On and on he went, his too-loud voice pouring round her. Then Liese saw the dressmaking scissors he was holding and she snapped back into something like life. She had taken them, cradled them; pressed the steel blades against her skin and imagined her blood pouring.
‘I wonder. Do you think about your parents?’
It had been an odd thing to ask. Did he really think she was wondering about anything except her child and how much suffering there had been in those last terror-filled seconds?
She didn’t answer; she eventually grew to understand he rarely cared if she did. Suhren was the show; Liese was simply part of the audience.
‘Do a good job and I could find them for you. Would having family left alive be a comfort?’
The stupidity of the question had stunned her. Or, more accurately, its cruelty.
Over the next months, at the close quarters Liese had suddenly found herself in, she realised that the Nazis’ capacity for cruelty went far deeper than anything she could have imagined long ago in Berlin; that it went beyond the more obvious brutality. She knew Suhren had seen what had happened to Lottie, but he never once acknowledged it, or behaved as if her child’s murder mattered. She had wondered, in her first confused days in the house, if Suhren had some sexual motive in plucking her out. If he planned to take what had been refused him before. It wasn’t hard to imagine. It quickly became obvious, from the maids’ white faces and his wife’s watchful narrowed eyes that he treated his female staff like a buffet. It also became quickly obvious, however, that his distaste for her Jewish heritage would always damp down his desire.
Liese was a trophy Suhren had no interest in touching. The Commandant, and his household, saw her so completely as other it was like living inside the sneering posters and the Jew-hating newspapers they all set such store by. They stepped back when she passed them, placing their hands forward like a shield. They discussed her while she moved among them, as if she spoke a different language or had no language at all. As if she had no more ability to possess finer feelings than the cat who scavenged scraps in the kitchen, who no longer turned her head when her latest litter of kittens was tidied away. Not that it mattered; not that anything that happened to her mattered.
‘I’m keeping you alive. You’re one of the lucky ones!’ Another of Suhren’s favourite sayings, riddled with pride at the generosity of her ‘special position’ that he presumed she would echo.
Part of Liese knew that she should feel grateful. That every woman thrown into the camp, facing the brutality of those guards every day, would change places with her in a heartbeat. Knowing that, and knowing that she cared nothing for her own life, only filled her with more guilt. His ploy had worked: the promise of finding her deported parents had added to the unreality of everything that was happening and kept the scissors off her wrists for those first sleepwalking few days. Then Liese looked up and saw the lake gleaming below the house where Suhren had put her and realised why she was still living. Lottie was down there; Lottie was waiting.
It was as if a blindfold had been ripped away. Lottie was waiting. One day, when all this was over, Liese would go down to the lake and join her child. She would walk out into the water, she would lie down, she would wrap her arms round her baby and never again let her go. Until then, it was a mother’s job to keep vigil.
Every night after that revelation, Liese sat at the window of the tiny attic she was locked up in and kept watch from behind its green shutters. Whether the water was still or smooth, rain-filled or iced-over, Liese sang Lottie’s favourite songs and told her favourite stories out into the dark, holding tight to the thread that still bound them.
And once she knew her purpose, staying useful started to matter. Liese could see the heavy fortifications round the camp and the bright lights that illuminated it as clear as she could see the lakeshore. As the months passed, she could also see the smoke that rose in thin plumes from behind the long rows of barracks. She could smell the burned tang that even a downpour couldn’t rinse from the air, that the rumours whispering through the house had turned into something too monstrous to believe. Being useless at the task Suhren wanted her for, and being sent back into the camp, being trapped inside Ravensbrück, would not bring the lake and getting back to Lottie any nearer.
Liese stopped existing from day to day and taught herself instead a survival-tuned discipline. She kept up her vigil, but she also forced herself into bed. She learned to accept that the nightmares would come. And she learned that she could survive them for long enough to sleep for a few hours every night, so that her eyes didn’t close in the day and ruin the fine embroidery that delighted Frau Suhren. She made herself eat the thin soup and stale black bread left out for her when the rest of the household had eaten, so that her fingers could sew a seam without shaking. Liese reduced her world to a workroom and a window. To all she needed to get back to Lottie.
As the months dragged on, rumours reached the house about the worsening conditions in the camp. Whispers about the starvation, the piles of corpses, the breakdown of order and the guards’ increasing cruelty. When 1943 finally ended, it brought no respite. 1944 came in cold and hard and mixed new words into the whispering: special trucks, selections, gassing. The charred animal stink in the wind grew stronger. Liese lay in her safe bed and felt her heart shrivel as the guilt gnawed. There were mornings when she pressed the scissors against her skin again and knew how fast it could be over. And then she imagined her daughter, cold and alone, and knew the only way was the water.
Liese stopped listening to anything except her direct orders. She kept her head down during dress fittings and tuned out the chatter. She kept her mouth shut and walked away from gossip. She behaved every day, in the Commandant’s words, like ‘an exemplary prisoner’. There were days when she woke and hated herself for waking. It didn’t matter.
Because one day this will end. One day I will walk to the lakeshore and I will make all this end.
The same promise repeated like a prayer every day as she worked; as she waited.
The months passed unchanging and then April 1945 arrived and brought a morning that started all wrong, that leaped into life far too quickly.
Car engines growled outside on the gravel. Inside, the house shuddered as doors slammed and feet pounded through corridors that shouldn’t even be wakening.
Liese was scrambling up, still bleary, when the attic door crashed open.
‘Get this uniform on. We have to be dressed and in the kitchen in five minutes.’
Hilge, the other prisoner put to work in the Commandant’s house, stood in the doorway, a blue and white bundle thrust out in front of her. She was a political who considered herself several steps above a Jew. She never spoke to Liese, never looked at her if she could help it. Now, Hilge’s proud face was pale and her hands shivered like windblown barley.
‘Get a move on; I’m not taking a beating for you.’
Liese shook out the striped dress and the jacket with its sewn-on number and two yellow triangles shaped into a star. Their thin fabric was sour with old sweat; the blue and white pattern was mottled with dirt and rust-coloured patches. She had been given a black dress when she entered the house and had never worn the camp uniform. The thought of putting it on, of what that implied, cramped up her fingers.
‘What’s happening?’