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

by Catherine Hokin

  His cheeks were wet. Karen forced herself not to look at him.

  ‘But she had suffered terribly. She wouldn’t tell me much herself, but she had experienced things that went beyond my comprehension. I knew of the camps – we all did by then – but I’d never been in one. And what happened to her daughter…’

  He sighed and shook his head in a way that reminded Karen of Michael restructuring himself.

  ‘I should have told you about Lottie, when you were old enough not to be frightened. I’m sorry. At least now you know why she did what she did. You know the whole story.’

  ‘But I don’t, do I?’

  His hand withdrew.

  Karen inched forward as cautiously as if she was sliding over newly set ice.

  ‘There are gaps; I can feel them.’

  ‘I don’t know what Michael’s been telling you, but this was all a long time ago. His memories are no doubt hazy.’

  He had shifted away; she could feel him poised to get up.

  ‘He didn’t tell me: that’s the point. Michael was really careful. He didn’t want to talk about you and her – he said it wasn’t his place. But he let one thing slip: he said when he came to the hospital, Mother was angry. Not with him – he said she felt nothing for him – but with you. He wouldn’t explain why, or how that changed and how you ended up getting married.’

  ‘Because there was nothing to explain.’

  When Andrew did scramble up, Karen was ready for him.

  ‘Don’t, Dad; please.’

  Her unexpected softness and the use of a term she’d barely even used as an infant pulled him back down faster than her hand.

  ‘I swear I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve done enough of that. If you tell me I’ve got this wrong, that Mother’s suicide was solely because of Lottie and the agony from that she understandably couldn’t shake, that she married you for love and there are no more secrets, I’ll believe you, I promise.’

  Karen let her hand drop; stopped talking; gave him the moment to leave. When he didn’t take it, when he sat still again, she took the cuttings out of her bag.

  ‘Would you look at these for me? Michael kept them. We – his son Markus and I – thought they might be important. He’s a good man, Michael’s son. He’s trying very hard to help all of us through this.’

  Andrew nodded, although Karen could see he was reluctant. She handed him the piece about Suhren’s escape first and waited while he read it.

  ‘We wondered, Markus and I, if you were trying to find Suhren and get justice for Mother.’

  He passed it back with a shrug and a look Karen could only read as relief.

  ‘I was never that fanciful. Michael may have considered it – he had a network of connections I wasn’t privy to – but he never mentioned it to me. Anyway, the French got Suhren in the end, hanged him in 1950. I’ve no idea about Michael’s motives, but this means nothing to me. I avoided the trial and tried to keep any mention of it away from your mother. Revisiting what happened there would have done her no good. I’m sorry but whatever this is, I can’t help you with it.’

  His response was disappointing, but Karen had had enough experience of her father evading her to know when he was telling the truth.

  ‘Fair enough, but what about this one?’

  When Andrew read the second article, the change was immediate. There was no relief. His tight edges dissolved as if he could no longer hold himself together. He shoved the cutting back at her as if the words were written in acid.

  ‘Why on earth would he have kept this? Karen, please. I can’t…’

  Pain furrowed his face. It twisted Karen’s stomach to see him so haunted, but the crack she had been searching for had finally appeared and she had no choice except to force it wide open.

  ‘Did you think the body was Mother? Had she read about the trial and run away and you were afraid that someone had hurt her? Were the camp survivors in some kind of danger? Was that why Michael had this?’

  ‘Christ no! It was nothing like that.’

  He was shivering.

  I could make him ill again; I should stop.

  She knew that she couldn’t.

  ‘Then what was it? Why was some drowned woman important? Was it a friend of Mother’s? Someone she was in the camp with? Were you scared what she might do if she found out? Michael said more than once that you were desperate to protect her.’

  ‘A friend?’ He made a noise that could have been a laugh or a sob. ‘You’re not going to give up, are you? Then yes, I was desperate to protect her; we both were. And yes, it was someone from the camp. Oh, Karen, my darling, you don’t get it – how could you? Ravensbrück was a women’s camp. All the guards there were female.’

  Her father, the soldier playing the knight in shining armour; Michael, with Heaven only knows what training behind him.

  Karen stared at her father as if she had never seen him before.

  ‘It was the guard, in the river. The one who murdered Lottie. You and Michael killed her.’

  Andrew raised his head and stared back at his daughter. His face was as white as a corpse.

  Fifteen

  Liese

  Berlin, November 1946–April 1947

  The shop was quiet.

  The frost-laced November wind had pushed the pedestrians back to their firesides, ready for a tucked-in Friday night. Herr and Frau Herber had already left, gone to visit their daughter in the countryside to stock up on the butter and cheese that kept them both round.

  Liese was glad of the respite: the shop and its adjoining workroom was a simpler place without them. The Herbers were good, generous people, but they were also gossips and inquisitive, and sometimes the balance tipped too far the wrong way.

  She glanced at her watch. Five o’clock and dark as night outside. There was only one more order to prepare, ready for making up on Monday, then she could close and slip away before either of her usual escorts had a chance to appear. She was too tired tonight to be much use as company.

  Liese stretched the fabric along the cutting desk and marked off the lengths with tailor’s chalk. She could lose herself for hours like this, even when her eyes and shoulders were drooping; that much at least hadn’t changed. Even through her time as Suhren’s seamstress, the process of assembling the building blocks of a dress had never lost its capacity to absorb and calm her; had never lost its magic. Carving straight lengths of material into intricate pieces, turning them from flat to full so that the finished garment would cling and swing and transform even the thinnest body. It remained magic, because this is theatre. Although that wasn’t strictly true anymore, or at least not in the way her father once meant.

  Liese traced the pattern onto the cloth, struggling to picture Paul spinning his spells in Berlin’s newly revived but battered and shortage-hampered fashion industry. There was little in it he would recognise, or that she could imagine him wanting to be part of. None of the names who once ruled it had come back from the exile or the hell they’d been sent to. The extravagant dresses Haus Elfmann was once famous for were museum pieces, the shows they put on a myth. Despite the extravagant promises made by morale-boosting magazines, silk and taffeta and crêpe de Chine had become the stuff of dreams, along with unlimited flowers and perfume-thick air and spectacle.

  Post-war Berlin was a divided city, hacked into four political sectors in 1945 by the victorious Allied powers and into two sharper, more obvious divisions by money – or, more accurately, the lack of it.

  The poor, a rapidly growing class, were hungry and cold. They were stuck in queues, surviving from day to day on scraps of food and scraps of coal, with no sense that the war they had lost had ended. The rich, however, who had salted their fortunes carefully away and were bolstered now by the flood of Americans and their dollars into the city, had re-embraced the social whirl. Parties lit up embassies and refurbished hotels; partygoers chased glamour from any fashion house that could get back on its feet and supply it. Competition was cut-throat, cus
tomers were fickle; resources were limited and ingenuity prized. The last days of Haus Elfmann, which had demanded a creativity from Liese that the old-style designers would have found horrifying, had proved to be of more value than any lessons in haute couture she had learned.

  In the year since she had secured a job at the Herbers’ dressmaking shop, Liese had retrained her hands and eyes to learn the language of new materials. Slippery acetates that ran away from the needle; wool mixtures that were too cardboard-stiff to fold and tuck. She had also learned to adapt her designs. Dresses no longer came elaborately sculpted with knife-edge pleats and intricate gathers; there weren’t the supplies to create them. Women with new responsibilities and less certainties in their worlds no longer needed morning dresses and afternoon dresses and a week’s worth of evening ensembles. Except for the wealthiest, the days of excess had gone. Liese didn’t mourn them. The Herbers, however, did and their ambitions far outweighed the little shop that had fallen into their hands when the war had left it ownerless.

  It took Liese less than a week to realise that, despite their pretensions, the Herbers were struggling and the shop’s existence was threatened. Glad of something to do that filled her days and asked nothing of her but her skills, Liese had risen to the challenge.

  She plundered their dwindling fabric stores and spliced together mismatched fabric ends, whipping up skirts and blouses in what some might call patchwork but she described as ‘rainbow-arc outfits’. She encouraged Herr Herber to open up the gloomy store window and filled its space with colour. Women tired of grey and bored with narrow skirts that hobbled their knees began to find their way to Budapester Straβe. Liese watched as they sighed in front of the mirrors and ran hands down bodies that rationing had turned boyish. She worked offcuts into overskirts nipped in with sashes and bulked out with padding that restored war-starved hips and waists, and used inserts and darts to create blouses stiff with the illusion of volume. Women left the shop feeling like women.

  Herr Herber saw the order book fill and began to introduce Liese as Rumpelstilzchen, daring clients to bring in any fabric they could salvage for ‘darling Frau Ettinger, who truly can weave gold out of straw’.

  ‘Why does he call you that? Surely he knows your name is Elfmann?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. Why would I use a Jewish name if I don’t have to? Germany was beaten, that’s not the same as safe.’

  It was a clever answer to Andrew’s confused question, but it wasn’t the truth.

  Liese wasn’t afraid of being Jewish. She wasn’t afraid of anything anymore, except memories. She could be Elfmann anywhere else, but not in the dressmaker’s. Saying her parents’ name there was impossible. Either no one would know it in this business where everyone should, or, worse, it would be recognised. Some well-meaning soul would reveal the unthinkable and fill out that last image Liese held of Paul and Margarethe walking away with a camp name and a too detailed nightmare. So, at work, she was Ettinger.

  Andrew accepted her reason, as she had known that he would: he was too horrified by the whole business of the camps not to. She wished she could so easily stop the rest of his questions. Now that she was no longer in the hospital and seemed more sure of herself, he was desperate to burrow into her history. To know every detail about her family, about her life before, about the dreams she had dreamed there. ‘So I can get to know you better.’ As if the Liese then and the Liese now were the same person.

  He means well. He cares about you. They both do.

  She picked up her scissors as her conscience pricked.

  Michael and Andrew: a year and a half out of hospital and she still hadn’t shaken the pair of them off. The truth was, she didn’t want to. Somewhere along the way, their concern for her had stopped being a burden and she had learned to value them both, despite, or perhaps because of, how different the two men were.

  Andrew was the simpler of the two and his company was impossible not to enjoy. He was well read, he had an eye for art that she appreciated, and a way of approaching the world without judgement that carried a genuine warmth. They had fallen into the habit of walking together at the weekends, watching Berlin reshaping, sometimes talking, sometimes not, or sitting in one of the dozens of cinemas that had popped back up, both happy to be lost in other people’s stories.

  Liese had come to like Andrew very much. She knew he had fallen in love with her; in a different world, it wasn’t impossible that she could have fallen in love with him. He was good and kind, and patient. Liese knew that he would do everything in his power to make her happy and he would be very easy to make happy in return. He knew that she was broken, that she had far less to give than he deserved and it didn’t matter to him. What was it he had said? ‘You like me – I know you do. And you trust me. That could be enough, if you let it, to make into a good life. I have love enough for both of us for now; one day, if you let yourself, you might just catch me up.’

  From anyone else, that would have sounded needy, or weak. Coming from Andrew, somehow it didn’t. And that was the problem. He was such an honourable man. He deserved so much more than a woman who couldn’t work out why she was still living.

  As for Michael… He was in love with her too and that was far harder to ignore. There was such a wealth of history between them, good and bad. Liese had tried to push him away, but he kept coming back. She couldn’t pretend anymore that he meant nothing to her. Sometimes she thought she sought out Andrew’s company the most because she couldn’t trust herself to be alone too long with Michael. He had a way of looking at her that went straight through to her heart, but her heart was still too broken to find room for that.

  A wave of exhaustion washed over her, the way it so often did when she tried to puzzle out her future. She put down her scissors and ran her hand over the blue wool she had already cut, noticing as she did so that it was the same deep shade the doctor had worn under his white coat on the day he had discharged her.

  ‘You’re well enough to leave us and we need the bed.’

  It was the last days of Ravensbrück’s liberation all over again. She would have argued, if she thought for a moment he would have listened to her any more than the American doctors had then. Or if she had had anything better to say than ‘I don’t want to leave here; I can’t deal with the world.’ Nobody could deal with the world the war had left them with and she was a picture of health compared to most of the wretches the hospital admitted. The doctor knew what had happened to her; there was nothing he could offer to heal that wound but pity. Liese didn’t want that from him; she didn’t want that from anyone. All pity did was stoke the anger that still crouched in her stomach.

  So much rage, constantly churning inside her. Liese stared at the desk, at her scissors and pins neatly waiting and wondered why, when it reared, she didn’t glow red or burn everything she touched. Andrew couldn’t see it, or chose not to see it, but Michael could. That was the danger with Michael – he saw everything she was. And didn’t hide from telling her.

  ‘Maybe the anger is good – maybe it’s what keeps you going?’

  As if she wanted to keep going.

  Then why do you? Why don’t you end it like you planned?

  Up it popped again: the question she could never quite answer. That always wriggled on into: It doesn’t need to be the lake: there’s cars to walk under; there’s scissors to cut wrists with – there’s a dozen ways.

  It was two years since she had last kept her vigil over the water, joining Lottie her only goal. Two years since she had swayed on the train platform, and yet here she was, still living her life. Something was pushing her to keep on breathing, but try as she might, she couldn’t work out what.

  When the hospital had discharged her, Michael and Andrew were there, waiting to take over. She wouldn’t let them. She had allowed Michael to use his connections and help her find a place to live but had refused to move into his block. She had waved Andrew away when he worried that she was too weak yet to find work. She had hauled herself
off to the new tailoring quarter springing up round the Kurfürstendamm and sold her talents to the Herbers with far greater success than she had managed with the wartime businesses who had chased her away. She had carved out a life and she was still inching into it. She still didn’t understand why living it mattered.

  For Andrew and Michael perhaps?

  It was part of the answer, but it couldn’t be all of it, no matter how much she valued their affection. No matter that she knew the love they wrapped her in was more than so many people had.

  Post-war Berlin was a battered place, its heart pounded by bombs, its streets crammed with the lonely and the desperate. Liese passed them as she walked between her new home in Seydlitstraβe and the Budapester Straβe shop. Starving children, whose feet were bound in blanket strips whatever the weather, whose faces were sharpened like weasels. Lines of rag-bundled women clearing rubble from Berlin’s ravaged buildings, from around the cellars too many still lived in. Women too hungry to manage such physically punishing, pitifully paid work; too hungry not to. With no one left to love or be loved by. Women who would have envied Liese’s life as much as the wretches stuck in the camp that Suhren snatched her away from.

  Liese knew how lucky she was, but it was hard to feel grateful when she was so filled with guilt.

  ‘Excuse me, are you open?’

  She had been so engrossed in picking over her life, she hadn’t heard the bell ring. If Herr Herber found that out, his pale face would turn purple.

  Liese straightened herself up and smiled at the dark shape letting the cold in.

  ‘Yes, for another half hour.’

  Never hurry a customer, my dear: there’s not enough wealth in the city for us to rest on our laurels.