What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel

by Catherine Hokin

  The guard wiped her hands and walked away as everyone screamed except Liese. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t believe her heart hadn’t immediately stopped. She stood in the middle of the screams and the shouts and waited for the end that had to be coming.

  ‘Liese Elfmann. Is that really you?’

  The voice cut through the clamour, as clear and crisp and as full of delight as if its owner was hailing her across a dance floor.

  ‘Come here.’

  Everyone fell back; a pathway opened. When she didn’t move, a guard dragged her forward.

  ‘Gently now, especially with those pretty hands.’

  The man tapping his foot as he waited for her was tall and blond and dressed in a black uniform so exquisitely tailored it looked as if he had stepped from a magazine.

  ‘I was right – I knew it. I’d recognise you anywhere, despite that rather strange hair colour you’re sporting. But you’re frowning: don’t you remember me?’ He smiled. It made him look colder. ‘Fritz Suhren? Commandant Suhren now, to be accurate. No? No matter. You were rather dazzled by that French buyer the last time we met, or so I recall. Such extravagant hosts the Elfmanns – always the finest foods, the most expensive champagne.’ He clapped his hands so suddenly, the guard next to him jumped. ‘And that’s why I had my idea, when I saw you there. I could barely believe it was you, to be honest, but the strangest people are turning up here these days. Anyway, this little kingdom you’re standing in is all mine, so here is my thought: why don’t I return the favour and extend you some hospitality in return for all your family showed me? What do you think?’

  Liese couldn’t make any sense of his manner or his words. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t think about anything, except the guard. About her vicious little eyes and the brick-sized scarred hand that had blotted out Lottie’s precious life. Whatever this Suhren was saying was drowned out by the noises she couldn’t shake from her head. The scream that ended almost as soon as it began, and the snap, and the splash that had taken her child away. Nothing was as real to her as any of that, so Liese stared at the bright-eyed Commandant in silence and wondered what he wanted with her, and how soon he would stop whatever this nonsense was and kill her.

  ‘She’s speechless with her good fortune, how charming! Well, I shall take that as a yes. Off you go, my dear – off you go!’

  Suhren turned away before Liese could catch up with him, his attention caught by some other distraction.

  ‘Up the hill. Do as the Commandant says. Move.’

  Not knowing what else to do, Liese stumbled up the slope towards the row of houses looking down onto the lake, another of the female guards panting behind her.

  ‘Why is he doing this?’

  What she really wanted to ask was, Why am I still alive when my daughter is dead?, but the words were beyond her.

  ‘How should I know? The Commandant thinks he knows you; he thinks you have some value. You should be grateful: he probably just saved your life.’

  And then the pain finally hit, raw and red and wearing Lottie’s face.

  ‘Still no news. Still looking.’

  Commandant Suhren had made the same solemn pronouncement at least twice a month, waiting until Liese nodded and smiled in the grateful way he preferred. By February 1945, she must have heard it at least thirty-four times. She had long since stopped believing that the looking was true, but on he went with the lying. Liese rarely wondered anymore why he bothered. Presumably, it was all part of the games he loved to play. Or perhaps he still thought she was going to turn her scissors into a weapon and mess up his pretty house.

  Doing that had been her first thought, seventeen months ago, when she was marched from the horror that had engulfed her outside the camp gates and up the hill into Suhren’s home. He had appeared shortly afterwards and looked her up and down as if she were a prize cow.

  ‘Liese Elfmann. What a delight. Finally, I get your undivided attention. I once asked your father for permission to court you, did you know that? He laughed. Can you imagine how much that hurt my feelings? He was happy enough for my family to supply textiles to the great Haus Elfmann, apparently, but to provide a husband for its heir? The idea was “an outrage”. What a lucky escape I had, when you think about it: what a horror to have been saddled with a filthy little Jew for a wife! The swings of fortune favoured me in the end and now look how the tables are turned. Liese Elfmann, my own little seamstress. Oh, we will keep you so busy. Dresses for my wife and her friends; uniforms for me. You’ll have a salon’s worth of clients again. Isn’t that lucky?’

  On and on he went, his too-loud voice pouring round her. Then Liese saw the dressmaking scissors he was holding and she snapped back into something like life. She had taken them, cradled them; pressed the steel blades against her skin and imagined her blood pouring.

  ‘I wonder. Do you think about your parents?’

  It had been an odd thing to ask. Did he really think she was wondering about anything except her child and how much suffering there had been in those last terror-filled seconds?

  She didn’t answer; she eventually grew to understand he rarely cared if she did. Suhren was the show; Liese was simply part of the audience.

  ‘Do a good job and I could find them for you. Would having family left alive be a comfort?’

  The stupidity of the question had stunned her. Or, more accurately, its cruelty.

  Over the next months, at the close quarters Liese had suddenly found herself in, she realised that the Nazis’ capacity for cruelty went far deeper than anything she could have imagined long ago in Berlin; that it went beyond the more obvious brutality. She knew Suhren had seen what had happened to Lottie, but he never once acknowledged it, or behaved as if her child’s murder mattered. She had wondered, in her first confused days in the house, if Suhren had some sexual motive in plucking her out. If he planned to take what had been refused him before. It wasn’t hard to imagine. It quickly became obvious, from the maids’ white faces and his wife’s watchful narrowed eyes that he treated his female staff like a buffet. It also became quickly obvious, however, that his distaste for her Jewish heritage would always damp down his desire.

  Liese was a trophy Suhren had no interest in touching. The Commandant, and his household, saw her so completely as other it was like living inside the sneering posters and the Jew-hating newspapers they all set such store by. They stepped back when she passed them, placing their hands forward like a shield. They discussed her while she moved among them, as if she spoke a different language or had no language at all. As if she had no more ability to possess finer feelings than the cat who scavenged scraps in the kitchen, who no longer turned her head when her latest litter of kittens was tidied away. Not that it mattered; not that anything that happened to her mattered.

  ‘I’m keeping you alive. You’re one of the lucky ones!’ Another of Suhren’s favourite sayings, riddled with pride at the generosity of her ‘special position’ that he presumed she would echo.

  Part of Liese knew that she should feel grateful. That every woman thrown into the camp, facing the brutality of those guards every day, would change places with her in a heartbeat. Knowing that, and knowing that she cared nothing for her own life, only filled her with more guilt. His ploy had worked: the promise of finding her deported parents had added to the unreality of everything that was happening and kept the scissors off her wrists for those first sleepwalking few days. Then Liese looked up and saw the lake gleaming below the house where Suhren had put her and realised why she was still living. Lottie was down there; Lottie was waiting.

  It was as if a blindfold had been ripped away. Lottie was waiting. One day, when all this was over, Liese would go down to the lake and join her child. She would walk out into the water, she would lie down, she would wrap her arms round her baby and never again let her go. Until then, it was a mother’s job to keep vigil.

  Every night after that revelation, Liese sat at the window of the tiny attic
she was locked up in and kept watch from behind its green shutters. Whether the water was still or smooth, rain-filled or iced-over, Liese sang Lottie’s favourite songs and told her favourite stories out into the dark, holding tight to the thread that still bound them.

  And once she knew her purpose, staying useful started to matter. Liese could see the heavy fortifications round the camp and the bright lights that illuminated it as clear as she could see the lakeshore. As the months passed, she could also see the smoke that rose in thin plumes from behind the long rows of barracks. She could smell the burned tang that even a downpour couldn’t rinse from the air, that the rumours whispering through the house had turned into something too monstrous to believe. Being useless at the task Suhren wanted her for, and being sent back into the camp, being trapped inside Ravensbrück, would not bring the lake and getting back to Lottie any nearer.

  Liese stopped existing from day to day and taught herself instead a survival-tuned discipline. She kept up her vigil, but she also forced herself into bed. She learned to accept that the nightmares would come. And she learned that she could survive them for long enough to sleep for a few hours every night, so that her eyes didn’t close in the day and ruin the fine embroidery that delighted Frau Suhren. She made herself eat the thin soup and stale black bread left out for her when the rest of the household had eaten, so that her fingers could sew a seam without shaking. Liese reduced her world to a workroom and a window. To all she needed to get back to Lottie.

  As the months dragged on, rumours reached the house about the worsening conditions in the camp. Whispers about the starvation, the piles of corpses, the breakdown of order and the guards’ increasing cruelty. When 1943 finally ended, it brought no respite. 1944 came in cold and hard and mixed new words into the whispering: special trucks, selections, gassing. The charred animal stink in the wind grew stronger. Liese lay in her safe bed and felt her heart shrivel as the guilt gnawed. There were mornings when she pressed the scissors against her skin again and knew how fast it could be over. And then she imagined her daughter, cold and alone, and knew the only way was the water.

  Liese stopped listening to anything except her direct orders. She kept her head down during dress fittings and tuned out the chatter. She kept her mouth shut and walked away from gossip. She behaved every day, in the Commandant’s words, like ‘an exemplary prisoner’. There were days when she woke and hated herself for waking. It didn’t matter.

  Because one day this will end. One day I will walk to the lakeshore and I will make all this end.

  The same promise repeated like a prayer every day as she worked; as she waited.

  The months passed unchanging and then April 1945 arrived and brought a morning that started all wrong, that leaped into life far too quickly.

  Car engines growled outside on the gravel. Inside, the house shuddered as doors slammed and feet pounded through corridors that shouldn’t even be wakening.

  Liese was scrambling up, still bleary, when the attic door crashed open.

  ‘Get this uniform on. We have to be dressed and in the kitchen in five minutes.’

  Hilge, the other prisoner put to work in the Commandant’s house, stood in the doorway, a blue and white bundle thrust out in front of her. She was a political who considered herself several steps above a Jew. She never spoke to Liese, never looked at her if she could help it. Now, Hilge’s proud face was pale and her hands shivered like windblown barley.

  ‘Get a move on; I’m not taking a beating for you.’

  Liese shook out the striped dress and the jacket with its sewn-on number and two yellow triangles shaped into a star. Their thin fabric was sour with old sweat; the blue and white pattern was mottled with dirt and rust-coloured patches. She had been given a black dress when she entered the house and had never worn the camp uniform. The thought of putting it on, of what that implied, cramped up her fingers.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  Hilge drummed her fingers across the door frame.

  ‘You really don’t know? Haven’t you heard the guns?’

  The rumbling disturbing the lake for the last few nights – was that what it had been? Liese had presumed it was the sound of a storm coming; she had watched for the rains that would whip up the water. When they hadn’t appeared, she had ignored it.

  ‘I thought it was thunder caught in the mountains.’

  Hilge’s shoulders arched. ‘Thunder that goes on for days without breaking? Seriously? I swear I don’t know how you do it. Cutting yourself off, sewing your stupid dresses and jackets like nothing else matters. You know what, I don’t care. The war is done, or as good as, and Germany isn’t the winner. And now she reacts – there we go. The Russians are almost on top of us. Stop staring at me like a simpleton and get dressed.’

  Hilge’s fists clenched.

  Liese shucked off her nightdress and pulled on the striped gown. It was so long the hem hit her ankles and generous enough at the waist and the hips to fit a second wearer. She knew her brain was moving too slowly, that Hilge was in no mood for questions, but she was missing something. Surely if the war was ending, prisoners would be freed?

  ‘Why do we have to dress like this? Frau Suhren won’t give these uniforms houseroom. And, anyway, if the fighting is all done, won’t they just let us go?’

  Hilge threw Liese a grubby white square that matched the one tied round her own head.

  ‘The bitch won’t care what we’re wearing. She’s not here. She’s already run with the children. And of course they won’t let us go. I’m still a criminal; you’re still a Jew – the Nazis still want Germany cleansed of us. All the big houses are emptying; all the prisoners are being sent back to the camp. And I’d rather take my chances there than be shot or, worse, left here alive for the Russians. Come on – get a move on. And cut off your braid.’

  Liese stopped tying her headscarf. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because if you walk into the camp dangling that, the inmates will know that you’re new. They could suspect you’ve been a collaborator and string you up as a Nazi. I don’t care if they do, but I don’t want anyone looking twice at me for knowing you.’

  ‘Prisoners, down the stairs!’

  Hilge grabbed Liese’s dressmaking scissors and hacked off her plait in one savage cut, pushing Liese out of the door before she could protest.

  Two soldiers were poised in the hallway, rifles raised and ready. They rushed Hilge and Liese out of the house and into a mass of white-faced women already gathered up from the surrounding properties.

  ‘Down the hill. March.’

  Liese stumbled over the slippery grass, arms out to keep her balance. Spring blossom frosted the trees. The air should have been sweet and apple-scented; it was choked instead with smoke and diesel fumes, and tasted charred and oily. Lorries packed the road running alongside the camp. Prisoners pooled round both sides of the gates; soldiers, not the black-caped guards of Liese’s nightmares, herded fast-moving groups in and out.

  Liese was swept down the hill and through the gates and steered into a packed parade ground. There was no stopping on the sand this time, no chance to slip away to the water. There was no chance to do anything – she was too busy trying not to scream.

  The women like her, who had been sent to the SS houses, were thin and pale, but they were beauties compared to what now surrounded them. The square was filled with emaciated women shivering in ragged dresses or, to Liese’s horror, naked and too lost in misery to try and cover the skin stretched tight as a drum over their bodies. Some had shaved stubble-covered heads; others had hair growing back in wild clumps. Everyone was grey; everyone was old.

  ‘Move.’

  Her group was forced on again.

  Liese ran, eyes fixed forward without being told, desperately trying to blank out the stick-bodies moving past her like snapped puppets. Bonfires flared. Scraps of burned paper floated through the air like rotten snowflakes. The red flowers were gone. Some of the barracks were half torn down; judging by
the stench, many more were overcrowded.

  Orders flew harsh as rocks: ‘Move, keep left, stay together, stay on your feet or we shoot.’ Liese ran, refusing to think, until ‘halt’ brought her column to a tumbling stop.

  ‘In there.’

  One of the soldiers kicked a door open, while the others herded them into a barracks that was dark and ripe.

  ‘Is everyone in here dying?’

  The woman who came in behind Liese pulled off her headscarf and tied it round her nose and mouth as she spoke.

  ‘Everyone in the camp is dying. If you’re lucky, you get to do it under your own steam.’

  The owner of the voice was too thin to claim a discernible age or a gender; only the filthy dress marked her out as a woman.

  ‘Come in – don’t be shy. Press yourself close and choose your poison: TB, cholera, dysentery – we’ve got the whole set.’

  She climbed off her bunk and tried for a fairground flourish, but the effort was too much and her twig arm sank. The newcomers stayed clustered in the doorway.

  ‘Suit yourself – find a bunk or don’t. You’ll not likely be here long enough for it to matter at the speed they’re running selections.’

  The prisoner limped towards the disoriented women. Her left leg was badly twisted and wrapped round with scars.

  ‘I’m a rabbit.’

  She waited, clearly expecting a reaction. Her eyes narrowed when she didn’t get one.

  ‘You don’t know what I mean, do you? Where have you been hiding? Everyone in Ravensbrück knows about the rabbits – it’s the camp’s worst-kept secret. You don’t know about the experiments?’

  She came closer, her hands bunching. An animal stink rose from her blotched and peeling skin. There wasn’t a trace of fat to separate her bones from their covering. She looked like one too-quick movement would split her in two. Liese had to fight not to run.

  ‘Of course we know.’

  Hilge pushed herself to the front of the group, her shoulders squared.

  ‘The Nazis use women here for their medical tests. They broke your legs and cut out your bones. Then they stuck the wounds with splinters and bits of glass and injected them full of bacteria. And you hop until you heal, or what passes for healing, so they call you rabbits. There’s a difference between knowing and seeing, that’s all.’