The Good Liar (35 page)

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.

227

1ST_9780241206935_TheGoodLiar.indd 227

05/05/15 5:32 PM

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

1ST_9780241206935_TheGoodLiar.indd 228

05/05/15 5:32 PM

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

1ST_9780241206935_TheGoodLiar.indd 229

05/05/15 5:32 PM

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

and food had become still shorter in supply. The numbers of people

daily taken from work details and sent to the looming grey building with the four chimneys increased. And then things slowed down and

the guards seemed to adopt a kind of grimacing lassitude.

Their numbers gradually dwindled until in the middle of one

night the camp was alive with the sound of starting motors and

businesslike shouts. The inmates watched as the commandant and

final guards drove off into the dark forest that surrounded the

barbed wire.

Still they did nothing but wait. There was no food but no one

broke into the kitchen compound or the barracks that the guards

had inhabited. They were accustomed to days without food.

It was three days before the first British jeep drove by, its

230

1ST_9780241206935_TheGoodLiar.indd 230

05/05/15 5:32 PM

occupants seemingly so stunned that they simply sat in their seats, then drove away quickly. Later that day salvation, or as close to it as can be achieved in this world, came to them. Elisabeth would later

remember the waiting more than the days after the British opened

the gates.

She was fortunate enough to have contracted typhus. When they

were liberated, the British brought bread and cheese and meat,

plundered from the nearest town. They knew no better, and nor did

the prisoners as they gorged on the rich food. Several died as their digestive systems failed to cope with the abundant proteins and fats that now filled their bellies. Elisabeth, on the other hand, had no appetite.

It was not, for her at least, a joyous time. She could remember a

deep depression falling on her during the time she spent in the military hospital. This was release, then; but she was so numbed that

she could not feel happy. Nor could she feel sad. The weight of

events and the inhumanity she had witnessed crushed her.

It was several months before she discovered, at first tentatively

and then with more certainty, the fates of her parents and sisters.

Albert Schröder had been found guilty of treason. Magda was con-

victed as his accomplice. Both were executed. This much was on

record. What had happened to her sisters was never firmly estab-

lished. The records were not clear on events immediately after

the detention centre and subsequent traces were fragmentary. She

knew beyond doubt that at some stage they had perished in

the camps, a fact established by omission. They were not among

the survivors whose identities were carefully logged by the Allies.

Elisabeth had retained only slight hope that they might still be

alive. When she discovered the likelihood was negligible she found

it impossible to grieve. To all intents and purposes they had died the moment she was parted from them and their corpses had been

added to the towering pile she had witnessed. She did not feel shame at her coldness. She felt the coldness.

In May 1946 she left the displaced persons camp near Hannover,

boarded a train that took her to Ostend and then took a boat across 231

1ST_9780241206935_TheGoodLiar.indd 231

05/05/15 5:32 PM

the Channel. She was being sent to England and as she boarded the

vessel in a warm spring breeze she felt excitement, and no guilt.

7

Elisabeth Schröder was of an awkward age, no longer a child but

not yet an adult. She was placed in the care of John Barber, a don

who had recently arrived back at Pembroke College in Oxford after

his war service, and his wife, Eleanor. In flowing white nightdresses and dressing gowns, her long grey hair hanging loose and free, Eleanor haunted the corridors of the large Jacobean house day and night like a thin silver wraith. She was a kindly woman, but shortly after Elisabeth had joined the Barbers Eleanor was diagnosed with ovar-ian cancer. It was clear that death was upon her. Elisabeth felt no embarrassment at its presence and the Barbers were gently candid.

This did not prevent John Barber from pacing the rooms of the

house in soft despair, as if somewhere he could find the solution to all this, an expression of puzzlement and distraction on his plump, florid face. He tried to do his crying in private, though more than once Elisabeth found him in the library or the boot room, lost,

weeping as he stared through the mullioned windows.

John and Eleanor Barber were childless, unaccustomed to the

presence of young people in their home. This suited Elisabeth, who

did not want to be treated as anything other than a stranger. The

draughty old house was large enough for the three of them to pass

a day without meeting one another. As she recovered her sense of

self, this was what Elisabeth needed.

The intention had been that the Barbers should familiarize her

with life in England. She had not a word of English, so the place-

ment with an academic who specialized in the German Romantic

novel would be advantageous. The middle- aged couple would teach

her, care for her and help build her confidence.

In the event it was she who cared for them as they stared at the

vortex of what was to come and took their first tentative steps into it. Eleanor’s condition became rapidly worse. It did not minutely

232

1ST_9780241206935_TheGoodLiar.indd 232

05/05/15 5:32 PM

trouble Elisabeth to tend for her, spending nights soothing her as

she writhed in pain, fetching and carrying, and calmly clearing the mess of her foul bodily excretions as she descended further into the hell of her final months. Nor did what was to come concern Elisabeth. She knew death intimately, and it was not to be scorned or

feared. It simply was.

At the same time she learned again how to be a human being.

She rediscovered compassion. When Eleanor Barber died at the end

of the long winter of 1947 Elisabeth was more affected than she had imagined she would be. The thousands of deaths of which she was

directly aware during the war, the hundreds she had witnessed at

close quarters: these had not evoked similar feelings. For this she was annoyed with herself, but in the midst of his own grief John

Barber said gently that at least she could once again feel.

It was in 1950 that she thought about university. She wanted ini-

tially to apply for a place at Oxford so that she could continue to live in the house with John Barber, but he blocked the idea. One afternoon he made a pot of tea and sat with her in the drawing room,

unembarrassed but hesitant.

‘My dear, I’m afraid I must insist you study elsewhere. The idea

of you studying here at Oxford is simply out of the question. You

need to discover a life beyond this house, a life of your own, and you cannot be tied to me. And for my part, if you do remain it is almost inevitable that I shall form an attachment to you that borders on

inappropriate.’

She laughed and said, ‘John, don’t be so silly.’

‘No. I may be fat and fifty- three years old, but sadly I do continue to have such feelings.’

‘But John, you’re such a lovely man.’

‘I think if you knew me better you might revise that opinion. It is certainly one I do not share. I wish it were otherwise.’