A Mother's War - Couverture souple

This is the gripping story of Fey von Hassell, a beautiful young German aristocrat, whose privileged life was turned upside down during World War II. In 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 concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald, sharing her grim odyssey with an improbable collection of prisoners which included former prime ministers and governors. They were to be killed if the war was lost.

Facing death from disease, hunger and intense cold, Fey was unable to get news of her boys. In the end a last-minute daring rescue freed her and her fellow hostages. But 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 includes 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 months 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.

Fey von Hassell divides her time between Rome and Brazzà, the Pirzio-Biroli estate in north-eastern Italy. David Forbes-Watt, her son-in-law, lives in Rome.