The Big Lie (26 page)

I am not what I was.

So I continue to build this new life. I have no real foundations, no clear structural plans. I’m laying bricks on top of riddles and secrets – the ones that belonged to my parents and their parents before them and their parents before them. I’m laying bricks on ghosts. It’s not the easiest task, but I’ll make it stand up if it’s the last thing I do. I have an image of how it’s going to look, at least.

Of course, in recounting all this to you I have told you a lie. Or rather I have left out something that you might consider to be crucial.

I did get to use the lovely dances with Jan. Once. We were driven out to the market town near Elmdene at the beginning of the year for a local festival with lights and food stalls and music. The Elmdene leaders thought it would be a good chance for us to get to know our prospective husbands. We ate giant pretzels and sipped spiced wine to keep back the cold, and then danced in the square following the shouts of the caller. ‘Allemande left! Weave the circle! Bow to your partner and blow him a kiss!’

They had also installed an outdoor ice rink as part of the festivities. This was just beyond exciting to most of the girls. And the men – though they tried not to show it. I didn’t join in. I stood at the edge and watched as the girls tried swirling to the lilting breaths of the prelude from
La Traviata
, while also avoiding the daredevil knee-sliding of little boys threatening to poleaxe them at every turn. I used to think that the only place I could ever be free was on the ice. Now I believe otherwise.

Jan refused to skate too, thinking he must keep me company. He held my hands to keep them warm. This was when I realised he had potential, that there was something in him, really in him, and that I could make him see it too in time. This is what Clementine must have thought when she first met me. I hope. Or in that moment when I did the ‘wrong thing’ and kissed her.
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.

She was the princess, I was the frog.

Thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.

My turn.

I have the name of the village in Cornwall memorised, and the name of the cottage too. It is in me – as if I once slipped the paper it was written on into my mouth, chewed it up and swallowed. Clementine knew I read her diary, she must have done. Why else would she have put it in there?

One day Jan and I will go and visit, not because I think we should escape, but because I want to convince the people who go there to stay.
What will we achieve if we all run away to America?
I will tell them.
What will change if we do not take arms against this sea of troubles?
I will make them see that the Reich cannot control our desires, which makes it a fight worth fighting. A fight we are likely to win. It will be difficult, I know, but I am trained well. For now, I must keep my head down like Ingrid, while slowly delivering knocks and taps, like I learnt from my mother. Then, when the moment is right, with a fire in my belly and in my heart, slow and steady … REVOLUTION, ARSCHLÖCHER.

‘I used to know a girl who was good at ice skating,’ I told Jan that evening as we watched the others slide and stumble. We had been asked not to talk about our pasts, but that didn’t seem fair. These boys were taking us on with assurances that our heritage was good and that our sins had been erased, but no actual information on what any of us had done. I felt I owed him something, even if they were exactly like us, being forced to marry to atone for the terrible things they had done before.

‘Really?’ said Jan, pulling my hands up to his mouth and blowing warmth into both of our gloves. I think he could see that there was something in me as well. A truth, maybe; the one that can only belong to you. ‘How good was she?’ he asked. ‘Your friend?’

‘Oh, she was really good,’ I told him. ‘She was really, really good.’

Okay, so
The Big Lie
isn’t strictly speaking ‘science fiction’ but it does take place in an unreal world of my creation. I prefer the term ‘alt-history’ or Margaret Atwood’s description for this kind of book – ‘speculative fiction’.
The Big Lie
is me taking a guess on what might have happened.

I returned to my copy of Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale
– which I first gobbled up as a teenager – when I was asked to write this piece for the back of the book. In the back of Margaret Atwood’s book you’ll find ‘Historical Notes on
The Handmaid’s Tale
’ where she imagines a Cambridge Professor speaking in the year 2195, giving his opinion on the long-dead oppressive regime described in her story.

This fictional professor explains how none of the cruelty in Gilead was new or original, it had all gone on before somewhere on Earth. He then backs this up with real examples from the reader’s world.

This is when you come to see the power of science fiction (or speculative fiction or alt-history or whatever you want to call it) – at its heart, it’s not really fiction. It’s a patchwork of the terrible things humans do to other humans, all the time, every day, in our very real world.

So it was with
The Big Lie
. There was very little that I had to make up. My fiction just grew from the facts.

The Bund Deutscher Mädel was a genuine organisation in Nazi Germany that instilled a fanatical love for the Führer and the Fatherland among its teenage female recruits. Women were encouraged to be strong and pure as the nation’s future baby-makers, and for a period young couples took marriage examinations to ensure they were healthy enough to make a good match.

Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen
was a real book that taught young girls about being a woman,
Das Deutsche Mädel
was a genuine companion magazine for members of the BDM (the girl who we’ve spray-painted on the cover was featured in the October 1936 issue) and those posters on the walls of the meeting hall were produced weekly by the Nazi Party’s Central Propaganda Office. When Jessika describes exercises in her school biology textbook, she is describing the real pages of
Leitfaden Der Biologie 1
, which instructed students on what would happen to society if ‘quality’ people didn’t do their duty and have more than two children, and all the songs Jessika sings in
The Big Lie
can be found in Nazi music books. When Jessika’s mother tries to give her daughter a warning over the washing up she alludes to
The Poisonous Mushroom,
a children’s storybook
designed to instil a fear of Jewish people. Jess and Lilli’s puppet show,
Trust No Fox on the Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath,
is from another such storybook.

But it wasn’t just the Nazis who were writing. Their detractors, predominantly communists, produced
Tarnschriften
(camouflaged publications) that on the outside looked like innocent pamphlets on housekeeping and shampoo but inside criticised Hitler’s regime. Here came the inspiration for Clementine’s smuggled-in magazines.

Jessika’s experiences at Highpoint are based on accounts that I heard and read from women who were held at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The babies at Elmdene developed from stories of Aryan children stolen from their Eastern European parents to be brought up in ‘good’ Nazi families. Disabled children, like George Hart, were euthanized under Nazi Racial Hygiene rules, while women (and men) suffered forced sterilizations for health reasons, both physical and mental.

Even the small details came from a place of truth. Clara’s letter about silver aeroplanes was a paraphrasing of a beautiful piece of writing by a political prisoner in Ravensbrück to her husband, words that I just could not shake from my head. Also etched into my mind was a piece of graffiti etched onto the wall of a death camp –
They’ll shoot you anyway
.

So perhaps all I did was create a terrible jigsaw puzzle rather than write a book. But if that is what I did, it is certainly not a jigsaw puzzle of the past.

The main leaping-off point for this book was my seven-year-old son asking at the dinner table: ‘What would have happened if the Nazis had won World War II?’ I only decided to add to the stable of books that have tried to answer this question (mainly written for adults, I might add, mainly written by men) after Justin Bieber visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and wrote in the visitor’s book
Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber
.

Social media was awash with fury about this remark. But I liked what he’d written. Maybe Anne
would
have been a belieber. Why must we put her in a fusty box labelled ‘the past’? Read Anne Frank’s diary and you’ll find a fun, rebellious girl who liked music and boys and talking smart.

It is a seduction to think of the past as another place where they do things differently (to paraphrase LP Hartley). It lets us off the hook too easily. If the Nazis rose up now, we tell ourselves, we would never have been hypnotised. We are nothing like those people from history. Which leads me neatly back to that William Burrough’s quote …

The Big Lie
is a science fiction written in terms of what is happening right now.

Across the world, young gay people are still sent to priests, psychiatrists and needle-wielding doctors to ‘correct’ their homosexuality. At least seventy-eight countries have laws against same-sex relationships, and in five of these countries you can face the death penalty if convicted.

In Kiev in 2012, a topless Femen protestor took a chainsaw to a giant wooden crucifix because she was so furious at the sentencing of the Pussy Riot protestors, who dared to express their opinion about their leaders and the church. On release from prison, Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova spoke of the gynaecological examinations they had suffered while incarcerated and how they had to sift faeces from the drains before they could take a shower.

In 2010, a young man called Mohamed Bouazizi, who worked as a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, had his goods confiscated by the authorities. No longer willing to tolerate continual harassment from the police, and desperate for the return of his produce and equipment, Bouazizi set himself on fire outside the governor’s office – and triggered a revolution.

If this still feels too far away from our Western liberal lives, consider how the front pages of our newspapers choose a different group of immigrants each week to blame for unemployment, crime and problems within the health service. Consider how only a few years ago the British National Party managed to hold two seats in the European Parliament and get a voice on BBC Question Time, a party which, in an echo of Jess’s schoolbook, says on its website:
Given current demographic trends, we, the indigenous British people, will become an ethnic minority in our own country well within sixty years – and most likely sooner
.

In this country we are separated by the schools we go to – though money is the great divider here, not the shape of your forehead – and the children who attend the small percentage of private schools will go on to occupy a disproportionately large number of the positions of power. And while our society may not demand that women stay fit and pure for childbirth, if a high-profile woman should leave the house without make-up or if she gains some weight, that woman is then shamed in the national press. (The illegal magazine that Jessika pores over in the book? Real, and one that you have probably read recently.)

We like to think of ourselves, historically, as the great liberators of the Jewish concentration camps. Yet, in May 1943, while World War II was in its final years, a Jewish Polish socialist called Szmul Zygielbojm killed himself in London.
By my death
, his final letter read,
I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people
. On the day I sat down to write this, I listened to accounts on the radio of Jewish people in London, who live in fear of violent anti-Semitic attacks every day.

Perhaps what finally convinced me to write this book was a conversation I had with my five-year-old after a gymnastics class.

‘If you fall to the bottom of the foam pit,’ he told me, ‘you end up in China.’

Just like Jessika in the book, I laughed. And just like Lilli, he was cross that I didn’t believe him.

It made me realise how readily we accept the things adults tell us, no matter how big the lie. We might be told these things directly, for fun (Father Christmas, anyone?), but we also receive a drip-feed of snobbery, sexism and racism from society as we grow up. Slowly, slowly catchee monkey. Often these lies stay with us and they feel like truths.
I must behave this way because I am a woman. I must not trust this group of people because they are bad. We are a democracy and our leaders do everything in our best interests.

So when Jessika says at the start of the book that people like us challenge everything just because we can – is she right? Or do we think in the way she describes at the end of the book –
It’s all so easy, I don’t really have to think at all?

I’m not suggesting you set light to yourself in the market square. Absolutely not. Please don’t. You are much more effective while you are alive. I’m saying revolution starts by asking,
Is this right?
And if it isn’t, trying to do something about it.