Spring 1945

The bombs fall like clockwork now. Nights are spent in damp cellars, listening to the distant thunder of artillery—closer every day. Berlin, once proud and unshakable, is a skeleton of rubble. The shops are empty, the streets haunted by hollow faces. We trade jewelry for moldy bread; desperation is our currency.

They told us victory was certain. The Führer’s voice on the radio still crackles with defiance, but the lies are harder to believe. My brother died at Stalingrad, my neighbor’s son in Normandy. The boys left are barely sixteen, handed rifles and shoved toward the Eastern Front. The Russians are coming, and fear chokes us more than the dust of collapsed buildings.

The Party men vanish overnight, abandoning us to fate. The SS still hunts "deserters," but even their discipline frays. In whispers, we wonder: is surrender worse than this slow death? The stories from the East—women brutalized, villages burned—leave no good choice.

I clutch my daughter tight. She doesn’t remember peace, only hunger and air raid sirens. If the Allies don’t kill us, winter might. The Reich is collapsing, and we—the ones who believed, the ones who didn’t, the ones who just survived—will pay the price.

There’s no pride left. Only survival. And shame. So much shame.