The End of War Quotes

“In weeks or months, the rest of eastern Europe will become Soviet puppets as well. Tens of millions of people are to be subjugated to the communist will, against their own.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“It’s not over when a man lays down his gun. The question remains as to which fellow will pick up the weapon next. That’s politics.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Whoever occupies a territory imposes on it his own social system.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“The Russian lieutenant steps back to let the American photographer do what he was brought here to do, record for the United States press the Nazi atrocities of Brandenburg prison. Bandy considers the bodies. He turns instead to the line of Nazi guards. He walks close to the first, raising the camera, focusing tight on the man’s face. The Nazi is still as wax. These are the features of evil, Bandy thinks, not the dead piled at the wall. We’ll see the dead time and again in every war, every conflict. But this wicked man. This is what we have to be on watch for. This is what we must recognize and stamp out of humanity. Bandy levels the viewfinder. It’s a common face, not inhuman and twisted. Not beautiful and mesmerizing. A typical, grocery store, gas station, salesclerk face in Germany, or America. Waiting for the shot, Bandy questions, how to spot them? They look like the rest of us. The Nazi smirks. Bandy thinks, There you are, you fuck, and releases the shutter.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Bandy considers the bodies. He turns instead to the line of Nazi guards. He walks close to the first, raising the camera, focusing tight on the man’s face. The Nazi is still as wax. These are the features of evil, Bandy thinks, not the dead piled at the wall. We’ll see the dead time and again in every war, every conflict. But this wicked man. This is what we have to be on watch for. This is what we must recognize and stamp out of humanity. Bandy levels the viewfinder. It’s a common face, not inhuman and twisted. Not beautiful and mesmerizing. A typical, grocery store, gas station, salesclerk face in Germany, or America. Waiting for the shot, Bandy questions, how to spot them? They look like the rest of us. The Nazi smirks. Bandy thinks, There you are, you fuck, and releases the shutter.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Bandy climbs into his jeep. There is hatred on the woman’s face for all of them: the departing Americans, the powerful force sent from a free nation, failed and reluctant, not saviors for them at all; the Russians whom they’ve been taught to dread, despite this placating young officer; and her own neighbors for standing by and saying nothing. Just pawns, Bandy thinks. This outcome was rigged long before it was played out, decided not on the battlefield but in some quiet room somewhere in Washington or Moscow, with pencils and rulers for weapons. Warlords and politicians have turned the whole world into a game board. Money and power are more prized than lives and blood. History doesn’t have this brave village woman’s name on it. Not like Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Stalin. No. She disappears.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“But thoughts of God nag him. It’s the sixty again. It’s them. “What about us?” they ask Ilya in the explosions. Shut up, he answers. You were bound for death, either in the camps of Siberia or on the journey to your prisons. “No, it’s the way we were taken. Like animals.” And what of animals, Ilya retorts. What in your conduct lifted you above animals? Was it your torture of civilians, your rapes and pillaging, your death factories? “We were men, simple soldiers like you, Ilya Borisovich. Duty defined us, that’s all, not the acts of others you’ve heard about.” Shut up. You paid for those acts, whether you did them or not. “Who made you the collector of that debt, Ilya? Was it God?” Shut up about God. He watched you be butchered. He didn’t care. “Ilya, you watched us butchered. You didn’t care.” Shut up!”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“May I ask what the signal will be?” “You will play the finale from Die Götterdämmerung.” Lottie thinks: Fitting. Wagner’s depiction of the destruction of Valhalla. The death of the gods. The end of the world.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Misha makes an exasperated grunt. “I’m following the street-fighting manual.” “The manual wasn’t at Stalingrad. I’m the manual, Misha.” “Fine, yes. Then you take over. Fine.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“He hadn’t wanted to, but not watching seemed to take too much effort. It was easy to see. It is too easy to recall. The gun smoke drifted away and the executioners said nothing, as though the smoke were the last evidence of those sixty German lives, and when it was cleansed by the wind the episode was cleansed too. The Red soldiers all shouldered their hot rifles and turned to the west, to return the way they’d come. The bodies were left in the road unburied. Ilya hung back, looking at the gray heap, sixty, a massive jumble. He tried to sense the life that had been spilled, the stories that would never happen, children unfathered, and that was the first moment the war became nothing. They were bodies and he had seen bodies. The good news was they were German bodies. That was all Ilya felt, the good news and nothing.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Lottie stood. She wanted to look down on her mother, that was her mood. “Mutti. We’re not heroes.” Freya also stood. “We’re not monsters. Today, in Berlin and everywhere in Germany, that’s all there is. It’s a choice and every German makes it. Do nothing, know nothing. Or act. Monster or hero. That’s all there is for the whole world until this is over.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Misha’s eyebrows go up. Anyone who fought at Stalingrad has an aura for those who did not see it, the greatest single battle in the history of mankind. One medium-sized Soviet city on the Volga in the winter of 1942 became the dead end of the German advance into Russia. There the Red Army killed or captured 1.2 million Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians. Russian losses were titanic as well. But from Stalingrad on, the Germans have not taken a step farther east into the Rodina. They did not cross the Volga.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“The distant din of the bells is incongruous, joy and hope playing against such blackness. This is the Russian way, he thinks. Beauty meshed in tragedy, never one without the other for us.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin