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A magnificent wartime love story about the forces that brought the authors parents together and those that nearly drove them apart Marianne Szegedy-Maszks parents, Hanna and Aladr, met and fell in love in Budapest in 1940. He was a rising star in the foreign ministrya vocal anti-Fascist who was in talks with the Allies when he was arrested and sent to Dachau. She was the granddaughter of Manfred Weiss, the industrialist patriarch of an aristocratic Jewish family that owned factories, were patrons of intellectuals and artists, and entertained dignitaries at their baronial estates. Though many in the family had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, when the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were forced into hiding. In a secret and controversial deal brokered with Heinrich Himmler, the family turned over their vast holdings in exchange for their safe passage to Portugal.