She trailed away. Michael and Andrew were so silent she couldn’t read their reaction.
‘It is a good plan, Karen; a kind and thoughtful one. I can see why my son is so taken with you.’ Michael smiled as she blushed. ‘It would help me and, I imagine, you?’
He turned to Andrew, who nodded and took Karen’s hand again.
‘Good.’
Michael sat up, clapped his hands and changed back into the Michael Karen knew.
‘And now it is time for you two to go.’
‘What do you mean?’
The abrupt change of tone from thanks to dismissal wrong-footed Markus. Karen, who was slightly giddy with relief at how well, in the end, the reunion had gone, struggled not to laugh at his indignant frown. Michael completely ignored it.
‘This has been a day of revelations that need digesting. Right now, Andrew and I have years to catch up on and conversations which require only us. Berlin is celebrating; you should be out there with it, grabbing hold of your future.’
‘But what about you? How will you get home?’
It was Andrew’s turn to adopt Michael’s dismissive tone.
‘What, don’t you think a soldier and a resistance fighter can organise their way round dinner and transport? Or a night of fireworks and a party, if that’s what we decide?’
He grinned as Markus blustered.
‘Go on, do as Michael says, the pair of you. Let he and I be as young or old together tonight as we choose.’
Karen pulled Markus up. ‘They’re done with us. And they seem to be understanding each other just fine now. We should run before they change their minds and make us listen to them reminiscing.’
She blew kisses at their smiling fathers and dragged Markus out of the hotel before he could argue. Michael was right: it was time to grab hold of the future she knew was there waiting.
It was dark outside, the cold air already thick with the dry sulphur-edged smoke of the fireworks blooming in pinks and blues and greens across the black velvet sky. Crowds had begun streaming across the river, making their way to the Brandenburg Gate, although there were still hours to go before the Liberty Bell would toll and Berlin would be pronounced whole again. Karen and Markus were immediately swallowed by a laughing group. People were draped in the black, red and gold flag that now represented all of them, some of them, Karen noticed, wearing theirs like a cape, their heads sticking through where the DDR symbol had once been.
The contrast between the scene unfolding on what, for the next few hours at least, was still the West and the ceremony Karen had witnessed in the East was so pronounced she shivered and pressed close into Markus’s side.
‘Do you think reunification will be as good as everyone hopes?’
‘No. It will be better, and it will be worse, but it is here and I’m young enough to be glad of it.’ He grinned down at her. ‘The Wall has come down and opened doors I never expected to walk through. I could move to the West side, study psychology in the way I always wanted to; collect on a dream or two.’
Opening doors and collecting on dreams; it was her turn.
‘I could come here too. My firm is opening an office in Berlin. They’d like me to head it.’
He stopped, his grin so wide his eyes disappeared into crinkles, and swept her into his arms. Karen laughed as her feet left the floor.
‘Are you ready for this?’
His answer was almost lost to the whooping crowd and the music blaring in competition from the windows around them. Almost, but not quite.
‘For all of it, Karen Cartwright. For all of it.’
Nineteen
Karen
Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, October 1990
The drive from Berlin to Fürstenberg took almost two hours. Michael provided a running commentary on the mechanics of the DDR for most of it.
The crumbling, increasingly potholed roads Markus kept cursing were intended for military and agricultural use not ‘idle day-trippers’ and therefore could not be held to ‘Markus’s ill-informed notions of higher Western standards’. The great swathes of farmland, which were ten times the size of anything Karen had ever encountered in England, were ‘collectives’ and ‘models of production the West could learn from’. Nobody really listened; everybody humoured him.
As they grew nearer their destination, however, and the bleak machinery-dotted landscape gave way to thick woodlands wound through with rivers and lakes, even Michael grew silent. The canopy of trees which danced above them in sun-soaked shades of green and gold was too lovely to be comfortable, given the horrors it had sheltered.
‘That must be the town. We could stop here for coffee and a break if anyone needs it.’ Karen pointed to a narrow spire poking out from the forest and a line of sloping red tile and moss-covered roofs.
As more wood-framed buildings popped up between the trees, she had to stop herself from saying how sleepy and charming and storybook pretty it was. Andrew’s ‘it should look more ashamed’ better summed up everyone’s feelings.
No one wanted to linger. Late-morning hunger pangs were forgotten. They drove on in silence, exiting the town along a cobbled road that rattled through the car’s flimsy chassis and into their bones. There was no signpost for Ravensbrück anywhere along the route, although Karen kept twisting about trying to find one. In the end, Markus had to beg her to sit still.
‘This is the right way, past the railway station. Ilse said we just keep driving, that you stumble on the camp rather than see it. To put it like she did, “the Nazis preferred secrecy and that suited the town”.’
Ilse Neumann, the woman who had survived three years in the camp. Markus hadn’t stopped talking about her since a colleague had heard about the proposed Ravensbrück trip and arranged a meeting. ‘Formidable’ was the main word he had used. Karen had pictured a fierce, warrior-looking woman, with more than a touch of the Amazon about her. The one waiting as they parked the car opposite the high wall and the firmly closed gates was small and wiry and wearing tweeds not unlike Andrew’s. When she walked over to introduce herself, Karen couldn’t help but notice Ilse had a pronounced limp.
‘Which one of you is Michael Wasserman?’
Ilse’s gaze swept over Michael and Andrew as if she was inspecting a cohort of rather disappointing troops. Both men straightened.
Michael stepped forward as if he was about to salute. Ilse didn’t waste time letting him speak.
‘Good. Well, it’s your name that got you all in here, so you’d best come with me and calm down the Russian.’
She nodded briefly to the others and crossed back to the gates, beckoning Michael to follow her. From where she was standing, Karen could see the fringes of the lake. She turned away, refused to follow her desperate impulse to run to it. They had all promised each other that they would go there together, that it would be the last thing they would do here. Karen knew if she thought about her mother standing by the water, about the guard stepping forward and seizing Lottie, her knees would buckle. She focused instead on the gates where Ilse was deep in conversation with a soldier who looked like he should have still been in school.
Whatever was said worked. Hands were clasped, backs were slapped and the gates were opened. The soldier gestured the rest of the party over to join Ilse and Michael and drifted away. Karen crossed the road quickly, Markus and her father trotting behind, and followed Ilse inside, avoiding the broken tree stumps and roots crawling round the outer wall’s edges. The sight that met her as they passed through the heavy metal gates was nothing like she expected and brought her to an abrupt halt. The space they were standing in was sprawling and desolate, half of it covered in cracked concrete, half of it overgrown in a tangle of weeds.
‘I thought there would be buildings, the same as I’ve seen in pictures of the other camps. Lots of prison blocks laid out like army barracks.’
Ilse shook her head. ‘There was once. When I was put in here, there were dozens of them fanned out along both sides of a wide r
oad, bordered, for some reason that no one ever understood, with beds full of red flowers. But the Russians turned the site into a tank base in the 1950s and smashed everything down. Where we’re standing now was once the parade ground, where they did roll calls and their never-ending selections. Where most of us started and finished if you like.’
My mother was Jewish, which makes me Jewish too.
The realisation had never hit Karen before, but now she couldn’t escape it. What Ilse was describing could have happened to her. But for a trick of time it could be her standing in this frozen square, waiting to find out if her death would be quick or drawn out. Karen blinked at the realisation of how real it all was, of how the lives that had ended, and endured, here mattered and deserved to be told. Behind her, one of the men sniffed and turned it into a cough. Her own eyes were so dry they were stinging.
‘How many women were brought in here?’
Ilse began leading them further inside, pointing out where the main barrack blocks had been as they went.
‘In total over the whole war? I’m not sure anyone knows that number for certain. I’ve heard a hundred thousand mentioned, but since the Soviets took charge, no one has really investigated and there’s been no records released that I know of. All I know is that the number who survived is far lower than the number who came in. And that we came from all over Europe – France, Germany, Poland, Russia, even a handful from England. So many different languages. Add in the Romanies and all the different dialects and this place was a veritable Tower of Babel.’
‘Who was in here? Was it mostly Jews?’
Ilse shrugged. ‘There were some. More at the start, or so I was told, but the guards rinsed them out pretty quickly. We were all sorts: Jews, communists, gypsies, lesbians, prostitutes, Russian female soldiers. Every flavour of affront to womanhood you could find. I suppose that the only thing we had in common, apart from being women, was that the Nazis considered us deviants and surplus to requirements in their new vision of Germany. And we got caught.’
Ilse smiled; there was no humour in it. She gestured to a pile of broken masonry covered in weeds.
‘This is where the ovens were. I came in as a communist. If they’d known I was also a Jew, I’d have been straight in here.’
Karen couldn’t think of a single reasonable response. When her father spoke up, she was glad to hear another voice, although his wavered as thin as the sparse grass dotting the concrete.
‘Would my wife have suffered? As far as we know, she was only in this place for a couple of weeks, at the end of the war. We know about the selections and the gas chambers; there’s been rumours about medical experiments. So I’m wondering if she would have suffered here? As much as the women like you did, who were forced to cope with it longer.’ He glanced down at Ilse’s crooked leg. ‘Who were cruelly treated.’
There was a silence. Karen desperately wanted Ilse to answer with a simple no and knew that she wouldn’t.
‘I don’t know how to answer that, how you think I can measure it? Does a week leave fewer scars than a month, than a year? Is a short exposure to horror worse than a long one you somehow adjust to? This place was Hell. There is no other word for it. No one walks through Hell and comes away without burns. We suffered, all of us. But you know that, or you wouldn’t be here, looking for the parts of your wife you never quite knew.’
There was a pause. Ilse looked away from them.
‘Some suffered and died here. Some were set free. I doubt there is anyone who escaped, who still escapes, the suffering.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ilse turned round and finally looked Karen full in the face rather than flinging her comments back at the group.
‘Some of the pain is easier to spot. With your mother, perhaps, you can trace it in the choice that she made. For others, the pain is more silent, but it’s still there. No one talks, you see. No one remembers. There is a memorial here, at the lake. It is beautiful. But it is a Russian memorial, for their women, for communist martyrs. A very specific thing. The rest of us are forgotten. Scattered, voiceless, unheard. Most of us can’t even find each other. We live with our nightmares and we live with the shame of what this place did to us, what it brought us down to. It is as I said: whoever we have become, we live lives still shadowed by what happened to us here.’
Karen expected to hear pain in Ilse’s voice; the weariness in it was worse.
‘What do you want? What, if anything, could help you?’
For the first time since they had arrived, Ilse’s tough manner let in a degree of warmth as she answered Karen’s halting question.
‘No one has ever asked me that.’ She bent down and picked up a piece of the rubble. ‘We were brought together by a place. Now we need different places. To find our stories in. To be remembered in.’
Karen nodded, her mind whirling with thoughts it was impossible to voice.
No one had any more questions after that.
Andrew and Michael, Karen could see, were worn out. Markus was hovering around them, taking elbows when they reached rough ground, whispering words of encouragement when the old men faltered. Ilse led them back out of the camp and onto the lakeshore to where the Russian memorial stood. It was, as she had said, heartbreakingly beautiful. A bone-thin woman stood on a plinth, her head held up towards the heavens, cradling the broken body of a second woman, who was visibly nearer to death, in her arms.
Ilse offered to tell them the statue’s story; no one wanted it – they all had their own version.
As Ilse stepped back, the four of them formed into a line looking out over the lake and its long-buried secrets. No one spoke; there was no longer any need.
One by one, they kissed the two white roses they had each carried from the car. One for Liese; one for Lottie.
One by one, they threw the flowers out over the calm water.
There was no splash. There was no spray.
Each rose landed gently on the surface, as perfect in their beauty as the love that they carried.
Epilogue
Berlin, September 2001
We need places. To find our stories in. To be remembered in.
Karen watched the sun play across the sleek silver walls of Berlin’s newly completed Jewish Museum.
This is one. More are coming.
‘It’s really big. Did you build the whole thing?’
Karen realised Lottie was tugging at her hand and switched her attention off the museum and onto her daughter.
‘No, monkey. I was a small part of a very big team. Come on – let’s go inside. There’s something special Daddy and I want to show you, before the museum opens to everyone else tomorrow and gets really busy.’
She smiled at Markus, who swept the little girl into his arms and followed Karen’s lead through the huge entrance hall and down to the lower floors and the main exhibition galleries.
‘There we are.’
She didn’t need to point it out. Lottie had already wriggled out of her father’s arms and flown straight to the display case whose contents shone like a beacon even though the main lights weren’t yet on. By the time Karen and Markus caught up with her, Lottie’s nose and hands were pressed against the glass.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’
Lottie nodded but she didn’t turn round.
The dress that had mesmerised the little girl was cut from gold lamé and flowed like liquid over the mannequin. It had a fluted train and was clasped round the middle by a rhinestone belt with a butterfly-shaped buckle. The most eye-catching part of the design, however, was the sleeves. They were a confection of swirls and pleats, each one wrapped in a wreath of material so intricately twisted it coiled round the fabric like a vine. It was the kind of dress Karen knew visitors would imagine springing into life once their backs were turned.
‘Do you see the card, Lottie? This dress was made by Haus Elfmann, the fashion house Grandma Liese’s parents owned, the one that she grew up in. Remember I told you about that, and
how clever your grandma was with a needle? Opa Michael always says sleeves were her speciality. This dress could be one of hers.’
Lottie smiled at the mention of her grandfather. She adored both Opa England and Opa Michael as she called them, and they had shed years, and the last traces of their old resentments, with the little girl’s birth.
‘Why is that in there?’
Lottie pointed to a porcelain doll propped in the corner of the case, dressed in a miniature version of the gold gown.
‘That’s the really special bit. The museum staff let me put it in there. It’s for the other Lottie – the one you were named for.’
Lottie patted the glass as if she was stroking the doll’s blonde hair. ‘Your big sister who went to heaven?’
Karen nodded. ‘The doll and the dress are here because her story, and Grandma’s, is one of the stories that this museum was built to remember.’
Lottie turned to her mother, her eyes bright as diamonds in the dimmed hall. She wrinkled her nose in such a perfect imitation of Liese, Karen’s heart fluttered. Depending on her daughter’s mood, Karen could see traces of all of them in her heart-shaped face: Andrew and Liese; Michael and Markus; herself. More and more, however, as Lottie grew, Karen could see the strongly defined and separate character the seven-year-old was already becoming.
‘Do you think I could be like her?’
Karen frowned.
‘Like Grandma Liese? Do you think I could make dresses as beautiful as that when I’m big?’
Karen reached for her daughter at the same time as Markus’s arms encircled her; she couldn’t trust herself to speak. All the pain that had marked the past had finally been laid to rest; now it was time to look back and find the good, to feel her family stretching forward and stretching back, part of the same whole. To know that her Lottie would have the childhood Liese had dreamed of for both her girls: filled not with secrets and silences, but light and laughter and a safe place in the world. All the things Karen could give her child because – in this newly woven family that united all the strands that had been her mother and father’s lives, and the countries that had shaped them – she had finally found them for herself.
What Only We Know: A heart-wrenching and unforgettable World War 2 historical novel Page 34