The Berlin Diaries 1940-45

Description

`A brilliant record of wartime Berlin as well as the haunting day-by-day life of a beautiful woman of almost unbelievable courage' Daily Mail Marie `Missie' Vassiltchikov as a White Russian emigree caught with her family in Hitler`s Germany at the outbreak of the war. She was a Bright Young Thing, part of the cosmopolitan set who managed to maintain a trance-like normality until as late as 1941 - picnics, house-parties, dinners at the Eden... Before long, however, Missie became sickened by the brutal and repressive nature of Nazi rule which overshadowed every aspect of her life. Through Adam Von Trott, for whom she worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, she became involved in the Resistance and the diaries vividly describe her part in the drama of July 1944 and its appalling aftermath. Living among the ruins of Berlin during Allied bombing raids, she grows us to be strong-minded, committed and courageous woman as she daily displays uncommon bravery in the face of the Gestapo and the detestable Dr Six of the SS. Having survived the Nazis, Missie ends the diaries as she flees from Vienna, where she has been working as a nurse, before the advancing Red Army.

Marie 'Missie' Vassiltchikov - later Mrs Peter Harnden - was born in St Petersburg in 1917, the fourth child of Prince and Princess Illarion Vassiltchikov. The family left Russia in 1919, and Missie grew up in Germany, France and Lithuanian, where her father's family had owned property before the Revolution. After the war she lived in France, Spain and England. She died in London in 1978.

Quite simply, one of the most extraordinary war diaries ever written. Innocent and knowing at once, it portrays the death of Old Europe through the eyes of a beautiful young aristocrat whose world itself is dying with the events that she describes -- John le Carre Written with a vividness, detail, understanding and humanity that rank it beside Pepys on the Great Fire -- Bernard Levin * Observer * A fascinating insight into a circle whose independence of mind could not be crushed by totalitarianism, Soviet or Nazi * Financial Times * A remarkable historical document of the first importance -- A.J.P. Taylor