What’s That to Do With Me? A Crime in March 1945. The Story of My Family.

Sacha Batthyany’s aunt was involved in one of the most terrible Nazi crimes to be committed at the end of World War Two. While writing her story, he stumbles on an old family secret.

“I was expecting something to do with the 19th century, elaborate period dresses maybe, or horses. Some bridge or other named after one of my forebears. The Batthyánys had been counts, princes, bishops. One of them was prime minister of the country in 1849, another was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II for his services to Rome as a medical doctor. So I expected something like that when I glanced at the newspaper, something harmless. Instead, I read the headline “The Hostess From Hell”, which I didn’t understand, but I recognized the woman in the photograph at once. Aunt Margit.”

A few weeks before the end of the war, Countess Margit Thyssen-Batthyany hosted a lavish party in the Austrian town of Rechnitz. At around midnight, the guests left the castle and shot dead 180 Jews who were waiting for their deportation to the camps. Exactly what happened that night is still not known even today. Sacha Batthyany’s aunt remained silent all her life. “And what,” asked author Maxim Biller, "has that to do with you?"

The author started searching for more information. His journey took him to pre-war Hungary, post-war Austria, present-day Switzerland, a Gulag camp in Siberia, to the living room of an Auschwitz survivor in South America – and even to the couch of a pipe-smoking psychoanalyst. In the course of his travels, he stumbled on a secret that changed his view of his family and of himself.

Do previous generations define the way we live? Are we all “war grandchildren”? Even though we thought we were so enlightened, so modern and detached? Sacha Batthyany’s book is an unusual family chronicle and at the same time the psychogram of a generation.