Liese thought she was going to be sick. The woman didn’t move; neither did she do what Liese was hoping she would and tell Hilge she was mad or misinformed.
‘So you know about the games they play here, or you’re clever enough to know the right answer. That doesn’t explain who’s been feeding you and where you’ve come from. Are you brothel women?’ Her voice sharpened. ‘Or those bitches who got pulled out for house workers while the rest of us were left here to rot?’
Liese froze. Hilge didn’t falter. ‘We’ve been in the Siemens factory, in the plant outside the camp. They fed us because they needed our fingers nimble. Perhaps there was more food there than here.’
‘Perhaps? You think?’
But the woman finally backed off and hobbled away, waving to a corner where the bunks had two inmates crammed in them, not three.
The newcomers edged into the barracks. Liese tried to duck after Hilge but was met with a snarl.
‘Don’t come after me. I listened to enough gossip to get us past the door in one piece, but you’re on your own now.’
She disappeared into the forest of bunks, leaving Liese to pick her way through the groaning. Matchstick arms plucked at her; pleading eyes followed her.
I don’t want to die like this. She slumped to the ground, knees buckling as the truth hit her. Of course she wanted to die – that was all she had dreamed of since the day Lottie was taken – but she had imagined a quiet death, the water washing her pain away as she walked towards her child. A death with dignity, and in her offering; a penance. Not this brutal shove into sickness or selection.
Death is death – what does it matter? Liese didn’t know why but it did.
‘Get up.’
Liese started as a foot kicked at her.
‘Are you deaf? Don’t you know anything? The whistles and the yelling means it’s roll call. If they come in and find you capable of walking but ignoring their orders, it’s a bullet or the ovens.’
Liese stared at the furious woman still prodding at her and wondered why she cared.
The woman’s heavily accented German switched to a growl. ‘Not just for you, you stupid bitch. For all of us. Buses have been spotted not far from the gates. White ones, not the green ones they use for gassing. Some countries have finally whipped up the courage to get their people out. I’m not missing the chance of that because you’re lost in some dreamworld.’
She hauled Liese up, dragged her out of the barracks and back round to the now even busier parade ground. Liese already knew enough not to ask why they hadn’t done this first: why the guards had put the women into the barracks only to pull them straight out again. She sensed this was normal, or what passed in the camp for normal. Another way of creating fear and confusion, of stripping away the inmates’ humanity, reducing them to creatures without thought, capable only of reaction.
‘Are they still killing people, even with the enemy so close?’
The prisoner still holding roughly onto her arm snorted. ‘Are you serious? That’s why they’re still killing us.’
Liese stared round her and realised all the bodies packing the square were adults.
‘The children too?’
‘What children? What are you talking about? They’re all gone. Shipped out to other camps if they made it past birth, or survived the cold, or the hunger. Why would you think there were children?’
The parade ground was shouted to order before Liese could land on an answer. Numbers began flying through the air thick as the burning paper. Women were pulled into this line and that, some of them forced out of their clothing, some of them not. Liese barely noticed. She had never imagined there could have been a worse fate for Lottie – now she could picture too many.
‘That’s you. That’s the number on your jacket. Move, unless you want the whole line to get shot.’
Another snarling voice more tuned to the camp’s ways shoved Liese forward into a smaller group carved out from the rest. No one looked anywhere but forward.
Liese waited for the order to strip, which surely meant death. The public humiliation which gave gassing and selection meaning and explained the thin plumes of smoke. It didn’t come.
‘Move.’
More running, more shouting, more stops and starts. Two women were deposited outside a block with a medical sign, three at another with a pile of wizened turnips outside. And then there was no one but her, standing outside another grey building.
‘Get in.’
The guard pushed her through a door into a room she thought at first was empty.
‘Good – they found you.’
She didn’t have to look to know it was Suhren.
‘No greeting for me? Never mind. Thankfully it’s your silence I need, not your less than sparkling conversation.’
He was sitting behind a desk covered with papers. His uniform was as immaculate as always, each silver flash and button shining. Liese stared at him open-mouthed, wondering what possible need he still had of a dressmaker.
‘Lists.’ He waved a hand across the piles. ‘Ridiculous amounts of lists that Heaven forbid we don’t muddle. All to be checked, the correct orders attached. No matter how close to the end we get, the machinery must keep on turning.’
Liese couldn’t tell if he was exasperated or amused by the task. She had no clue how it could possibly involve her.
‘I’ve lost most of my men to the front and my women to leading the evacuation marches, but there’s still no let-up in the work to be done. This needs someone with a careful eye and nimble fingers and the brains not to discuss it. In other words, you.’
He pointed to a table and a stool in the corner.
‘Sit there, sleep there. If there is any food left, someone might bring it. You will not leave this building. Something else you might want to thank me for one day, eh? If anyone ever asks? Not such a bad boss when all’s said and done.’
Liese stared at him, wondering if he was hoping for a favour or some kind of reference. The situation was so absurd she laughed; she couldn’t help herself. It was, admittedly, a strangled gasp, she was so long out of practice, but it was still unmistakably mirth.
Suhren rose. She saw the pistol at his hip and wondered if this was finally the moment. He gazed at her; he gazed at the papers filling his desk. He sat down.
‘What are you waiting for? Get started.’
She lost track of time. The piles of paper for matching never seemed to grow smaller. She lost any desire to laugh when she saw what they were.
More days than not, no food came. There was a bathroom Suhren never went in but offered to her as if it was some kind of palace. Unlike the office, whose brass fittings and woven carpet Suhren insisted Liese kept polished and swept, the fittings in the bathroom were rusted and stained and the thin trickle of water the taps spat out was undrinkably brown. There was no mattress for her to sleep on; no blanket to keep out the cold the thin windows let in.
Suhren arrived each morning not long after dawn. When he left, he locked the airless room behind him. After the first day, Liese stopped looking at the typed sheets of barrack numbers and prisoner numbers and places she had never heard of. She knew what they were; she knew she couldn’t stop what was happening. She hoped that the white buses had come and the orders she filled for removals weren’t for the green ones. She had no hope that was true. She stopped thinking beyond one more thing to do and then I will have my ending.
She could barely see through the grease-smeared windows. At night, she blocked her ears against the cries and the screams, the emptiness that flooded in after the gunfire stopped rattling. She conjured up the lake instead, imagined she could hear the water lapping. Songs and stories, a little sleep; the old pattern. Days and nights spent in silence, her mind far away from the room, frozen in this strange world that was none of her choosing, that went on without ending. And then, one morning, Suhren didn’t come.
Liese sat at her table and waited.
The camp was quiet. There were n
o engines grumbling; there was no shouting. The sun rose high enough to light the room almost to its corners and still the day outside behaved as if it was the dead of night.
Liese got up slowly, ears straining for guns or shouting. There was nothing. Perhaps they had run. Perhaps this was her chance, in this moment between one side going and one side coming. She pushed the door and pushed again and would have wept at her weakness if she had had the luxury of time. Days existing on water and scant mouthfuls of bread had left her arms flimsy. She needed to dig the lock away from the wood. She scoured the room for anything that would make a tool and could only find a fork buried at the back of Suhren’s desk. The task seemed ludicrous, a labour better suited to mythical heroes, but the wood was soft and worm-ridden and crumbled like stale cake as she gouged it.
The camp she stepped into when the door finally splintered gave a new meaning to wasteland.
She had thought Ravensbrück was brutal when they had shoved her back into it; she had had no idea. It was as if she had wandered into Hell while its demons were sated and napping after an orgy of violence. She felt the stillness like a pause: it was filled with tension, time suspended while the next madness took shape. There were no soldiers visible, or snapping dogs. The bonfires had burned down to drifts of ash. The stinking smoke from the rear of the camp was faint enough to be a memory. The horror in this new underworld didn’t shout and stamp, it wriggled. Out of the heaped bodies Liese thought at first glance were kindling piles. Out of the rags that uncurled and crawled as she groped her way past them.
Don’t look. Head for the gate – head for the lake and Lottie.
Liese managed barely half a block’s length before the whimpers and the corpses and the air’s rotting sweetness swamped her. Her knees gave out, and she fell on all fours, retching until she was formed of nothing but empty spaces and bile. She lay curled and spent against a barracks wall, whatever it was she was trying to do forgotten. Not knowing if she was the last person left in the camp still breathing beyond her last gasps; too afraid to go looking.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Vibrations she had not had the strength to notice shook the ground, rolling through her legs and into her spine until her teeth were jumping.
‘That noise you’re so brilliantly ignoring is the Russian tanks; they’re almost at the gates.’
An arm caught her round the waist; lifted her off her feet.
‘That means soldiers – Russian soldiers. Don’t you know what they’ll do if they catch you?’
The arm dragged her along. The voice ran on, not waiting for an answer.
‘We were out there. When the Germans finally ran, we escaped. What we found in the forests was as bad as in here and drove us back in again. There’s women left for dead, so used up by those brutes they’ve gone mad. Sick women, their own women, women who are barely women anymore. The Russians don’t care as long as they can be knocked onto their backs.’
The voice kicked a door open and dragged Liese inside a block that smelled of damp and rotten earth.
‘You, lying there like that, still so obviously alive. Drawing them onto us like flies to shit with the promise of still-breathing bodies. They’ll tear the place apart. We can’t risk it.’
Liese never saw a face. Hands pushed her through loosened boards into a space hollowed out below the roof. More hands pulled her into a vent so narrow it doubled her over.
‘Stay still. Stay quiet. Pray the Russians pass through here quickly. Rumour has it the Americans are the next army behind them – pray for that. They’re too fearful of God to treat us like animals.’
It took three days for the Russians to sweep out and the Americans to sweep in. Liese and the other women crawled out of the kitchen roof when they heard the accents change over, most of them so weak they couldn’t stand. She was bundled into a bed, carried there by horror-stricken boys too young for what they had seen, and put into the care of Red Cross nurses grown too used to it.
‘I need to go to the lake.’
‘Of course you do – who wouldn’t want to see something pretty after this.’
Smiles and pats and no one listening.
‘I can’t leave here. Don’t make me.’
Sedatives and pressing hands and still no one listening.
Then an older man came, with stars on his collar and tired eyes, who waited while she begged to stay. He regarded her so seriously, Liese thought he understood. Until he shook his head like the rest of them.
‘This happens; it will pass. You’ve been a prisoner so long you’ve grown used to it. You’ve learned how to survive this and you don’t trust the world outside not to be as bad as it was when you came in. You don’t need to worry: Hitler is dead; the Nazis are finished. It’s safe to go back to your life. Besides, there is disease here and no sanitation – you’re in more danger if you stay. We have trains running back to Berlin; we are shipping everyone out. Maybe you’ll be lucky and there’ll be family waiting.’
‘You don’t understand – my family is here.’
She grabbed his arm, but he shook her off.
‘Be brave.’
There was nothing to be done. She was well enough to work, well enough to leave. Being weak and afraid didn’t count: everyone was weak and afraid. Liese was taken to a train that same afternoon and deposited in a carriage packed with women who couldn’t stop smiling. Women who were going towards the hope of what they loved, while she was dragged from all that mattered.
She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t re-enter some life that wasn’t a life. When the train pulled to a stop, she hung back and let the platform empty out. When she finally got off, she stayed in the shadows until the engine regathered its strength to set out again.
She was ready. She chose a place to stand which would catch the moment when the train hit the right speed. She closed her eyes and conjured up Lottie; opened her arms and felt her child tugging.
‘Woah there, Miss!’
The shout pulled her back, turned her round.
A man was bounding towards her, a soldier in a brown uniform, bellowing as if he was calling after a shying horse.
‘Another step and you’ll tumble. You don’t want that now.’
He spoke German, but his accent was clipped and unfamiliar. His hand was on her shoulder. Liese wriggled, but it was too late: the train was already past her, steaming away.
‘What are you doing? What business is this of yours?’
She meant to shout and hit and kick and run down the platform until she caught up with the engine, but he had her arm too firmly held and his eyes were so gentle, she couldn’t bring herself to lash out.
‘It would be a terrible thing for the driver, what you were trying. Never mind for you.’
‘I don’t care about the driver.’
But her body had sagged and they both knew that was a lie.
‘I have to do this. You stopping me now won’t change my mind. It will just change the timing.’
The words came out in a snarl. He didn’t step back.
‘I’m sorry you feel like that; I really am. I imagine a lot of people feel as bad as you, which doesn’t make your pain any less. But there’s been a lot of dying already, don’t you think? Could we wait a little longer for yours?’
The kindness that filled his eyes and voice was too soft for Liese to fight against.
‘I don’t deserve this. I deserve that.’
She pointed to the tracks and pulled away so fast her head spun and her knees buckled. He caught her as she slipped.
‘Maybe you don’t. Maybe you do. I’m not the judge here. But I could be a friend. Could we agree on that much?’
I don’t need another man in uniform who won’t listen to what I need; who won’t mind his own damn business.
But her head was whirling and so was the platform and she couldn’t find the words she needed to push him away.
Fourteen
Karen
Ber
lin, May 1990
Michael welcomed Karen back into his home as politely as he had done the day before. He made no mention of their previous conversation, so neither did Karen. He poured the coffee that was already waiting, he cut a cake that was clearly freshly baked and he talked without offering her any pauses.
‘Liese told me her story because I pushed her to do it. Her narrative was emotionless and full of gaps, as if it had happened to someone else. I can see in your face you hoped for more, Fraulein Cartwright. So, I promise you, did I. What I have given you is all I have. Her pain was too raw; whatever trust she had left in the world was gone. She wanted to be left alone. It was me who wanted her to stay, who needed her.’
Markus had continued to translate for his father as he had done before, watching Karen while he did so. He was waiting, Karen knew, for her to do what Michael apparently hadn’t been able to with her mother and push back. Michael had given her so little she barely knew where to start. He had handed her a pencil sketch with no colours, all outlines and nothing filled in.
Liese’s sewing skills had taken her out of Ravensbrück; the Nazis’ retreat in the face of the Russian army had put her back in. She had returned to Berlin alone, weakened and ill. Andrew had found her at the train station, where he was acting as some kind of army liaison point for refugees and returners. He had taken her to a hospital and Michael had tracked them down there. Two years after that, she and Andrew had married. That was the entirety of what Michael had said, but he knew more – Karen could see it. He was wary, prepared for a challenge, prepared to defend himself.
Markus was right: his father was clever. Well, so was she. He was ready for questions about the end of the war; that didn’t mean they were the ones she should ask.
What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Page 24
