Although her scars are not visible as David's, the war has ravaged her no less he. None of the characters in the Bridge to Tomorrow Series has greater difficulty in finding new stability and peace than Charlotte.
Despite her title, Charlotte grew up in a rural environment helping with the harvests and mucking out the stalls. Even in the prewar era, she was not well-traveled, well-educated, rich or spoiled. Then the Nazis came to power and started a war. Six years later, her brothers had been killed fighting for Hitler, her fiance had gone missing at Stalingrad, and her parents had been killed by a strafing Russian fighter before her eyes. Yet, most devastating of all was the brutal violation of her own body when she was gang raped by Russian soldiers in the final days before German surrender.
Things started to look up when she was hired to teach German to the new RAF station commander's wife, Emily Priestman. Through Emily, Charlotte met David Goldman, and he offered Charlotte a full-time, permanent job running the office of his fledgling new ambulance service. Charlotte starts to sit up straight again, to smile timidly and to hope for the future -- and then the Russian's choke the Western Sectors of Berlin off from all supplies. Charlotte recognizes this is just a prelude to a complete take-over. The thought that the Russians will return and dominate her life again shatters Charlotte's confidence and hope.
An excerpt introducing Charlotte:
Christian put the butter in the refrigerator, cynically noting that with only two hours of electricity, it couldn’t keep things very cold. Still, it served as a kind of insulated icebox, and the electricity would come on eventually. He left his overcoat on the rack in the hall by the door and glanced into the sitting room that faced the street. The only furnishings were an old packing crate and some wooden chairs — and the huge sideboard at the far end of the room. No Charlotte. He continued to and through the large “Berliner Zimmer” at the corner of the building and turned to start down the darkened hall towards the bedrooms. He kept calling in increasing alarm, “Charlotte? Are you here? Are you all right?”
A sob answered him.
Christian froze. “Charlotte?”
The sob came again, and he followed the sound into Charlotte’s bedroom. She was curled up under the comforters on her bed. Christian went down on his heels beside her. “What is it, Charlotte? Are you ill? Has something happened?” She looked like a complete wreck. Her face was swollen from crying and splotched with red marks; her short-cropped, blond hair was in complete disarray.
“Would you shoot me, Christian?” she gasped out. When he recoiled in shock, she begged more insistently. “Please! It would be so simple and fast and merciful!”
Shock made him angry. “Of course not! Have you gone mad?”
“No, or yes, maybe. I don’t know. But I can’t go on, Christian, I just can’t. It’s no good pretending. I’ve tried and tried these past years, but…” She shook her head. “It’s no good. I can’t forget. And I can’t live with the memories. It would be so good to end it all. Please shoot me.” Her big, blue eyes focused on him like a wounded puppy.
“No! Never!” Christian told her forcefully, hoping to shock her out of this nonsense with his uncompromising tone.
“But it would be the most merciful thing you could do.” She insisted, sitting up slightly to look at him more intently. “It would put me out of my misery — just as Horst killed Pasha when he was wounded by the Soviet fighter.”
“Pasha was a horse! Furthermore, he was unable to continue the journey,” Christian reminded her.
“But I can’t go on either, Christian,” Charlotte answered, tears slipping down her face again. “Just because you can’t see how crippled I am, doesn’t mean I’m not as broken as Pasha.”
Christian drew a deep breath to steady his nerves. He met Charlotte’s eyes and they gazed at him, frightened yet as trusting as a child’s. He was all she had left. He knew he had to help her.
“Charlotte, I can’t understand how broken you are — or how to help you — if you don’t tell me what happened.”
She looked down and away and was silent for so long that Christian began to think she would not answer. Then abruptly she shrugged and without looking at him whispered in a voice full of shame, “The Russians. They got me.”
“Today? Here in this house?” Christian reared up, ready to kill someone.
“No, no,” she hastened to assure him. Adding as tears streamed down her face. “It was shortly after they took the city. In May ’45. Jasha and I went out to get rations because we’d had nothing to eat for two days. We thought we’d be safe together, but they cornered us. Jasha tried to protect me, but they flung her aside and two — or maybe it was three? — fell on her and held her down and then took turns raping her. The others, there were six of them.” She broke down into violent sobs again, her whole body shook as her lungs struggled to drag air into her lungs.
“Charlotte,” Christian spoke gently as he reached out and pulled her into his arms as if she were a child. “Charlotte, it’s over, it’s done with—”
“NO, IT’S NOT!” she screamed at him, pulling away. “I will NEVER get over it! Because of them Fritz would look at me like slime, even if he should come back, and David —” she broke down into miserable, hopeless crying again. Fritz was her fiancée, missing since November 1943, and David was her employer — and the man she had fallen in love with against her better judgement.
Christian pulled her again into his arms and stroked her back and shoulders. “Hush, Charlotte. Hush. No one is going to blame you for being a victim—”
“Don’t be so naïve!” she rasped at him through her crying. “Men do it all the time. A thousand times a day. I see it every day with my own eyes! All of you — Russians, Amis, Brits, French and Germans! — you look at us like whores, like trash, like shit!” She spat out the last word, one she had been taught from childhood never to take in her mouth. The use of it now underlined how traumatised she was.
But there was a spark of anger in that deliberate use of the forbidden word, too. It gave Christian hope. He did not answer immediately. Instead, he made himself more comfortable, cradling her in his arms until she had calmed herself down again. Then he bent and kissed the top of her head as he told her, “I don’t think of you like that, and I never could. To me, you are still my favourite cousin. The one I loved to ride out with. The one, unlike my silly sister, who didn’t dislike the wind in her hair and didn’t mind getting wet. You could harvest hay and drive the horse plough as well as any of us boys. I always admired you for that. You were good with the horses, too, and the dogs. So, at ease with nature.” He hesitated but then risked saying something that he knew might hurt her, but which he hoped would build her up, he added, “I think that was what Fritz loved, too.”
Charlotte started crying again, and Christian cursed himself.
Charlotte is a character in both of the First two volumes of the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy
The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin....
Berlin 1948. In the ruins of
Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian
brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course
with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War
Three is only a misstep away. Buy Now
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight
Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin.
They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile,
two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and
abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the
side of Russia. Buy now!
Based on historical events, award-winning and best-selling novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing.
Winning a war with milk, coal and candy!
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