Read The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] for Free Online

benches and plank floor. The quiet is a crater, as though a bomb has found them after all in their hole beneath the small church and they are every one of them dead but still sitting upright.
     
    No one moves. Eyes lock straight ahead or dart like spooked minnows. Freya knits her hands in her lap and closes her eyelids.
     
    There is a stranger among them tonight.
     
    Lottie sighs. She has already played all afternoon with her string quartet at one of the few undamaged homes on the Kurfürstendamm. Why did he have to come tonight?
     
    In every shelter, Lottie knows, there are taboos and good luck charms. There are regulars with preferred seats who bustle down the steps with the sirens blaring. There are special concerns: some residents fear fire most and have buckets of sand handy; others are preoccupied with the possible collapse of the building above and keep shovels and picks near their seats. There is also trust and sharing of meager foodstuffs with the faces one sees every day in the neighborhood, the gray heads and the children.
     
    And in this shelter beneath the Ludwig Church on Pariser Strasse, as in every other corner of Berlin, there lurks a palpable mistrust of anyone unfamiliar, and certainly any unknown men of military age. The unasked question: why is he in Berlin and not at the front? He must be Gestapo, a Nazi functionary, an informer, maybe a deserter. Whatever he is, he spells mischief and bad luck for your shelter.
     
    On those few occasions when there is in their midst an unknown for whom no one vouches, not one person in the shelter speaks. Even normal conversation, about potatoes, clothes, the Opera, is struck dumb, all words are vipers that can bite their handler in the presence of an unfamiliar face. The Berliner Blick, the quick, furtive glance over the shoulder to see who is listening, fills the hours of waiting, making them even more racking. Now that the Russian army is surely coming, Goebbels has made it a crime punishable by death to speak of anything that smacks of defeatism. The official term is Zweifel am Sieg, Doubt about Victory. Stories are rampant of innocent remarks that have led Berliners into unwitting oblivion. The man who joked that the Reds won’t attack Berlin, why would they come here when all the bigwigs will have taken off by then? He was shot in the street by the SS. A woman who hoarded bread and cheese for her family was punished for spreading lies that there was not enough food for Berlin under Goebbels’ leadership. She was stripped naked and forced to wear a placard reading i do not believe in hitler. Those elder folk who complain about the deaths of their sons, or housewives grumbling about the unavailability of shoes, at best are made to scrub police station floors. At worst, they’re beheaded. Last year, the Berlin People’s Court passed fifty-one death sentences against some who did no more than listen to a foreign radio broadcast and were denounced for it by a relative or neighbor. Children are encouraged to inform on their parents. A teacher, who likely is a Nazi, might ask, “What did your family have for Sunday dinner?” If the response is roast and sauerkraut and applesauce, not the economical casserole Eintopf ordained by the government, the mother could find herself reported.
     
    Tonight, when the air raid sirens wailed at 11:30, thousands of New Year’s Eve parties were ruined. Lottie was at one near her flat on Regensburger Strasse, with her mother. She ran home first to gather up her cello, as she always does when there is a raid and she is anywhere near her flat in Wilmersdorf. Freya met her at the church. Lottie was disappointed, the party was fun and there had been real coffee, not the lousy chicory ersatz. Still, a raid was not unexpected tonight. The English, whose Mosquito bombers handle the nighttime chores over Berlin, have a black sense of humor. Many of the Anglo attacks are calculated to aggravate as well as kill: bombs on Hitler’s