Twelve year old Charlotte should have been going to school, playing with her friends and sleeping in a warm, dry bed. Instead, she was huddling in air raid shelters, running through the flames of burning buildings, and watching the skies for American fighter bombers. Charlotte's Story describes what life was like for a young German girl thousands of feet below the bomb sights of the Allied air forces. It offers a real and poignant glimpse of how the Second World War ripped apart an ordinary working class German family, and what it took to survive the homelessness, hunger and killing winter cold of the post-war years in Berlin. Written with the encouragement of her children and her husband, this book is dedicated to Charlotte's grandchildren and the future generations of her family-with a prayer that they will never have to run in her shoes.