Publisher's Synopsis
In the fall of 1944, Fey von Hassell, the 24-year-old wife of Italian Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli, was seized by the SS at her villa at Brazza near Venice and shuttled by train among a series of Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau, as World War II thundered to its close.;Her two little boys were torn from her side, their fate unknown to her for months to come. She was seized because her father, Ulrich van Hassell, the former German ambassador to Italy was implicated in the von Stauffenberg bomb plot to kill Hitler. Miraculously, she survived, and her mother eventually found the children in Austria. This story is based on Fey's diaries, letters and recollections. It is a story of SS leader Heinrich Himmler's holding hostage elite members of the Third Reich as his final bargaining card. Only the intercession of the captured British intelligence officer Payne Best saved Fey's life and the lives of her fellow hostages.
