Nicholas Searle - The Good Liar

ing door to another room, in which, Lili could see, a bespectacled

woman in a white coat stood waiting.

‘Schröder, Hannelore,’ announced the supervisor, and Hannelore

walked with her into the room.

‘Until later,’ she said, smiling.

The supervisor closed the door firmly behind her. The remaining

three girls were excited.

‘It must have been sorted out. Perhaps that’s what Mama is talk-

ing about with the manager,’ said Anneliese.

‘We’ll soon be home,’ said Lili.

‘I’m going to put on my best clothes and dance in the ballroom,’

said Charlotte, ‘on my own.’

It was only a few minutes before the door opened again. Han-

nelore did not come back.

‘She’s back in your room,’ said the supervisor, smiling in reassur-

ance. ‘Now, Schröder, Charlotte.’

Charlotte walked into the room, giving a little wave as she went.

A small patch of darkness crossed Lili’s consciousness but it was

soon gone as Anneliese took up the commentary on what she

planned to do when they arrived home. After a short time she too

was gone.

Left on her own, Lili began to think. Their mother had told the

other girls that if they were ever separated one of them should

always stay with her. But there was no need to worry. They were on

their way home. Or at worst, they had had showers and would be

back together in the room in a few minutes.

It seemed only seconds before the door opened again.

‘Schröder, Elisabeth,’ the supervisor said.

‘But it’s not been long enough.’ said Lili.

‘Of course it has. You must have been daydreaming, my girl.

Now come along.’

Lili stood up.

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6

Even as she stepped through the door she sensed what was happen-

ing. There was no particular pretence. She had no idea what

subterfuge had taken Hannelore, Charlotte and Anneliese from

here. By the time Lili was called forward, there was no need. As a

child, she was manageable.

She followed the supervisor meekly along the corridor, down the

stairs, through the metal rear door of the building and on to the

waiting transport. At the age of ten, she had already begun to know the trade- offs and the parameters of her new existence. Together

with her intelligence and alertness, this knowledge would be crucial to her survival. She did not struggle or resist.

Years later she spent a semester as a visiting professor at one of

the Ivy League colleges and made the mistake of agreeing to stand

in for an absent colleague to deliver one undergraduate lecture of a series on the Holocaust. Clearly the administrators had not known

of her own life, simply that she was an expert on twentieth- century European history and politics. Her experiences were not among the

few details about herself she had chosen to share, so the college

staff were not to be blamed.

During questions, a pretty young female student in the third row,

who had been gratifyingly attentive throughout the lecture, said of those who had been through the camps, ‘Gee, so brave. That pain,

that suffering.’

This met with murmurs of approbation, but one young man

who had spent the whole hour fidgeting and scribbling intently on

his pad raised his pencil.

‘I don’t know,’ he said in a whining drawl that she found irritat-

ing, ‘these people weren’t brave. They had no choice. They were

just in that situation. And,’ he said, waving the pencil more vigorously, ‘they didn’t resist. Why was that?’

She could not recall her reply but could vaguely remember the

ruckus in the lecture room. Strangely enough, though, she agreed

with him in a way. She was no hero. It was simply survival, and she 228

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would have betrayed any of her fellow captives for an extra crust of bread each week. She would have welcomed any of the guards

between her legs if it would have staved off death. There was noth-

ing noble about her life in the camps.

After the war, once she was safe, she would periodically try to

recall those years. But, especially in the comfort of their farmhouse in the Scottish Borders, memory failed. The reconciliation between

the Lili who had undergone all of that and the present Elisabeth was impossible. The cord between them was broken. It had been a different person, in a different world. The parties in the Tiergarten

villa and those dull hours waiting in the detention centre with her sisters and her mother were far more vivid in her memory. As was

the image of Hans Taub as he rammed his fingers inside her, bold,

blond and blue- eyed; vicious and demonic.

The filth and the pain and the fear and the despair in the camps

were unimaginable to her afterwards. Not only could she not recall

events, she could not summon up inside herself the odour of her

feelings. As she sought adequate description, the words themselves

brought distance and an antiseptic, anaesthetizing effect. Whatever the documentary evidence, including the number tattooed on her

forearm, it was impossible to believe that this body, these hands and this mind had burrowed through all this and emerged. She did not

suffer from nightmares and reasoned that she was unable to equate

what had happened with the person she now was. No doubt a pro-

fessional psychologist would say otherwise. She must be in denial,

with suppressed memories that at some point would return to harm

her. But she had no appetite to revisit the past. She had survived and that was sufficient.

She did so by becoming as insignificant as she could. She later

discovered that a clerical error had consigned her to the concentration camp when she should have been fostered. This at least was

what the record reflected; it could just as easily have been the result of some undefined personal animus towards a traitor’s family on

the part of an anonymous, powerful official.

At first, emerging from the cattle truck in her rough uniform and

edging uneasily into the sunlight, she had been adopted by a kindly 229

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elderly Jewish couple. She was quickly regarded as their grandchild and became embedded in the community of the camp. She could

not later remember what they looked like or their names. There

was a vague recollection of the woman’s warm embrace and the

man’s smile, unconnected with any facial features. At some point

they became separated. Whether they were removed or died on

work detail, she could not remember or never knew. Like so many

others, they ceased to exist, and she was simply carried on the sea of squalor, thrown here and there by the waves, just trying to be a

speck in the centre of it all.

She too was moved, not selected individually but simply as part

of a tranche of livestock herded on to a train and transported elsewhere. She did not know where she came from or her destination.

It happened three times. Each camp had its own unique properties

and topography to which she had to habituate herself; each was uni-

form in its destruction of the soul. Away from the dull gaze of the guards, personality still existed, to be sure, but it was being system-atically crushed. Her existence became a continuum of work,

hunger and a desperate effort to avoid sickness and disease.

She could recall well, however, the days leading up to their liber-

ation. Suddenly – it seemed to her suddenly – there was a buzz in the camp. The guards had in previous months worked them even harder