Shattered

Berlin, Germany in the closing days of World War Two was the definition of hell on Earth. Adults pressing children into combat roles, brutal street-to-street fighting, starvation and poverty define life in that city. Through it all, sixteen-year-old Birgit Kircherr tries to keep a positive outlook, even when everything around her is literally on fire.  Her mother is losing her mind. Her father is barely holding himself together.  Just when it seems like  things couldn't get any worse, what remains of normalcy in Birgit's life is taken away in an instant. 

Birgit forces herself to confront the ugliest aspects of the Nazi regime, and come to terms with her role in them. She also begins to question everything she thought she knew about her supposed enemies, especially after a group of Red Army soldiers takes her in and treats her as one of their own. Who is the true enemy in this war: the ones placing the city under siege, or the ones Birgit grew up with? 

Author's Note:

As I write this, I am still not quite sure what to make of it. This story came into my mind, very forcefully, on April 16th, 2024, on the 79th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Battle of Berlin. I have never experienced anything like this, and bluntly, I hope I never do again. I wrote the whole 50,000 word manuscript in under three weeks. It bordered on obsessive, and to be perfectly honest, scared me a little with the intensity with which it 'demanded' to be written, for lack of a better description.

In the course of the writing, several eerie coincidences came to light. 

I learned that my great-uncle participated in the Allied bombing raids of Berlin in February of 1945. My father has all of my great-uncle's handwritten flight records to prove this. 

There is a rifle in my house that was captured by the Soviet Army during the Battle of Berlin. I was not aware of this object's presence until my father brought it to my attention.

My great-uncle brought home another object, one that is also in the house. My father showed it to me. Since my great-uncle was Air Force, it is unlikely that he ever set foot in Germany, so this object was more than likely purchased from another serviceman. I won't go into detail about what this item is, though if one looks at videos or photos of Nazi Germany, one will see lots of these things hanging from windows/balconies. While I understand the historical signficance of the object, the symbolism behind and on it makes me deeply uncomfortable. 

Image Credit: By Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P054320 / Weinrother, Carl / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5474888