The Orphan of Sarajevo Who Chose Silence😢 #history

She was the eldest and only daughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Princess Sophie of Hohenberg was born into a world that never fully accepted her. Because of her parents’ unequal marriage, she and her brothers were barred from any rights to the Habsburg throne. But they had something more valuable: a loving family.

And then, when she was just 13 years old, her world was destroyed. On June 28, 1914, she and her brothers, Maximilian and Ernst, learned of their parents’ assassination from the newspapers. They became orphans overnight, and their personal tragedy became the trigger for World War I.

After the assassination, the children were taken in by their aunt, but after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, the new Czechoslovak republic confiscated their home, Konopiště Castle. They were exiled from their native country and moved to Vienna.

In 1920, Sophie married Count Friedrich von Nostitz-Rieneck. It was a love match. She gave birth to three sons and a daughter. It seemed she had finally found her own quiet happiness, far from the shadows of the past.

But history was not yet finished with her family. In 1938, after the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany, her brothers Maximilian and Ernst were arrested for their anti-Nazi views and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. Sophie was powerless to help them.

She survived the horrors of World War II. After the war, when the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, her husband’s properties were confiscated, and they fled to Austria, becoming refugees once again.

Sophie lived a long, but quiet life marked by loss. She rarely spoke of her parents, but she wore a ring with their images on it for the rest of her life. She died in 1990 at the age of 89, having outlived almost everyone involved in the drama that had defined her fate.

#history #royalfamily