Review: Vivien Horler

The Silence in Between, by Josie Ferguson (Doubleday)

Imagine: you live in Claremont in Cape Town and one night you allow your eight-year-old daughter to have a sleepover with her cousin in Bellville. The next day you wake up to discover the city has been divided, and you can’t reach her or get her back.

It seems a ridiculous notion, but it happened in Berlin in August 1961, when the Soviets fenced off the sector of the city over which they had control, dividing thousands of families for nearly 30 years.

This is part of the premise of The Silence in Between, a work of page-turning historical fiction based on true events.

Lisette Lange, who lives in East Berlin, has taken her five-week-old son Axel to a hospital in West Berlin.

Lisette and Axel have been at the hospital for nearly two days while the baby has tests for what may be a heart problem. A doctor tells her they want to keep him for another few hours for observation, so she should go home, bathe, sleep, and come back in the morning.

Lisette is reluctant, but eventually agrees.

The next morning, as she and her husband are preparing to go to the hospital, they hear the news. “The border. They’ve closed the border.”

In a crowd of thousands of frantic people, Lisette, her husband and her 15-year-old daughter Elly rush west until they come up against fences across the streets, topped with barbed wire. Soldiers stand in front of the barriers, stone-faced, refusing to make eye-contact or speak to people.

Lisette begins to howl.

Back home, Lisette stops speaking. Elly is puzzled – her mother is something of a mystery to her. She used to play the piano, but does no longer. She often sits staring at the spot against the wall where the piano used to be. She is also not very maternal, and isn’t anything like as warm and loving to Elly as her father is.

It emerges this is not the first time shock has rendered Lisette mute – as both her father, and Lisette’s mother Oma Rita, confirm.

The story then switches back to Berlin at the outbreak of World War 2. Berliners seem to believe that their city will never be bombed, and are shattered when this proves to be untrue.

Eventually the Allies come, and eastern parts of Berlin are overrun by Soviet troops, who pillage and rape, while the German men are still away at the front. We go through the terror Lisette and her mother experience as they wait for Soviet soldiers to come to their door.

Forward to 1961, and Elly believes she could make her mother love her if only she could somehow get Axel back. And so she embarks on a terrifying venture to do just that, with the help of an occupying Soviet soldier.

In a note at the end of this book, author Josie Ferguson says the exact number of German women raped in the dying days of World War 2 is unknown, but it is possibly as high as two million.

She writes: “The awful truth is that civilian women in war are often overlooked victims, silenced by shame and the governments that should have protected them. In writing The Silence in Between I in no way wanted to diminish the horrors of the Holocaust and the suffering of those who were victims of it. I simply wanted to tell a story that has remained largely untold – the story of the German women who were punished for the deeds of their country.”

Not only is this a deeply interesting novel, it is also a nail-biter as we go through the horrors of what Lisette and Oma Rita experience at the end of the war, as well as Elly’s desperate attempt to find Axel and claim her mother’s love.

And in the process all sorts of terrible secrets are revealed.