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

with the thought. Freya was Lottie’s age, twenty-six, when she gave birth to her only child, the musical daughter. Her father, Frederick, was killed in the final days of World War I. Freya says Lottie was conceived on her parents’ last night together. The daughter was named Charlotta after the Berlin district Charlottenburg, where her well-to-do mother and father grew up and met as children playing in the forested groves of the Tiergarten, where Freya still lives.
     
    Mutti is not flirting, Lottie thinks. She is not making eyes at this specter of a man in our shelter. She’s being nice, by her own lights. Mutti is often too nice; she can be led, even gullible. Lottie cannot imagine her mother with any man but her father, the handsome, winsome fellow in the old photographs, forever young and brave. Growing up, Lottie sent her mother on make-believe vacations with Frederick to beautiful places. Frederick became her pretend playmate, her guardian and inner voice. He was Papa, wise and strong, and never was he absent. Mutti had male friends through the years, and Lottie always made it known that she was watching, and through her so was Papa, and the two of them did not approve of anything beyond innocent companionship with men. Why should Mutti need men? Lottie was a wonderful daughter, pretty and proper, wasn’t she? At age five she played her first cello concerto. By the time she was nine she could tune the family piano by herself. Wasn’t Mutti proud enough of her daughter? Papa was, certainly.
     
    The arguments began when Lottie became a teenager and Freya did not need to stay home with her every night. Freya began to go out, to dances and social functions. Lottie stayed in to practice. Other nights, Freya’s female friends dropped by they smoked cigarettes and sometimes smelled of drink. Mutti never brought men home to visit, but Lottie did not have to see with her eyes what she knew to be true. Lottie and Papa watched. Often they spoke out. In short time, Lottie’s talent with the cello grew to local renown. She joined a German national youth orchestra. She played first chair, and was taken from home more and more by performances and traveling concerts. While on the road, in Switzerland and Austria, Hungary and Italy, Lottie worried about Mutti. Who might be misguiding her while Lottie was away? The more her head was filled with notes and troubles and suspicion, the less clearly she heard Papa’s voice.
     
    At fifteen, Lottie was conscripted into the BdM, Bund deutscher Mädel, the girls’ equivalent to the Hitler Youth for boys. Because of her musical abilities, Lottie was allowed to stay in Berlin and continue her studies, while other Aryan girls were dispersed around the country to serve as nannies, farm helpers, tutors, and office workers. Lottie entered into two years of handicrafts, folk songs, and political rallies. She wore white flowing robes and waved flags while Wehrmacht soldiers and brown-shirted storm troopers goose-stepped down the Unter den Linden. She played patriotic and martial music on her cello at public shows while wearing the BdM uniform of black skirt, white blouse, and leather scarf holder. Mutti never spoke for or against the BdM to her daughter, but never once did she accompany Lottie to any of their events. Lottie didn’t mind, she saw it all as a sign of her increasing freedom of mind and body. Lottie was careful to make no judgments about the National Socialists or the war, or that Jews and other non-Aryans were excluded from not just the BdM but almost all of Berlin life. She was a musician, and music inhabited a higher plane than Hitler’s politics, shopkeepers’ busted windows, or ugly rumors. She only knew her Papa had been in the army. She liked being around the boys in uniform, they looked like him.
     
    When she turned eighteen, Lottie was accepted to Humboldt in Berlin to study music. She rebelled against Mutti, saying she wanted to move out and have her own flat. Freya