Dimensions
129 x 197 x 18mm
This is the incredible story of a mother's search for her children in the midst of the chaos of World War II.
A beautiful and independent-minded young German aristocrat, connected by marriage to a prominent Italian family, Fey von Hassell's privileged life was turned upside down during World War II.
In the autumn of 1944 her father, the former German Ambassador to Rome and a courageous anti-Nazi, was executed in the wake of the Staffenburg bomb plot to kill Hitler. In accordance with a savage medieval German law ascribing guilt by kinship, Fey was seized as a "special prisoner" of the SS, her two small sons torn from her side with no word as to what would happen to them.
As the war thundered to its close, Fey was shuttled across Hitler's burning empire in trucks and cattle-cars, held in a series of concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald, sharing her grim odyssey with an improbable collection of prisoners which included former prime ministers and governors.
Facing death from, disease, hunger and the intense cold, Fey was unable to get news of her boys or to be sure of her own fate. In the end a last-minute daring rescue freed Fey and her fellow prisoner-hostages. But even though the war was over, anxious months were to pass in the search for the children, lost amidst the collapsed Third Reich.
'A Mother's War' is based on Fey von Hassell's diaries, memories and letters. Her story of growing up at the German Embassy in Rome, in the years leading up to the war, records a fascinating mixture of political and personal events, including the meetings of her father with Hitler and Mussolini, her own experience under the fascist state and her engagement and marriage to the dashing Italian Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli.
The account of Fey's later imprisonment and harrowing journey in the hands of the SS provides a unique insight into the terrifying effects of war on the innocent, and a haunting picture of the chaos and devastation through which Fey's determined mother searched for the two little boys.