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…
What Only We Know by Catherine Hokin is published as a paperback on 15 February, 2022.
Catherine writes about the historical background to this book in Concentration camps and the politics of memory.
She has written more features about the Second World War for Historia: the ‘hidden’ Nazis of Argentina and the French fashion industry in WWII.
