Fey von Hassell was a German aristocrat, married into a prominent Italian family, whose privileged life was disrupted during World War II. Taken hostage by the Gestapo when her father was implicated in the Stauffenberg bomb plot, her children were taken away. She was held in a series of concentration camps, including Dachau and Buchenwald, sharing her fate with an unusual collection of prisoners including the Stauffenbergs, Leon Blum, Fritz Thyssen and General von Seyditz. Moving constantly out of reach of the advancing Allies and with a mobile gas chamber always in attendance, she and her fellow hostages were finally in a last-minute rescue bid. She spent many anxious months searching for her children. The book is based on her diaries, written mainly in 1945, immediately after the events took place.