What Only We Know by Catherine Hokin
Genre: Historical fiction, WW2
Date: 6th December 2020
Published: 27th May 2020
★★★★ 4.5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
When Karen Cartwright is unexpectedly called home to nurse her ailing father, she goes with a heavy heart. The house she grew up in feels haunted by the memory of her father’s closely guarded secrets about her beautiful mother Elizabeth’s tragic death years before.
As she packs up the house, Karen discovers an old photograph and a stranger’s tattered love letter to her mother postmarked from Germany after the war.
During her life, Karen struggled to understand her shy, fearful mother, but now she is realising there was so much more to Elizabeth than she knew. For one thing, her name wasn’t even Elizabeth, and her harrowing story begins long before Karen was born.
It’s 1941 in Nazi-occupied Berlin, and a young Jewish woman called Liese is being forced to wear a yellow star…
A beautiful and gripping wartime story about family secrets and impossible choices in the face of terrible hardship. Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, We Were the Lucky Ones and The Alice Network.
MY REVIEW:
"I have one more piece of advice, if you can bear to hear it. When you dig up the past, do it gently. With a care for the living."
This story certainly isn't at all what I expected. It was so much more! Having read Catherine Hokin's historical debut with "The Fortunate Ones" which was incredibly beautiful as well as heartbreaking, I was eager to delve into WHAT ONLY WE KNOW. And believe me, it was just as beautiful and just as heartbreaking. A dual timeline novel the story, told two separate voices throughout, will consume you as if you had lived through it.
Hove, England, 1971: She steps into the water, the shingles crunching under her feet, until the ground becomes softer into sand and the ripples lap around her ankles. The sun would soon be up, floating on the horizon - it will be a beautiful day. But today, this is it. Her day has come. As she steps knee-deep...chest-deep...feet on tiptoes as the waves hug her shoulders pulling her deeper and deeper. Her eyelids drop. The seagulls fall silent. And there is nothing in her ears but the gurgle of Lottie's giggle. She has found her at last. Her parting thoughts are that he will read what she has written and will do what she asked. It was time.
Berlin 1936: Sixteen year old Liese Elfmann is the only child of Paul and Margarethe and heir to the Hause Elfmann fashion salon where the family design and make clothing for the wealthy women of Berlin and beyond. Their designs are highly sought after and their status is firmly entrenched within distinguished German social circles. But that all changes with the rising of the new National Socialist Party and their dogmatic leader, Hitler. For the Elfmanns are Jewish...albeit non-practising, but Jewish all the same.
Little by little, Jews were stripped of their status right down to the last piece of their dignity. They were unable to attend school, go to work, run a business, own a property...to being restricted to curfews, wearing yellow stars emblazoned on their clothing, living in the squalor of the ghetto before being "deported" which was just another word for sending them to death camps. Some survived, most did not. But those that did, were irrevocably changed by their hellish experiences.
Liese's parents refused to listen to her pleas and those of their closest friend Otto or his son Michael, and continued to operate their business as if the new rules did not apply to them. They were royalty in German society! They dressed the wealthiest people...including Nazi wives. They were completely safe from being singled out. Until they weren't. And then they lost everything.
By 1939 they were shuffled into a Jewish ghetto and Liese sent them out to work while she stayed at home and cared for her baby daughter, Lotte. When one day her parents returned home late with letters telling them to report the following day for deportation, Leise bid them goodbye as she left the ghetto with Michael who worked for the German resistance and organised a litany of safe houses for her and Lotte to stay in, moving on regularly so as to not raise suspicion as to her being a Jew. But one day when Michael was to take them to their final safe house in the country, he had failed to arrive. And in his place were Nazi soldiers who threw Leise and Lotte into a truck and then a train bound for Ravensbruck concentration camp.
And it was there that Liese's life changed forever.
Aldershot, England, 1978: Eighteen year old Karen Cartwright was devastated when her mother Elizabeth took her own life seven years ago when she was just 11. Since then, the gap between her and her father Andrew has grown wider and wider, as she has grown angrier and angrier at him for refusing to tell her anything about her mother or why she took her life. Growing up, Karen's mother was something of an enigma. She rarely spent any time with her daughter or did anything together as a family, claiming one of her headaches and then sleeping for days on end. She would often recall her father holding her mother in a way she thought was coercive and controlling and so she therefore blamed him for her death.
It is then she ponders as where her mother's jewellery box had gone to. It always sat on her bedside table, despite her mother never wearing anything that was in it. So Karen decided to search her father's room for it...and she found it, hidden on the top shelf right at the back of her father's wardrobe. Whilst reminiscing over the pieces locked away inside, the felt lining at the bottom came away, revealing just one of her mother's hidden secrets. Her mother's passport which held a different name and another document in German which appeared to be a marriage certificate dated 1947. She confronted her father with these documents but beyond confessing that her mother was German, her father refused to give her anything else.
So when her German class announced they were travelling to Berlin, Karen jump at the opportunity to see the city in which her mother once lived and hoped to find some answers there. But the Germany of 1978 was a different Germany to that during and after the war. Now the country was divided into East and West by a wall that now separated them...and never the twain shall meet. All she had was the address to a place her mother once worked as a seamstress and upon finding it, was to learn that her mother was actually Jewish...and from the East. It seems now she has more questions than answers. But still her father refused to give up her mother's secrets.
Eleven years later in 1989, Karen's father has suffered a massive heart attack and doctors advise that his best option would be assisted living. Her father, ever the organised military man that he was, had planned for such an occasion right down to his preferred care home. So while he was in hospital recuperating, Karen set to packing up the house he shared with her mother for 40 years. In doing so, she comes across a photo of her parents' wedding with a mysterious man standing behind them, a look of pure adoration in his eyes as he gazed upon her mother, and a postcard dated 1953 with an address for a man named Michael. Karen had no idea who this man was or how he was related to her mother but she had a piece of a puzzle she was determined to solve once and for all. She could not question her father, as the mere mention of her discovery sent him into all sorts of distress, so she was advised not to visit him. But she rang the hospital daily for reports on her father's progress despite her confused feelings for the man.
So with nothing but the photograph and the postcard's address, she sets off to Berlin, just as the East and the West are about to be reunified, to find out the answers she had been seeking for almost 20 years, determined to find them at last. But just as the Iron Curtain falls, so will the secrets of the past...and nothing will prepare Karen for what she is about to discover about her mother...or her father.
WOW! That is all I can say. WHAT ONLY WE KNOW is a story that takes you through a range of emotions from grief to anger to heartbreak to love and so much more. We are taken through dual timelines through the eyes of two women - Liese and Karen - whose stories are both painful and heartbreaking. The chapters alternate with the voices through each timeline.
Karen's story is told from 1971 through to 1990 in both England and Germany. From a young girl who lost her mother at a young age through to a confused woman at the age of 29, she feels she has nothing left to lose by digging into the past. Her father won't give her the answers to her questions so therefore she must seek them herself. But at what cost to others? I especially love the words given to Karen by the priest in the church where her parents were married and which I opened this review with that I feel says it perfectly:
"I have one more piece of advice, if you can bear to hear it. When you dig up the past, do it gently. With a care for the living."
But as the reader, we feel her pain. She never really knew her mother who always seemed just out of her reach...always unwell, always sad, always longing for something else. And after she died, her father stubbornly refuses to give her any answers or enlighten her as to who her mother really was. To Karen, she was an enigma. And that is incredibly sad. To have missed out on the love and warmth of a mother's love.
And there is Liese's story. Her's is the most difficult to imagine, let alone put into words. The utter devastation of her hellish experience could be felt within every word on every page that will have the reader reaching for the tissues as we cry along with the broken but stoic Liese. By the time she was 23, she had lost everything but her life...and even that she felt was not worth much. She may have survived the camp but she wanted to die. And she spent the next two and a half decades wanting to die. What was there to live for? By 1947, she had met and married British soldier Andrew Cartwright and moved to England to begin a new life...but how could she escape, let alone forget, the old one? My gosh, her story was at times brutal and difficult to read and I found myself in tears at the horror through which people like Liese had to endure at the hands of the Nazis. But although I have read many WW2 stories, including those of the Jew's plight in Germany and beyond, Liese's story is different and even more heartbreaking...if that is at all possible.
I cannot express how completely breathtaking WHAT ONLY WE KNOW is. You cannot help but be touched by Liese and Karen's stories...and you may find yourself bereft once they have gone.
I have just two complaints with the book. The first being that the beginning was slow and incredibly drawn out. I can see why it was included, but I felt it may have also sufficed as a backstory reminisced on and reiterated at a later time, possibly as war broke out. I felt at times like giving up it was that slow...but I'm glad I stuck it out and I urge you to do the same. I guarantee that it WILL be worth it. My other gripe is the loooong and drawn out chapters. Again, I can see why they were, as alternating between the two narratives, but I really loathe long chapters and I find that they only serve to make the story even more drawn out. Had the chapters been shorter, I'm sure my first issue would have been null and void as it wouldn't have seemed so drawn out to begin with. If that makes any sense. However, as I said, I am glad I did stick with it because the story really IS WORTH it.
If you love historical fiction sagas, particularly WW2 fiction, then you will love WHAT ONLY WE KNOW. It is heartwarming as well as heartbreaking as we delve into both Liese and Karen's stories and uncover their secrets.
"We were brought together by a place. Now we need different places. To find our stories in. To be remembered in."
I would like to thank #CatherineHokin, #NetGalley and #Bookouture for an ARC of #WhatOnlyWeKnow in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Catherine Hokin is the author of two World War Two inspired novels set in Berlin, her favourite city. Following a History degree at Manchester University she worked in teaching, marketing and politics, while waiting for a chance to do what she really wanted which was to write full time.
As all writers are, Catherine is a huge reader and devours books of all genres. Having read Jane Eyre at an early age she likes a bit of Gothic, but also loves magical realism and obviously historical fiction. Her short stories have been published by iScot, Writers Forum and Myslexia magazines and she was the winner of the 2019 Fiction 500 Short Story Competition. She is a lover of strong female leads and a quest.
Catherine is from Cumbria in the North of England but now lives in Glasgow with her American husband. She has two grown-up children – one in London and one in Berlin – and a life long addiction to very loud music.
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