I jumped back onto my bike and drove the pedals hard, leaving the letters behind. I didn’t care about the cobbles now, and I juddered and jerked, the bike wheels slipping on the smooth, uneven stones as I rushed to the end of the alley. I looked each way, deciding to go right, and then I was off again, searching, searching, searching.
    Riding up and down the streets and lanes and alleys, I didn’t find whoever had painted the slogans. Instead, I found more flowers on the walls, more words telling me that Hitler was killing our fathers, and each time I saw them, I wondered why the Führer would want to kill our fathers. It didn’t make any sense.
    I must have been cycling for half an hour, maybe more, looking for the vandals, hardly thinking of anything other than those words, when I found myself in front of the school.

    It wasn’t as big as the school I went to in the city, but there were two large buildings with a good-sized yard and a wire fence surrounding the whole place. Where I was standing, there was a tall, thick pole with an air raid siren at the top of it like two upside-down dinner plates painted red. When the sirens went off, they made the most terrible racket, so I moved further along the fence, just in case.
    The yard was filled with children. The boys on one side, all in Deutsches Jungvolk uniform and arranged into lines, the girls on the other side, wearing shorts and vests and doing their exercises.
    The girls were swinging hoops over their heads and from side to side, but the boys were jumping up and down and doing press-ups. I watched the boys and wished I were with them, making myself fitter and stronger. The more I wished it, the more I felt my anger and frustration rising, as it had done before, and I remembered what I had said to Oma and Opa; that perhaps I should report them.
    That would have been the proper thing to do; what my group leader would have told me to do, and what my friends would have done – go to the police station or Gestapo Headquarters by the river and report Oma and Opa. Then they’d have to let me go to school and join the Deutsches Jungvolk .
    As I was thinking about it, I glanced over at the girls and caught sight of the one I’d seen leaving her house this morning. She was standing in line with the others, twisting her hoop, but she wasn’t looking ahead like she wassupposed to. Instead, she had turned to watch me, and she was smiling.
    I checked behind to make sure she really was watching me, and when I looked back, she let go of her hoop with one hand and lifted it – not high, but high enough for me to know she was waving at me.
    Which was when the teacher noticed.
    ‘Lisa Herz!’ the woman shouted, then turned to see what Lisa was looking at, and caught sight of me right away.
    The