A Castle in Wartime
One Family, Their Missing Sons, and the Fight to Defeat the Nazis
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"I was gripped by A Castle in Wartime--it contained more tension, more plot in fact--than any thriller."--Kate Atkinson, author of Big Sky and Case Histories
An enthralling story of one family's extraordinary courage and resistance amidst the horrors of war from the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Rooms.
As war swept across Europe in 1940, the idyllic life of Fey von Hassell seemed a world away from the conflict. The daughter of Ulrich von Hassell, Hitler's Ambassador to Italy, her marriage to Italian aristocrat Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli brought with it a castle and an estate in the north of Italy. Beautiful and privileged, Fey and her two young sons lead a tranquil life undisturbed by the trauma and privations of war. But with Fascism approaching its zenith, Fey's peaceful existence is threatened when Ulrich and Detalmo take the brave and difficult decision to resist the Nazis.
When German soldiers pour over the Italian border, Fey is suddenly marooned in the Nazi-occupied north and unable to communicate with her husband, who has joined the underground anti-Fascist movement in Rome. Before long, SS soldiers have taken up occupancy in the castle. As Fey struggles to maintain an air of warm welcome to her unwanted guests, the clandestine activities of both her father and husband become increasingly brazen and openly rebellious. Darkness descends when Ulrich's foiled plot to kill the Fuhrer brings the Gestapo to Fey's doorstep. It would be months before Detalmo learns that his wife had been arrested and his two young boys seized by the SS.
Suffused with Catherine Bailey's signature atmospheric prose, A Castle in Wartime tells the unforgettable story of the extraordinary bravery and fortitude of one family who collectively and individually sacrificed everything to resist the Nazis from within. Bailey's unprecedented access to stunning first-hand family accounts, along with records from concentration camps and surviving SS files, make this a dazzling and compulsively readable book, opening a view on the cost and consequences of resistance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing from interviews and primary sources, documentarian Bailey (The Secret Rooms) tells the true WWII tale of aristocrat Fey Pirzio-Biroli in this exciting history. Pirzio-Biroli and her husband, Detalmo, an Italian anti-Fascist, had lived a quiet life at Brazza, their lavish estate north of Venice. In 1944, Pirzio-Biroli was arrested by the Nazis and separated from her children after her father, the former German ambassador to Italy, was executed for taking part in plans to assassinate Hitler. After placing Pirzio-Biroli's sons in an orphanage, her Nazi captors sent her and fellow "prisoners of kin," so called for their blood ties to the assassination conspirators, on a grueling months-long journey around German-occupied central Europe. Along the way, they were held in prisons and concentration camps. Their living conditions weren't as horrific as those of Jews and other Nazi scapegoats, and their lives were spared only because Heinrich Himmler, the head of the German SS, hoped to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Allies. While Pirzio-Biroli and her husband were reunited soon after the war's end, it was a longer and more arduous project to track down their children. This historical page-turner gives a gripping view of the conflict's consequences for one upper-crust family.
