The Willow Wren Philipp Schott (best free e book reader TXT) 📖

champagne. This was provided and a couple hours later he slipped away in his sleep.

Several months later I received a small package from Germany. The will had been read and I was one of the few people Opa had selected a specific object for. It was his 1922 Methuen edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Acknowledgements & Author’s Note

This book is born from a memory of memories. My memory of my father recounting his memories. A meta-memory if you will. Ludwig was a marvellous storyteller, and unlike many of his generation who did not want to talk about it, he often told detailed stories from the war and the difficult years after. He told them often enough that I will confess to my share of teenage eye-rolling and tuning out at their repetition. This book would not have been possible, however, without my grandmother’s Erinnerungen — her memoirs that her children privately published for her eightieth birthday in 1987. It provided me with a detailed timeline and factual framework to embed my father’s stories into. Her anecdotes from life under Soviet occupation were useful as well. My grandfather also wrote memoirs. While they are fascinating and well written, his children did not elect to publish them. These memoirs, perhaps tellingly, conclude before he joined the Nazi Party. Consequently they were not useful for this book.

I am also grateful for my cousin Sonya Steiner’s assistance. She is a journalist in Germany and interviewed Uncle Theodor before he died. The account of his time with the Volkssturm relies almost entirely on this interview. In addition I am indebted to my aunt and my younger uncles for their contributions. They don’t remember much, but the fragments they do remember were valuable. Uncle Johann in particular joined my cousins, my brother and me at the start of our attempt to recreate the fifteen-kilometre escape hike from Osterwieck to Vienenburg in the spring of 2019, marking the seventieth anniversary. “Recreate” I say — well fed, relaxed and without any threat from Russian soldiers or border police.

My father’s stories, my grandmother’s memoirs and a few memories from my aunt and uncles constitute the factual bones of this book, but a good portion of the flesh of it is from my imagination. The conversations, the minor characters, many minor incidents and the descriptions are all conjecture. Plausible conjecture, but conjecture nonetheless. I have subtracted nothing from what is known, but I have added much.

As aids to this conjecture, I would like to specifically make mention of Ian Kershaw’s excellent The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945 and The Colditz Story by Major Pat Reid.

Except for my father’s name and the known historical figures, all other names in this book have been changed. His story is the only one I feel entitled to lay claim to. An exception regarding name changes, though: Squish Eye’s nickname really was Squish Eye.

About the Author

Bestselling author of The Accidental Veterinarian, Philipp Schott was born in Germany but grew up in Saskatoon. He now lives in Winnipeg where he practises veterinary medicine, writes, and shares an old house on the river with his wife, two teenagers, three cats, and a dog.

Copyright

Copyright © Philipp Schott, 2021

Published by ECW Press

665 Gerrard Street East

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2

416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Cover design: Ingrid Paulson

Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey/Trevillion Images

Author photo: Michael Koch-Schulte

Library and Archives Canada cataloguing in publication

Title: The willow wren / Philipp Schott.

Names: Schott, Philipp, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200381997

Canadiana (ebook) 2020038208X

ISBN 978-1-77041-573-7 (Softcover)

ISBN 978-1-77305-700-2 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-77305-699-9 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-77305-701-9 (Kindle)

Classification: LCC PS8637.C5645 W55 2021

DDC C813/.6—dc23

The publication of The Willow Wren has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and is funded in part by the Government of Canada. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,965 individual artists and 1,152 organizations in 197 communities across Ontario for a total of $51.9 million. We also acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through Ontario Creates for the marketing of this book.