Product Description

The biography of a White Russian emigree trapped with her family in Hitler's Germany at the outbreak of World War II. Living among the ruins of Berlin during Allied bombing raids, she grew up to be a strong-minded, committed and courageous woman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44874 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 343 pages

Customer Reviews

Compelling and easy to read
This book is wonderfully easy to read, not often the case with a diary or diaries, and more than that it is absolutely compelling. The editing is superb, so you not only get Vassiltchikov's diary entry, but the circumstances of the time as well. Vassiltchikov was involved on the periphery of the 20th July plot and relates the circumstances of it fantastically. I thought the book was marvellous, a good read for anyone who has an interest in the social and cultural history of the Second World War. I couldn't put it down.

Utterly Compelling
These are the absorbing wartime diaries of Marie "Missie" Vassiltchikov, a White Russian who worked in a German foreign office in Berlin from 1940-45. Idealistic, vivacious and observant, Missie was a diarist of the first order, and her book is both a detailed portrait of 1940's Berlin and a gripping account of political conspiracy. She wrote her diary in English and is very detailed throughout with occasional humour. Her accounts of the bombing raids are so descriptive you can almost imagine being there yourself, brushing off the dust. Missie was also unwittingly in the centre of the most famous plot which led to the failed assassination of Hitler at the Wolf's Lair. Towards the end of the war she became a nursing Helferin before finally fleeing the advancing Russian army, where the diary ends.

The book had me gripped from start to finish, and is clear and easy to read throughout. I cannot recommend it enough.

as times goes by
Yes, I think Missie Vassiltchikov would have been the heroine of "Casablanca". This memoirs counts many events of all types, including brief mentions to Spanish diplomatics I have never heard out of this book and also the Spanish "Blue Division" in Russian front. The protagonist, being an aristocrat had sometimes to do the most unpleasant and dangerous tasks besides feasts and concerts, this last very own of the aristocracy to whom she pertained, but Vassiltchikov wasn't an unuseful nor decorative woman from high society because she spoke several idioms and was a hard worker: she is able to clean a bombed house and at same time, dress long silk vestments for a party in a luxury hotel, if necessary, going several kilometers in a bycicle and no doubt, and owing to his great beauty she must defy worst chances at end of war as her friend Sisi mentions once in the diary because hungry women would be easy preys in Germany by then, but she seems to have avoid the poor with rare, difficult decency. Missie Mixes hunger with caviar and champagne. For that his diary is highly nostalgic, because Missie represented these part of european civilization that was destroyed by the nazis and World War II, his culture and lifestyle being irreparably replaced by modern fashions. Missie was placed in an exceptional point of view and logically she relativizes his criterions about Germans and Allies because bads and goods are in all places and times and suffering daily air raids must be not easy to stand. When I was child in the late fifties some of that noblesse lived near my house in Madrid. They were rarely seen but some did yet his life here permanently. I don't like aristocracy but Marie Vassiltchikov was a person aristocratic in herself and not only by birth. These don't abound.