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

by Catherine Hokin

Andrew was shifting again, looking over to the lawn as if he was hoping for a rescue. Karen wanted to let him go. She wanted to let it all go. She wanted to curl up in a ball and hide and never talk about any of this again. She gripped the bench to stop herself rocking and pushed on.

  ‘How did you feel? About covering it up?’

  He turned to her, his exhausted expression transformed to astonishment. ‘How did I feel? I have no idea. I didn’t think about it, not in the moment. I cared about her; Michael cared about her. She needed our help. What should we have done instead? Contacted the authorities? Watched them take away a good woman to hang?’

  ‘No! Of course not.’

  His voice softened as hers rose. ‘We all paid for it, Karen. All three of us. No one walked away from that night unmarked. But at least she walked away. What we did in the shop, what I did in bringing your mother here, was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.’

  She heard it then, the tremor in his voice which rang with uncertainty.

  Didn’t she love you enough? She’d hurled that at him years ago, without any other thought except the hurt she could cause. Watching his spent face now, Karen realised her father had spent his whole marriage haunted by the same question.

  ‘I’m sorry – so very sorry, Karen – for having to tell you this. And for all the other things I should have said and never found the courage.’

  The apology took her by surprise. How long had she waited to hear that? Now, Karen wished she had played her part better and not fought him, that ‘I’m sorry’ had never been needed on either part. She wished she knew him well enough to wrap her arms round him. She settled instead for honesty.

  ‘Don’t, please. There’s just as much fault with me as with you. You were trying to protect me, like you tried to protect her. I was too angry, too wrapped up in myself, to see it.’

  This time he didn’t turn his back when his eyes filled.

  ‘Thank you for saying that, but the blame isn’t equal and I won’t let you go on thinking it is. I’m your father. I’m meant to take care of you, but I got the doing of it so wrong. Your mother died and then I kept her away from you. She wanted me to tell you about your sister. She told me to do it; she knew you needed to hear it. I didn’t know how. I thought you were too young when she died. Then you weren’t, but I was a coward and I kept missing the moment to be brave. I failed her and I failed you. That has been as hard to live with as her dying.’

  It was the longest, most personal speech she had ever heard from him. But before Karen could acknowledge that, Andrew shook his head as if to clear out the memories and got up. Karen felt the newly closing gap between them lurch open again and panicked.

  ‘Please don’t leave it like this, with more holes. What do you mean she told you? How? When? Why did it matter to her, that I knew what had happened? Don’t you see? I don’t know her and I so need to know her.’

  The words came out in a cry of pain she couldn’t stop.

  ‘That’s the worst of this. Ever since she died, she’s kept shifting. Everything I learn drives her further away. And I know there were good things, but they’ve got lost under the bad. I need my mother back, Dad. I really need her back.’

  It was Andrew who took the leap they both were yearning for. He reached out a hand and pulled her into as close to a hug as the two of them knew how to do.

  ‘I know you do. I’m not leaving anything unturned, not this time. Come with me, Karen. I’m going to do what I should have done years ago. I’m going to help you to find your mother.’

  His flat was brighter and more personal than Karen had imagined it would be. She wandered the rooms, glad of a distraction. The walls were washed in lemon yellow; cheerfully checked curtains framed the windows. There were daisy-printed cushions on the sofa in the living room that Karen knew her mother would have liked.

  ‘You’ve put out photographs.’

  Three elegant silver frames decorated the main bookcase. Her mother’s passport photograph and Karen’s baby shot had been remounted and reframed and flanked a larger print of Karen, looking awkward in her graduation gown.

  ‘It wasn’t a kindness to have photos around when your mother was alive and then, well, I hadn’t learned the habit. Mrs Hubbard suggested that a new home deserved new ways.’

  ‘What do you mean, it wasn’t a kindness?’

  Andrew adjusted Liese’s picture before he answered.

  ‘Simply that. Liese was frightened by images of herself, and displaying my family only reminded her that all trace of hers was gone.’

  There were so many questions Karen was burning to ask, but this new confiding felt too fragile to rush at and overload. She waited while he busied himself with the inevitable tea and a home-made fruit cake he was quietly proud of. The similarities between him and Michael kept growing stronger. Karen was beginning to sense why they had both loved Liese; why their lives had ended up tangled together.

  ‘Mother never found her parents then?’

  ‘There was nothing to find, except their names on the lists of the dead. The deportation they were on was sent straight to Auschwitz; they were murdered almost at once. She never stopped blaming herself for that.’

  More guilt bleeding into the jigsaw that was her mother. The depths of it were devastating, unacceptable.

  ‘Why would she do that? Shoulder so much blame? Markus said she would have carried Lottie’s death the same way, despite the fact there was nothing she could have done. That broke my heart, even though I knew he was right.’

  Her father glanced up and smiled. ‘This Markus sounds like someone you listen to.’

  Karen nodded. ‘He is.’

  She could see he was interested, but this wasn’t the time.

  ‘But I don’t understand how Mother could blame herself over what happened to her parents? She couldn’t have stopped them being deported.’

  ‘I know. There was nothing she could have done. Like she could do nothing for Lottie. I hate that she felt the weight of all that misplaced guilt, just as you do, but I could never ease the burden. In the last years of her life, Liese became convinced a lot of things were true that couldn’t possibly have been. That she had sent her parents to their death because it was her idea that they went out to work was one. That she had done something shameful in the camp she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain but had to pay for was another. That the renewed interest in tracking down Nazis in the sixties meant she would be discovered and hunted and would be called to account for the guard’s killing or something she did in Ravensbrück. I don’t know. None of what she was afraid of made a great deal of sense and me saying that, as I did over and over, made no difference to how deeply she felt it.’

  The fear of photographs. Her mother’s averted face at her wedding, the upset on the pier at Brighton. Did it all stem from the same twisted feelings of guilt and the fear of discovery? How had Liese continued as long as she had if that’s what her life was?

  Karen picked the sultanas out of her cake and lined them up like cherry stones.

  ‘Was that what the night-time ramblings were about?’

  Andrew nodded. Karen couldn’t begin to imagine the strain he had lived under, that he had hidden from her for years, that she had unwittingly added to.

  ‘I remember how she was. The headaches that sent her to bed for days, the bursts of energy when she never seemed to sleep. You in the kitchen trying to calm her. And how overprotective she was. With me, with that weirdness over the windows. Surely she can’t have been like that from the start? Did she worsen? Did she get help?’

  Her father took so long to answer, Karen wondered if he still suspected that an attack or a harsh judgement was coming. When he did speak, he was slow and painstakingly deliberate.

  ‘She was often… removed. She always had odd ideas she wouldn’t explain. She grew less certain what was the past and what was the present as the years went on. She loved jewellery, but she would only look at what I bought her inside the house and never
wore it outside in case anyone thought we were wealthy. That was some throwback, I imagine, to the way her Jewish family was treated, but she wouldn’t say when I asked her. And she always had one foot walking with Lottie.’

  The way he said that sprung tears to Karen’s eyes, but she waved him on when he tried to stop and comfort her.

  ‘I knew, when I found her at the station, that she didn’t want to live. So did Michael. But something kept her going and we never had the courage to ask her what. We couldn’t live with her death, you see. We thought if we refused to accept it would happen, it wouldn’t. Perhaps it really was some hope of revenge that got her through the days, although I doubt that she knew that. And then, after she killed the guard, she kept herself alive for us, for me. She never said it, but I knew that, by helping her, Michael and I had become another debt she felt she owed payment on. I always knew that I had borrowed her; that her scars would catch up with us one day. Our marriage… Perhaps it wasn’t the great love story I was so desperate to turn us into, but there was love on my side and real affection, maybe even love, on hers, I promise you that. It was a proper marriage because she wanted that too…’

  He stumbled and reddened and couldn’t meet Karen’s eye.

  Karen’s heart went out to him as he tried to battle through this unaccustomed openness. She was starting to understand what the dignity she had dismissed as coldness had cost him.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad. There’s things that should stay private.’

  He nodded and managed to recover his composure. ‘I never thought there would be a child, not after so many years. And then you came. And you were wanted.’ His face suddenly lightened so much he looked a dozen years younger. ‘That first night I held you was a miracle.’

  ‘And Mother?’

  Karen didn’t want to ask. When he replied, she could hear the answer she dreaded curled in the spaces.

  ‘She loved you. When the nurse put you in her arms after you were born, she laughed with delight. I’d never heard her properly laugh before. It was beautiful.’

  He stopped.

  ‘But?’

  Andrew’s voice was so quiet, Karen had to lean in.

  ‘She got sad. The baby blues they called it, nothing to worry about, meant to last only a few days. Except it didn’t. She had good spells and bad spells; the bad ones got longer.’

  ‘So her death wasn’t because of Lottie, or because of the guard’s killing. It was because of me?’

  And there it was: the question she had long ached to have answered finally out. Not mixed with blame and hurled out of spite, or loaded with anger, but simply and heartbreakingly put. It cost so much to ask it and, although the pause was agony, she was grateful her father took time to consider his answer.

  ‘No, Karen: it wasn’t. You’ve lived too long carrying a fault that was never yours. Perhaps, yes, your birth was a catalyst for what came, but so was the war and my saving her and marrying her and bringing her here and a dozen other things I doubt even she could name. Your mother was badly damaged by her life. She was ill. But she loved you with every bit of her that could and that’s the truth.’

  He got up and left the room before she could gather her thoughts up to speak. When he came back, he was carrying a cloth-covered blue book.

  ‘She was brave, Karen. All the battles she fought and yet she kept on going longer than most people I know would have managed, soldiers among them. Nobody talked about depression in the fifties and sixties. You pulled yourself up and got on with it. That was the language I had, that most doctors had. Or they gave you pills. She hated them; she wouldn’t take them properly. When she did, they stopped her functioning and made her paranoid. When she didn’t, it was like she had to live all her lives in one day. It was exhausting, for both of us. I never knew which Liese I was coming home to, or which one you had seen.’

  ‘Which is why Mrs Hubbard stepped in.’

  Karen remembered the slap and squirmed. If her father knew, which he surely must, he had the heart not to mention it.

  ‘I know she interferes, but she was – and is – a lifesaver. But this isn’t about her.’

  He held out the book. ‘I found this when your mother died. I’m not sure what to call it: a journal perhaps, or a scrapbook. She must have started keeping it not long after you were born. One of the doctors might have suggested it, to try and marshal her fears, or it was her own doing for the same end. I don’t know. I don’t imagine she intended either of us ever to see it, but it helped me. Eventually. I think it might do the same for you.’

  Karen opened the flimsy cover and began turning the pages. There were cuttings pasted into it, thickly speckled with annotations and longer pieces of writing in both English and German.

  Her father stopped her as she flicked through to the end.

  ‘You need to take time with it, follow it in order. My dictionary is on the bookcase if some of the German is harder than you can follow. I’ve been brushing up my skills.’

  ‘Why didn’t I find her book when you were in hospital and I cleared out the house?’

  She knew the answer before he supplied it.

  ‘You gave it to Mrs Hubbard for safekeeping.’

  ‘I had to. It wasn’t something for stumbling over. And you would have got it, whatever happened to me. I’d written a letter to go with it, if my treatment didn’t work.’

  He got back to his feet.

  ‘Sit with it now, as long as you need. I’ll be in the garden when you’re done. I want you to come to me when you are. It doesn’t make easy reading. But you’ll find her in there, Karen. And I hope you’ll find the forgiveness you need. For yourself, for me, if you want that. For her.’

  She heard the scrape of the kitchen table and the whistle of the kettle long before she was finished. The light had faded outside, drawing Andrew in. He didn’t disturb her. Reading the scrapbook had taken a number of stops and starts: the entries were muddled and without any thread of time or narrative to link them. It took Karen an age to find a pathway and decipher a voice she could follow.

  All the stuck-in clippings appeared to date from the early to late sixties. Their subject matter would have seemed wildly at odds with each other without Andrew’s brief description of Liese’s obsessions. They veered between highly prescriptive advice on all aspects of motherhood and childcare, and a whole series of articles reflecting the upsurge in the early 1960s in the demand to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. Every article was accompanied by scribbled thoughts and questions – about what made a good mother; about what made someone a murderer. As with the more personal, undated and untitled handwritten sections, their tone became more desperate as Karen worked her way through them.

  There was a pattern to the fears but no discernible order in the way the pieces were put together. Sometimes articles were stuck on top of each other in a jumble of crying babies and new medications, as if her mother was overwhelmed by competing anxieties. Sometimes there was a grouping which suggested one obsession had dominated. Newspaper reports from the 1963–1965 Auschwitz Trials ran over half a dozen pages. The details of the charges presented, and the defences offered, were thickly underlined; the same questions about where the guilt lay scribbled over and over.

  Karen found the longer entries, the ones where Liese had laid her soul bare, the hardest to read. They ran round and round in endless circles and were filled with a restless spirit that made her weep while she read them. Karen tried, but she couldn’t get through them all. The anguish in the loops Liese clearly couldn’t break out of was unbearable. The ever-present shadow of failure. The inability to trust herself as a mother, so caught up in the lessons of the past that a loudly crying child still meant danger. The knowing and not knowing she was safe, the inability to see soldiers as anything but a threat. It was little wonder she had always dreaded going to the base. That her mother could separate Andrew from the pack, Karen realised, said a lot about her father’s kindness and the strength of their marriage.

&nb
sp; To Karen’s relief, not every page was so bleak. Every so often there was the trace of a lighter day. When her mother recorded personal milestones and celebrated them.

  My clever baby walked today. My precious girl smiled and lifted her arms when she saw me.

  She has so many words, every day a host of new ones – they tumble from her. She is the cleverest little thing.

  How will I ever be able to tell her off? She is such a little monkey, into everything she shouldn’t be, and then she looks up at me with that grin and my heart melts.

  Her mother had captured these moments in a rounder script and surrounded her delight with garlands of beautifully drawn roses. Karen began hunting these entries out, combing through the pages for glimpses of herself and of happiness.

  Her father’s carefully phrased guidance proved right. The scrapbook was soaked in pain and hard to read. It was clear that her mother believed, although she could not, or would not, coherently explain it, that her actions had knocked the world off-kilter. That she was a danger to her daughter. That the crime she had committed, and the ones she judged herself guilty of, came with a price attached; that one day the universe would demand payment. There was paranoia and terror imprinted on every page. It was a side of her mother Karen knew was there but had never wanted to see, no matter how much closer it brought the real Liese.

  It also wasn’t the whole story. Karen found another woman inside the writings. One with a quick mind and a full heart. With a determination to understand what had created the horrors she had been plunged helplessly into, horrors that had rewritten the happy life she had expected to live. Her mother was plagued with demons but she was also, as her father had said and Karen had felt since she first heard Lottie’s story, determined and brave.

  Have I found forgiveness?

  Karen stared out of the window at the dark edges of a lawn which was as immaculate as the one at her childhood home. She knew her father, who was still waiting quietly in the kitchen until she was ready for him, hoped the answer to that would be an easy ‘yes’. The truth was, however, more complex.