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Writing historical fiction comes with a responsibility to accurately portray an important time in history and though my characters are fictional, they represent the many women who lived through both the Rape of Berlin in 1945 and the brutal division of Berlin in 1961. 

There were so many books and articles that inspired me to write The Silence in Between and the research I have done has been extensive. I would like to acknowledge the part that some of my sources have played in the development of this story. 

 Sue Lloyd-Roberts’s The War on Women is such a powerful, important book that everyone should find the time (and the bravery) to read. During her career as a journalist, Roberts documented the atrocities that have been inflicted on women worldwide. Though only one of the chapters focuses on rape as a weapon of war, the book examines everything from female genital mutilation to honour killings to Ireland’s fallen women. It’s a difficult read but the women Roberts met during her trav- els showed such courage in the face of the horrors inflicted upon them and it was this courage, this survival instinct and bravery, that I wanted to write about. 

The memoir A Woman in Berlin, originally released anonymously but later confirmed to have been written by German journalist Marta Hillers, depicts the Soviets’ occupation of Berlin with honesty and an admirable lack of sentimentality. 

The exact number of German women raped during the dying days of World War Two is unknown, but it is possibly as high as two million (and many were raped multiple times). It’s been estimated that in Germany 240,000 women died in connection with their rapes. 

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 civilian women who were punished for the deeds of their country. 

This detailed, brilliantly researched account of Berlin’s downfall was an essential source of information for me. Beevor sews together a catalogue of events and dates with eyewitness accounts to give an unbiased portrayal of the end of the war and Berlin’s demise. 

This book was another crucial source of information for me. It offers a comprehensive history of the Wall but also includes personal accounts portraying the devastating effects on those who found themselves in a fractured city. 

I researched countless heartbreaking stories of families separated by the Berlin Wall, but it was Sigrid Paul’s story (‘The Berlin Wall kept me apart from my baby son’, printed in the Guardian in 2009) that stuck with me. Sigrid’s son Torsten was a very sick eight-month-old baby when the border was closed. The hospitals in East Berlin were unequipped to care for him and, fearing he would die, one doctor organized for his transfer over to the West (transfers were only allowed for heart patients and so the doctor falsified Torsten’s medical records). It was four years before mother and son were reunited. 

Though the fictional story of Lisette is very different from Sigrid’s, being a mother myself, her story struck a chord with me and it sparked the initial idea for The Silence in Between.

All the characters depicted in The Silence in Between are fictional, except Roland Hoff who was shot dead while trying to swim to freedom across the Teltow Canal on 29 August 1961. 

Over the years, in the aftermath of the border being closed, East Germans attempted a variety of escape methods, from flying over the border in a homemade hot-air balloon to wading through the sewers. 

Tunnel 29 is the gripping true account of a group of students who dug a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. Along with other sources, it gave me ample material to weave together Elly’s story. 

In 2020 I read a fascinating article on the IFLSCIENCE website about the different ways we think (‘People With No Internal Monologue Explain What It’s Like in Their Head’). Some people have verbal thoughts, others experience visual thoughts and the majority experience both. My thoughts are purely verbal and I couldn’t get my head around that some people don’t have a running commentary accompanying their everyday lives. I’d heard of synesthesia (those who experience a merging of senses) and I began to imagine a character who associated each person she met with music. 

Some will dislike this part of the book, but I hope others will recognise that music is a language (one that heals) and my hope was to portray in Elly a quirky characteristic that would counter Lisette’s mutism and the silence of those who suffered when the border closed between East and West Germany. The talented Micki Bonde has composed snippets of music for each character and you can listen to these here.

Though this is a book of fiction, I have tried to incorporate not only big-picture facts but also smaller details not only to bring the story alive but to do this period justice. Some details may seem fantastical – like civilians wrapping their heads in towels in the belief that it would save them from a bomb – but are true nonetheless. 

A friend who read an early draft of the book commented that the story felt too unrealistic. A border couldn’t simply be closed overnight, a government wouldn’t allow a mother to be separated from her baby, a rape victim would never offer herself to one man so as to secure her survival. Sadly, all of these things did happen. The border between East and West Berlin was secured in the dead of night; husbands were separated from wives, parents from their children; and at the end of World War Two women in Berlin did seek out Soviet officers to protect themselves from multiple rapes. 

These are stories from the past, but they are still echoing now, in the present. As I write this, Russian forces are using rape as a weapon of war against Ukrainian women; deported mothers are being separated from their children in the US; border walls are being built and fortified at an unprecedented rate across the globe (there are currently seventy-four in existence). But this much is clear: when walls are built, people will find a way over or under them; when families are separated, they do everything in their power to be reunited; and when women are victims, they find the courage to speak up, to band together, to survive.