End and the Beginning, The

A stunning tour de force of a novel based on the true story of a fourteen-year-old boy's harrowing experience fleeing a Hitler youth camp in the last days of the Second World War.

At the start of the war, Max Bernot lives with his sister and parents in Lauterbach, Saarland, a narrow strip of territory between the French and German defence lines. His parents, Anton and Marguerite, do their best to shield Max and his sister, Anna, from Nazi violence, but in late 1944, their beloved godfather is executed in their garden by the SS. Max is shipped off to a Hitler Youth Camp in Bavaria but when he is called to fight for the Volkssturm. Instead, he flees. His mission: to return home and tell his mother the truth about his godfather's murder.

Unbeknownst to Max, his mother is trapped in the German interior, coerced into working for a fanatical Nazi officer. Desperate to escape and reunite her family, Marguerite must first protect Anna from the sinister attentions of their captor, who could hold information on Max's whereabouts, even as Allied planes circle closer.

Deftly interweaving the wartime stories of Max and Marguerite, The End and the Beginning maps the loss of innocence for a generation of children raised in the shadow of the Reich and follows the fate of one family, neither wholly French nor entirely German, who find themselves on the wrong side whichever way they turn.