‘And then you’ll come? No more excuses?’
Liese lay against the pillow, cradling her daughter.
She could imagine a life without her parents, although that hurt more than she had words for. It was impossible to imagine a world that didn’t spin around Lottie. The love that bound her to her daughter was as strong as iron; it would stand against whatever challenges were coming.
She kissed Lottie’s soft hair and nodded at Michael.
‘And then I’ll come.’
Nine
Liese
Berlin, November 1942–September 1943
Live your cover story, lose yourself. Trust no one. Stay alert.
In the year since Paul and Margarethe had been relocated and Liese and Lottie had begun living underground, the Nazi’s determination to rid Berlin of its Jews had intensified. Their lives were never still. Liese had worn four different names in twelve months and had no doubt that the fifth one was coming. The number of rooms she and Lottie had bounced through had grown too long to count. Michael had led them in and out of basements and attics and cramped carved-up spaces the length of Treptow and Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg since he had pulled Liese from Cuxhavener Straβe, clutching Lottie and weeping. The sight of her parents walking away, hand in hand, bent into each other and not looking back, had broken her more than she could have imagined.
‘I can’t do it. I can’t let them go like this. What if I never see them again?’
She had thrust Lottie into Michael’s arms and run down the corridor, screaming at them to stop, deaf to Lottie’s frightened cries and Michael’s furious shouts.
‘You have to stay. You have to. I’ll work something out; I’ll hide you.’
‘And what will happen then?’
Paul’s face when he turned at her pleading was grey and so aged, Liese would have taken him for a stranger if she had passed him in the street. ‘They will find us. And you will pay. You and Lottie. We can’t live with that.’
‘It won’t happen, it won’t!’
When he reached out and stroked her hair, Liese thought her heart would stop.
‘We haven’t been much use to you.’ He shook his head as she tried to speak. ‘It’s best I finally face the truth, even if it is too late to mend things. We thought the world would always be ours, you see. And we’re not equipped for what it’s become. Your mother is my centre, Liese; Lottie is yours. Let us go; keep what matters safe.’
He turned then, tucked Margarethe’s arm into his and walked away. Liese didn’t call out again; Paul didn’t look back. When Michael picked her up from the floor where she had fallen, she didn’t fight him.
She had no memory of leaving the tenement, or of the first scrambled-into apartment he left them in. None of the places Michael had taken them to since were in areas she knew; most of their dark streets continued to remain a mystery. Every move was made at night and not every apartment was safe to leave, no matter how much Lottie begged for ‘outsides’. Every day dawned so fraught with danger, Liese’s nerves were permanently knotted. But at least, as she constantly reminded herself, every day dawned. Even if too many brought with them threats she hadn’t known were there to fret over.
‘You have to trust no one and you have to stay vigilant. The Nazis aren’t our only problem. There are catchers everywhere: turncoat Jews turning us in. They work for the Gestapo, hunting down illegals. Some of them are better at the job than their bosses.’
‘Why do they do it?’
Michael had shrugged, clearly uncomfortably aware how hollow his answer was.
‘Who knows. Money, I suppose. Or freedom to live on the surface unmolested, or to save their own families from the deportation trains. Whatever their reasoning, they deserve a bullet for betraying the rest of us. We’ve gathered what information we can; one day there’ll be a reckoning. Stella Kübler is the worst, but she mostly targets the men dumb enough to fall for her smiles and her flattery. Most of them you can’t spot, and that’s where the trouble lies. If anyone looks twice at you, or makes an approach and acts like they know you, break eye contact at once and get out of sight.’
There were so many rules; all, Michael insisted, equally essential for survival. Liese, determined not to put a foot wrong, memorised every one of them until they ran through her head on an endless loop.
‘Stay in if you can. If you must go out, always look smart and spotless, whatever the challenge of finding hot water and soap. Map every street for doorways and alleys that might offer a bolthole. Be confident. Belong. Walk head up and shoulders square. Carry a visible copy of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Party-loving newspaper. Never run, unless someone is pointing a gun at you and then running will be a waste of time. Never look frightened, or dirty, or out of place. Never look like how they imagine a Jew.’
Not that, given the hateful distorted images the Party peddled, any real person ever could. That didn’t matter. Posture, clothes, colouring: everything could be used as a weapon; everything had to be rethought.
Liese had ripped the star from her coat and turned her curls from chocolate brown to platinum blonde before she had changed into her first new name. The dye she made Michael bring stank and stung like a swarm of bees had taken root in her scalp. Lottie had taken one look at her brassy new mother and burst into terrified tears.
‘She’ll get used to it. It’s best that I look more like her anyway. Thank goodness Bardou managed to pass on his colouring, or I would have had to put her through the same.’
It was Michael who soothed the little girl in the end, who managed to convince her that her new mummy was as pretty as the old. When the child finally fell asleep, he went back out and returned with all the bottles of dye he could find.
‘It was a good idea. You won’t attract attention like this, and blonde hair makes fake papers far easier to manage. The most useable pictures we get are of real German girls.’
Liese no longer asked about the ghostly women whose lives she took over. The dead; the bombed-out and the missing; the ones whose identities were stolen from carelessly gaping bags. Nothing mattered, except their name and the town they had come from. She learned that set of rules as quickly as the rest.
‘If you are asked for your papers, decide quickly if you actually need to present them. If the police are distracted, or there is a crowd to check through, say that you’ve newly arrived, that you’ve not had a moment to register. If you have no choice but to hand them over, say the same thing. You’re new here. A seamstress come to work in the factories, still looking for the right accommodation. Tell them you’re a widow, that your husband lay down his life for the Fatherland. Blink away a few tears – that usually works. We’ll keep changing the documents, so the dates you left wherever you came from don’t stretch out so long they make your cover suspicious.’
Michael made it all sound matter-of-fact and he swore the fake papers he dealt in were foolproof. He showed Liese the different components so that she could see the care that went into creating them. The blank forms obtained from a network of well-bribed policemen; the carefully shaved-off photographs. How the official stamp was lifted from the old document to the new by rolling across the impression with a hard-boiled egg and transferring it.