Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: A Crime in the Family

Subtitle: A World War II Secret Buried in Silence - and My Search for the Truth

Author: Sacha Batthyany

Narrator: Christopher Oxford

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-03-17

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

A memoir of brutality, heroism, and personal discovery from Europe's dark heart, revealing one of the most extraordinary untold stories of World War II

One night in March of 1945, on the Austrian-Hungarian border, a local countess hosted a party in her mansion, where guests and local Nazi leaders mingled. The war was almost over, and the German aristocrats and SS officers dancing and drinking knew it was lost. Around midnight, some of the guests were asked to "take care" of 180 Jewish enslaved laborers at the train station; they made them strip naked and shot them all before returning to the bright lights of the party. It was another one of the war's countless atrocities buried in secrecy for decades - until Sacha Batthyany started investigating what happened that night at the party his great aunt hosted.

A Crime in the Family is the author's memoir of confronting his family's past, the questions he raised, and the answers he found that took him far beyond his great-aunt's party: through the dark past of Nazi Germany to the gulags of Siberia, the bleak streets of Cold War Budapest, and to Argentina, where he finds an Auschwitz survivor whose past intersects with his family's. It is the story of executioners and victims, villains and heroes.

Told partly through the surviving family journals, A Crime in the Family is a disquieting and moving memoir, a powerful true story told by an extraordinary writer confronting the dark past of his family - and humanity.

Critic Reviews:

"Riveting" (Daily Express)

"Evocatively written with a sharp journalist's eye, A Crime in the Family lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned." (Literary Review)

Members Reviews:

Interesting personal account

A Crime in the Family is by Sacha Batthyany. It is a true story of the authorâs quest to find out about his familyâs past and come to some kind of acceptance of his own feelings. It is a story with deep roots in the Holocaust and in Hungarian history as well as the gulags of the Soviet Union. It is written in first person with segments from various diaries from the past.

Sachaâs family was Hungarian aristocracy before World War II. His parents fled to Switzerland and raised him there. However, the feeling that they were just waiting to go home permeated the family and Sacha never felt quite at home. His Father eventually returned to Hungary; but Sacha continued to live and work in Switzerland where he was raising his family and working as a journalist. One day, a colleague handed him a news article about his Aunt Margit. It detailed a party during the war and called her âThe Hostess from Hellâ. At this party, the guests who were drunk, were given guns at midnight and they shot 180 Jews. Then, the party continued. Sacha set the article aside and continued work on his own article. Later, he called his Father to ask him about the event. His Father confirmed the event; but also said âit was unlikely that Margit was involved.