My Brother's Secret by Dan Smith

Author:Dan Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Australia
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE FÜHRER’S BOOK

‘What do you think he meant by that?’ I asked.

‘About Frau Schmidt?’

We had turned onto Escherstrasse in silence, both of us lost in our thoughts.

‘He’s a pig,’ Lisa shivered. ‘I hate him.’

I couldn’t blame her – and after what we’d seen him do to Herr Finkel, and what he’d done to Lisa’s papa, I was starting to hate him too.

‘He was just showing us that he knew we’d been there,’ Lisa said. ‘He thinks he knows everything, but he doesn’t know who these Edelweiss Pirates are does he? But we do.’

I looked up at her. ‘You mean Stefan? You really think he’s one of them?’

‘He had the flower didn’t he? I reckon that girl’s one, too.’

‘You can’t tell anyone. Not anyone.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Your brother’s secret is safe with me.’

‘Anyway, he might not even be one. Maybe he just had the flower … I mean … Do you really think they’re criminals? Worse than Jews?’

‘Jews are just people like everyone else,’ Lisa said. ‘You can’t believe everything they tell us at school.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a good job I met you when I did, Karl Friedmann. Any longer and there’d have been no hope for you.’

When we arrived at the entrance to the alley beside Oma and Opa’s house, I looked back along the street. ‘Do you think he followed us? Maybe he’s following us now.’

‘He can’t follow us all the time.’ Lisa was looking along the street too, though, scanning the windows as if she thought someone might be watching us right now. ‘But he said he saw the whole thing, didn’t he? At the parade, I mean. And he knew you hit Erich so he must have seen that.’

An image of the boy popped into my mind and I remembered what he had said to Lisa. ‘Does he really know where you live?’

‘Erich?’ Lisa said. ‘Yes, but I’m not scared of him. He’s just a bully.’

She was afraid of Kriminalinspektor Wolff, though, and so was I, and it made me even more scared to think that he might be watching us. Suddenly I felt exposed, standing in the mouth of the alley like that, the leaflet in my pocket. I imagined what would happen if Wolff appeared at the corner now, running up to us because he’d forgotten to make us turn out our pockets. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get inside.’

I had to get rid of it. Put it somewhere safe.

Opa was tinkering with his car when we let ourselves in through the back gate.

‘That doesn’t look good,’ he said, coming towards us, cleaning his hands on an oily rag.

At first, I thought he must have been talking about my face, and I put a hand to my cheek, but he was looking at the bicycle.

‘You’ll never ride it like that.’

He stood with the rag in one hand and shook his head at the state of the buckled wheel. When he looked up at me, though, his face fell.

‘What happened to you?’ He came forward and put his fingers on my chin, turning my head to one side.

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