Narrative history
The Lost Boys
Catherine Bailey (Viking, £20)
CORRADO AND ROBERTO are the ‘lost boys’ of the title: brothers taken from their mother, given false identities and sent to a Nazirun orphanage in the Alps, aged only four and two.
Their father, Detalmo Pirziobiroli, was working undercover for the Italian Resistance, leaving them in the care of their mother, Fey, at Brazzà, his family’s estate. Fey used her German background to establish ‘a rapport’ with the Nazi officers, who soon occupied the estate, but, when her father, Ulrich von Hassell, was instrumental in the failed plot to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, orders were given to arrest all relatives of those involved. The boys were taken, screaming, from Fey, who was shunted from hotels to schools to concentration camps with other
Sippenhäftlinge (‘prisoners of kin’), from October 1944 to May 1945.
Himmler’s orders were to preserve them as hostages, so this group suffered the peculiar fate of being kept alive, in close proximity to mass killing. At Stuffhof camp, they ‘saw the glow from the pyres and smelled the burning bodies’, but ‘the high wall outside their barrack screened their view of the camp and they had no means of communicating with the other inmates’.
Catherine Bailey marries sensitivity to Fey’s inner life—convincingly conveying her anguish for her children and her love for fellow prisoner Alex von Stauffenberg—with the plot tension of a thriller. The acclaimed author of Black Diamonds and The Secret Rooms is also adept at weaving this family’s story with the larger historical narrative of the war. As she reflects on the ‘unprecedented scale’ of children’s wartime suffering—13 million lost their parents; 1.5 million were killed in camps; 50,000 were ‘Germanised’—so we understand that the painful, courageous story of this mother and her ‘lost boys’ is one of many. Emily Rhodes