The Secrets of the Notebook: A royal love affair and a woman’s quest to uncover her incredible family secret

The Secrets of the Notebook: A royal love affair and a woman’s quest to uncover her incredible family secret Eve Haas The incredible true story revealed by a family notebook, telling of four daughters across two centuries of turbulent history, of a passionate and ill-fated royal love affair, ending in a tragic and cruel death.'The beautiful owner of this book is dearer to me than my life.August, your protector.'Eve Haas was irresistibly drawn to the family 'notebook', which had been passed down the generations. Her father had shown her the inscription inside when she was young, with warnings of dire happenings if the secret behind the diary was pursued.Years later, Eve decided to follow the trail of the notebook, it would take her to the old kingdom of Prussia, to a forbidden royal marriage that was wiped from all official records, and a royal princess given away to ensure her protection.Forty years earlier in 1942, Eve's grandmother, Anna, had died on her way to Auschwitz after being seized by the SS. They believed she was just an old Jewish woman. The secret of her royal heritage lay in that notebook, but it couldn't save her. The SECRETS of the NOTEBOOK EVE HAAS A royal love affair and a woman’s quest to uncover her incredible family secret I dedicate this book to the memory ofEmilie, Charlotte and Anna WITH SPECIAL THANKS to Andrew Crofts and Timothy Haas for their contribution in the writing of this book. I owe so much to my dearest parents, Hans and Grete, and to my Uncle Freddy and Alice his wife. My beloved husband Ken was my rock, my three sons, Anthony, Timothy and David my inspiration. Without them my journey could never have taken place. PROLOGUE (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) The FIRST GLIMPSE I SAW THE notebook for the first time in London in 1940 and was instantly enchanted by the mystery of the story surrounding it. It was wartime and we were in our flat in Hampstead where we had been living ever since we had escaped from Europe in 1934. All through the previous night we had suffered a terrifying air raid, which at dawn had left the three of us feeling shaken. My father had brought the book to the breakfast table, never having mentioned its existence to me before. It was still in its envelope, tied with a green ribbon. He must have decided that now I had passed my sixteenth birthday it was time for me to be given some knowledge about the family secret. Perhaps he had waited before explaining the little book’s history to me until he thought I was old enough to be trusted not to tell anyone else. Or maybe the closeness of the bombs the previous night had reminded him of his own mortality and he didn’t want to risk the secret dying with him. I never knew what caused him to choose that morning to fetch it from wherever he had been hiding it since we’d arrived in London, and to take it from its envelope in front of me. ‘What’s that?’ I asked as he sat down with us. ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said, trying to underplay its importance as my mother poured the coffee. ‘Just a diary.’ ‘I didn’t know you kept a diary.’ I was surprised. In my youthful ignorance I had thought I knew everything about my beloved father. ‘Well,’ he looked uncomfortable for a second, as though he had been caught out not telling the whole truth. Was he having second thoughts about telling me, now that he was sitting beneath my mother’s firm and slightly disapproving gaze? ‘I don’t keep a diary,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s just an old family memento,’ Mother said brusquely, clearly coming to his rescue in some way. I don’t know if he had consulted her about telling me that day, or whether he had reached the decision alone, but they exchanged a look that I couldn’t understand and then seemed to come to a decision simultaneously to go ahead with the revelation. My father passed the book to me. ‘Be careful, Eve,’ he said, as if I were a small clumsy child who might drop and break it. ‘It’s very old.’ It was heavy for something so small and as I cradled it in my hands I saw there was a grand family crest of some sort embossed on the silver gilt cover. It felt solid and substantial as I gently ran my thumb over it. I opened the first page and read out loud the elegantly written inscription inside. It was in German. ‘The beautiful owner of this book is dearer to me than mylife – August your protector.’ I looked up enquiringly but neither of them said anything, both concentrating on their breakfast. ‘Who is this August?’ I asked. They exchanged another nervous glance and then my father seemed to decide to take the plunge. ‘He was royal,’ he said. ‘A Prussian prince. He was your great, great grandfather, Eve.’ ‘Anna’s grandfather was a royal prince?’ I said after considering the thought for a few moments. I tried to imagine my sweet, arthritis-ridden old grandmother being that closely related to royalty and failed. Princess Anna – it seemed too fantastical to be true. ‘He married Emilie Gottschalk, the daughter of a Jewish tailor, and …’ my father seemed to be hesitating; was he wishing he had never started the conversation, eager to squash my enthusiastic curiosity? Was it all too embarrassing to talk about? ‘We know very little, and it is only word of mouth,’ he carried on with conviction, then seemed to want to change the subject as quickly as possible, as if I had now been told all I needed to know and there was no point in going any further. ‘Except that this little pocket-book is all there is …’ ‘Why is this all there is?’ I stroked the little book again. I wasn’t going to leave it at that. What sixteen-year-old girl would be willing to dismiss the idea that she might be descended from a prince without coming up with a thousand new questions. ‘What about Anna’s mother? What was her name?’ ‘Charlotte,’ my father said, avoiding my eyes and those of my mother as he continued to eat his breakfast. ‘She was Prince August’s daughter.’ ‘Well,’ I said, feeling slightly frustrated by how evasive they were both being. ‘There must be records of her life—’ ‘Eve,’ my father put up his hand to stop me in my tracks. ‘My mother gave me—’ He stopped speaking for a moment, as if mustering enough strength to keep his emotions under control in front of me and I immediately felt guilty for having forced him to talk about my grandmother, Anna, like that. Anna was sending us letters intermittently via the Red Cross, which was in itself very worrying, although she professed to be alright, I knew he was partly hoping that if she did get arrested then she wouldn’t linger and would leave this earth before her suffering became too great, while the other half struggled with the idea that he might never see her again, would never be able to say goodbye and might never know the truth of what had happened to her in her final days. My own deep-rooted fears for her safety were distressing for me too, as the truth of the desperate situation for all Jews who remained in German-occupied Prague had begun to dawn on all of us. We weren’t alone in our worries; many Jewish families living in England had had to leave relatives behind for one reason or another when they fled from the murderous hatred that Hitler was spreading throughout mainland Europe. In fact my family was more fortunate than many because my parents were already well travelled, with many friends in other countries. But Anna had been too old and too slowed by her arthritis to be able to come with my Uncle Freddy, my father’s brother, and his family when they escaped for the last time from Prague to join us in England in 1938. Both Uncle Freddy and my father had had to put the welfare of their wives and children before that of their elderly mother, especially as she was insistent that she wanted to stay. They had done the right thing, but that didn’t mean my father wasn’t racked with a painful guilt as a result, tortured by not knowing what had happened or what could be happening in Prague at the very moment that we were sitting round the breakfast table in England. I went back to studying the precious little book in silence for a few moments. ‘This little book is all we have,’ my father said after a few minutes. ‘It has been handed down through the generations. It is the only proof we have that Emilie and the Prince had a life together and that that is where we came from. When I am no more, this book will be yours to keep and to pass on to the next generation. But you mustn’t do anything about it. Remember Eve, there is nothing more to find out. Nothing else has been written, nothing else exists, so don’t go looking for it. All we know is what we have learned by word of mouth. Apart from a little portrait of Charlotte’s mother, Emilie, which your Uncle Freddy has, this book is all that exists from that time. I wanted you to know that you have blue blood flowing in your veins, that is all. Just be content with that.’ In all my innocence I couldn’t immediately accept what he was saying, but I knew enough not to press him any more and I was privileged to think that I had been chosen to be the keeper of such a precious and mysterious heirloom, to be the one to pass the secrets on to the next generation of our family. I adored my father above anything else, but he was sensitive, and a man whose word I respected. If he didn’t want me to go looking for any more information about our family’s past then I would not question his wishes any further. My father passed the pocket-book to my mother, who promptly put it back into the old yellowing envelope it had come from and slipped the green ribbon over it. Then she left the room. We met again a few minutes later in the kitchen where I was washing up the breakfast things. Caressing my hair, Mother quietly whispered in my ear, ‘The King wouldn’t allow it, but August went against his wishes and married Emilie anyway.’ The events of my childhood in Berlin had taught me just how dangerous it could be to be related to the wrong people or to anger those who held the power of life and death in their hands. To be considered to have the wrong blood flowing in your veins could mean instant arrest and who knew what fate after that. No Jewish family living in Europe during those times wanted to draw attention to themselves in any way at all. The secret to survival was to be as discreet and inoffensive as possible. Going around claiming to be directly descended from one of the wealthiest and most powerful royal families in all history, as I later found out they were, was likely to annoy more people than it would enchant or intrigue, but I still ached to find out more about what sounded like a real-life fairy tale. My father must have chosen me to give the book to because he knew that I would be captivated by the romance of the story and believed that I would pass the story on to any children I might have, just as he was passing it on to me. He must have believed that the precious book would be in safe and loving hands with me and I still feel touched and honoured to have been chosen to carry the secret on for the next generation. Sitting at the breakfast table that day, however, I had no idea just what an extraordinary journey that little keepsake would eventually take me on, a journey back in time, across closed and dangerous borders to uncover secrets that had been carefully hidden and closely guarded for over a century. The SECRETS of the NOTEBOOK (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) Contents Title Page (#u889f2ca6-f50a-5516-95cd-13358e2af5f0)Dedication (#ue69941b8-3c48-5439-a868-272ca7914f46)Epigraph (#u33acd799-a8eb-537f-9489-a1f5ffb97b19)Prologue (#ud8d801fc-2a2a-5808-ad83-803c27778109)The Secrets Of The Notebook (#ucb6f4d40-d383-59a5-b46e-63edd6a1e31e)Chapter One: Goodbye Berlin – Hello Hampstead (#u6ec8d232-ed75-58ea-accd-97462bc7db3b)Chapter Two: Granny Anna – No News From Prague (#ub6d961c8-01d9-5b1a-9236-f16847da3754)Chapter Three: Meeting Emilie (#u2e0ee283-0892-545b-85f6-e69b563240fe)Chapter Four: The Call To Adventure (#u89e4365a-e9fe-5710-8361-5db2fb039345)Chapter Five: Return To Berlin (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six: Crossing The Border (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven: At The Castle Walls (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight: Charming The Minister (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine: The Disappearing Passports (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten: The Opening Of The Archives (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven: My Great, Great Grandfather – Prince August Of Prussia (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve: Gottschalk (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen: Finding Emilie (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen: Going To The Ball (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen: An Assassin In The Palace And The Disappearance Of Victor (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen: The Death Of The Prince (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen: A Humble Plea (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen: An Offer To Spy (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen: Calling Their Bluff (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty: The Prince In England (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty One: Visiting August (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Two: An Ally In Berlin (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Three: A Poisonous Legacy (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Four: Finding Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Five: The Final Piece Of The Puzzle (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Six: Tracking Down Isadore And Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Seven: The Vanished Palace (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Eight: A Letter From The Grave (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue: Visiting Anna (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) GOODBYE BERLIN – HELLO HAMPSTEAD (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) MOST OF THE early years of my life were spent in the political turmoil of Berlin. I was born on my father’s birthday, 26 June 1924. My mother went into labour in a state of shock, having been informed by her sister, Fridl, that the Berlin evening paper had announced that my father had been fatally injured that day in a car accident. In fact my father was not dead, but instead was fighting for his life in a convent in the middle of nowhere. He had been travelling on business from our home in Breslau, which was then in Germany but is now in Poland, when his car was forced off the road by a heavily laden haywain steered by a woman in a red headscarf. Startled by the unexpected sound of an engine the carthorse had reared up. My father loved driving his new Buik 24-54, so he was at the wheel despite the fact that he had his chauffeur with him. He swerved to avoid the flailing hooves and rolled off the road into a ditch, ending up on its side. The chauffeur was thrown clear but my father was trapped inside with a fractured skull and a broken arm and leg. Clambering to his feet, the chauffeur waved down the next car to pass by, but the driver refused to take ‘a dying man’. The next vehicle to pass was a lorry loaded with bricks and the driver agreed to take my unconscious father to a nearby convent in the hope that the nuns could save him. Having no option the chauffeur accepted the offer and the nuns took him in, in the true Christian spirit. Somehow the news reached the ears of a journalist in Berlin who decided to print the piece as news without further verification. Father stayed under the tender care of the nuns for five days before he was finally judged strong enough to be transferred to Breslau Hospital, where my mother and I were still patients after my apparently difficult and traumatic arrival. Things would have been so different if he had died that night on the road, or later in the peace of the convent. If he had passed away that night his mother, Anna, would never have been able to give him the pocket-book, which would later come to me. It would instead have gone to my Uncle Freddy for safekeeping, with our family’s mysterious past remaining a secret. After my dramatic entry into the world, my first few years were stable and pleasant. As a small child I lived in central Berlin with my family all around me. We lived close to my grandparents and to my Uncle Freddy and his family. Freddy and my father were very close, and looked similar too, although Freddy was heavier set and taller than his brother. My parents, Hans and Margarethe Jaretzki, had married in 1917 after my father was invalided back from the Russian Front during the First World War. My paternal grandfather, Samuel Jaretzki, was a tough, disciplined man, a highly respected stockbroker who was the longest serving member of the Berlin Stock Exchange and didn’t want my father to marry my mother, although I have no idea why not. My father however, as quietly determined as ever, simply packed his bags and left home. His mother, Anna, went searching for him and eventually tracked him down in a small hotel. Using all her quiet charm she persuaded her son to come home and she persuaded his father to relent. As a result of her efforts to broker a peace between father and son, my parents’ marriage took place. Hans was an architect, one of a dynasty of Jaretzki architects. Eight of them had practised in Berlin; the last remaining, Frank Jarrett at 98, lives happily in California, where his son, Norman, carries on the family tradition. Some of their buildings remain today, despite nearly eighty per cent of Berlin having been destroyed, first by allied bombs and later by the Russian tanks as they invaded, forcing Hitler’s final line of defence to capitulate and surrender. Earlier in 1917 during World War 1 Hans was injured and invalided away from the frontline when the German Army ordered him in his capacity as an architect and engineer to build munitions factories on the Polish border, and so my parents moved to East Prussia. My father was a gentle man, softly spoken and thoughtful, different to my mother and always keen to avoid personal conflict or confrontation. My mother was dark-haired, petite and attractive and my father was slightly built and fair. Two years after they were married they had my brother, Claude, who took after my mother in many ways. I was born five years later and I was much more like Father. Claude grew to be quite tall and handsome and because of their similar personalities he got on very well with our mother. But Grandmother Anna made no secret of the fact that she adored me, and I adored her in return. She indulged me at every opportunity she was given and took a keen interest in my schooling and progress. She used to buy me some special little chocolate figures and I remember at one time I had a very strict governess called Fraulein Mueller who snatched the treasured figures away from me because I wouldn’t eat my dinner, and she never returned them. I still regret losing them to this day. They were happy times for the whole family and I still remember scenes from those days as vividly as if they were yesterday; playing with my friend Lottie Schulz, walking an old lady’s dog for her, wrapping up pfennig coins in newspaper, then throwing them to the organ grinder and his performing monkey from our first floor balcony. The man doffed his hat as the monkey picked them up before waving their goodbyes. We lived very comfortably and my mother had the help of both a maid and live-in nanny. I had no inkling at that stage of what terrible times lay ahead. Anti-Semitism had been endemic in those parts of Europe for centuries, but as a child I was blissfully unaware of that fact, shielded as I was by my loving family, and to begin with I was not aware that the hatred of the Jews was becoming deeper and darker with every passing year. Eventually, however, the truth was inescapable. We stayed in Germany until the spring of 1934, long enough for me to learn the shocking lesson that we were not welcome there, although at the age of nine I was finding it hard to come to terms with why that might be. I remember Hitler coming to power and wearing my ‘Ja for Hitler’ sticker with the same enthusiasm as all the other children I knew. The Brownshirts, a Para-military wing of the Nazi party renowned for its violent methods, were often outside the school after that, menacingly checking that we were displaying our stickers prominently. I was nine years old when I huddled beside the wireless listening to Hitler’s victory speech, unnerved by the sombre mood of the adults all around me and finding it hard to really understand why their fears were so great. We could hear the euphoria of the crowds on the streets outside but inside everyone’s spirits were brought low with feelings of dread because they had already started to hear rumours and stories about what was happening to Jews in other parts of the country. At eight o’clock one morning at school we were all assembled as usual in the classroom when we heard an unusual noise. It sounded like the clumping of approaching boots. The door opened and we saw that our teacher had been transformed overnight. The small and usually sober-suited Herr K?hne looked taller and prouder than usual in jackboots and a brown Nazi uniform emblazoned with a swastika armband. ‘From now on,’ he announced loudly, ‘we no longer pray to God. We pray to Adolf Hitler.’ That day as I walked home I noticed that the grocer and baker’s shops that we used nearly every day to buy our supplies had been boarded up and the word ‘JUDE’ had been daubed across the boards in large, angry letters. It was an ugly, threatening sight and my disquiet grew when I found my mother was crying as I reached her at the street corner. ‘Terrible things are happening,’ she said, hurrying me back home without elaborating. Now of course I know that the first pogrom against the Jews had already started as Hitler fed the wave of euphoria that was sweeping through the hearts and minds of young Germans everywhere, but at that moment I was still too young to know about any of that. It was hard for me to understand why everyone else in Germany seemed to be so excited by what was happening when my family and their friends were all so sad and fearful. Back at school in the following weeks there was always a squabble for one of us to have the honour of carrying the huge Nazi flag at the head of the class on our weekly walks through the ‘Grunewald’, the local wood across the road. One day I insisted it was my turn and pushed eagerly to the front of the class with my hand up. Herr K?hne seemed reluctant but eventually handed it to me, still not quite brainwashed enough to blame a child in his care for belonging to the wrong religion. I had no idea of the significance of my actions as I proudly marched away holding the swastika standard of my class, wanting to belong and to be part of the excitement. The first time I heard the voices of the Hitler Youth singing the Nazi anthem to the drumbeat of their jackboots they were marching through the city, thousands of them in a sea of brown uniforms. I was out in the street with my friend Lottie. We ran to the front of the crowd to watch and wave, smiling at them happily as they passed. Women were pouring out of their front doors, feting and kissing the boy soldiers and filling their water bottles for them. Seeing this show of military might seemed to fill the hearts and minds of all the onlookers with excitement and anticipation and I found myself infected along with everyone else, completely ignorant of what it was I was cheering for. But every day things kept happening that puzzled me. Lottie’s brother, Hermann, for instance, was so influenced by all the propaganda that he reported his father to the local Hitler Youth Group Leader, denouncing him for speaking against Hitler at home. His father duly received a visit from a Gestapo officer, which effectively silenced him on that subject from then on. Hermann was not unusual in believing that this was the right way to behave, that loyalty to the F?hrer was far and away more important than loyalty to your own family. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances where I would ever dream for even a moment of getting any member of my family into trouble with the authorities, least of all my beloved father. ‘The man is insane,’ my father would insist over and over again whenever the name of Adolf Hitler came up. ‘I will not live in a country led by a murderer.’ My mother accepted that Father was right and that it would soon be too dangerous to be living in Germany, but before we could move they needed to establish where we could go that would be safe. It was through Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador, whose residence he had designed and built in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, that my father was able to seek the help that he needed from Frank Foley, the British Passport Control Officer stationed in Berlin. Foley, it was recently revealed, was working under cover as Britain’s Chief Spymaster in Europe, saving more than 10,000 Jews from certain death by flouting both British and German laws. My father left first to search for a country that would accept us if we were to flee from Germany. When my mother heard that he had reached England she joined him, having given up our home and left me to stay with her sister, Aunt Fridl, and Claude with friends in Silesia. They were hoping that we would be able to move to Hampstead in North London. None of my family were practising Jews and my father did not go to synagogue, although he did eventually design one of the biggest ones, situated in Edgware, North London. My father was a well-known Bauhaus architect and a leading light of the modernist Bauhaus design movement, which had started in Germany after the First World War (even though so much of Berlin was destroyed quite a few of his buildings have survived and are now officially protected by preservation orders). His reputation was not going to be enough to protect him against the rising tide of hatred. While my father was away the situation was rapidly deteriorating. In November 1933 the Nazis threw him out of the German Architectural Association (BDA). By this time Reg Calendar, one of Frank Foley’s close aides, had arranged for my father to receive a permanent working visa in England, without which he would have been deported back to Germany like so many others. Reg and my father became friends and I remember him visiting our flat in Hampstead with his family. So it was that by early 1934 my parents were making the necessary arrangements for our arrival in England as a family. I was nine years old and devastated by their departure, and by the thought of having to leave the home I loved. Above all, I missed my father terribly while he was away and was constantly writing him notes on any bits of paper I could find. I was so distraught about all the changes that were going on in my life that I was hardly eating and I was losing weight at an alarming rate. I was terrified that I would never see my father again. My brother was also a long way away, staying with our parents’ friends in Silesia and I felt very lost and lonely. Anti-Semitism was becoming more open and violent every day, even in the little school where I had always been so happy. One day I was singled out and cornered by a group of boys who ripped my glasses off and beat me for no other reason than that I was Jewish and they had learned that they must hate me and that there would be no repercussions for any harm that they might decide to do to me. Lottie ’s mother sent some honey cakes to the house for me one day, but my aunt’s cook confiscated them before I could take even one bite, fearing that they might have been laced with poison. All Jews were becoming paranoid, but with good reason. We could not be sure who our friends were any more, or who had had their heads turned or who would decide to denounce us in order to save their own skins. Uniformed Nazis arrived at my aunt’s flat, barging their way into the kitchen one lunchtime on ‘eintopf tag’ (one pot day), when we had all been told we were only allowed one simple stew – and we had to pay the price of the big meal that we had apparently saved to the country’s war chest. They would come checking regularly that our family meal was being confined to one pot as instructed and then demand a considerable sum of money which they said we would have saved with this action – all for ‘The F?hrer’s Charity’. They could take whatever they wanted from us and there was nothing we could do. There was no one we could turn to for justice or protection. In Spring 1934 my mother appeared back in Berlin announcing that everything was arranged and that she was going to be taking me and my brother Claude to England with her to join our father. I was traumatised at the thought of my life in Berlin coming to such an abrupt end, but excited at the same time to think I would be seeing my darling father again, and relieved to think we would be going somewhere safe and far away from the threatening Brownshirts. The hardest part was being separated from my best friend Lottie, but during a tearful farewell we both swore we would keep on writing to one another forever. The journey across to England was frightening and overwhelming. There were soldiers and police everywhere and we expected to be stopped and arrested every time anyone looked at us, as we headed to Holland and the port of Hook Van Holland, where we would board our boat. When we finally reached the grey, misty English Channel sea-sickness had consumed me, as the weather was stormy and the boat rolled and tossed violently on the giant waves. As we queued up to leave the train at Liverpool Street a surge of sickness hit me again, partly due also to my mother’s insistence that I should start living like a little English girl and breakfast on kippers on the way over. The last thing your stomach wants in a situation like that is an unfamiliar and aromatic smoked fish. My father was waiting for us anxiously on the station platform and I fell into his arms as he gathered me up in a giant hug. Being with him made me feel like all my troubles were over, and that I would be able to bear being parted from Berlin and Lottie after all. With him there to guide us, the bustle of the station and the foreign voices all around didn’t seem so overwhelming. My father strode to the taxi rank and instructed the cabbie to take us to a boarding house in Fairfax Road, Hampstead, where my parents had been staying during the previous months. The taxi was open-sided and driven by a red-faced man in a flat cap. It seemed like a very British experience and I was grateful for the flow of fresh air to blow away the last lingering flavours of breakfast, despite the biting cold. When we reached the house I was surprised to find that it was filled with German doctors who worked at the German hospital in London. I was put straight into a big Victorian bedstead with sheets and blankets, another new experience for a child used to an eiderdown and a feather bed, but a great deal more pleasant than the kipper experience. There was an open fireplace in the room and from the chimney I could hear the contented sound of pigeons softly cooing on the roof as I began to slip into an exhausted sleep. It was a sound I had never heard before. I felt so safe in the knowledge that I had been reunited with my father. The next morning at breakfast we shared our table with a tortoise, which was happily munching away at some lettuce leaves while its owner, an English lady, sipped her coffee like it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘The English are great animal lovers,’ my father explained when he saw my astonished and delighted face. The next problem was finding a school that could accommodate a child who couldn’t speak a word of English, but eventually Kingsley School in Belsize Park, near Hampstead, agreed to accept me. Although it was a relief to be away from the brown uniforms and jackboots, I felt very homesick for my life in Berlin and for Lottie who had shared so much of my life until then, but I didn’t complain. I knew that we had had no option, and I would never have questioned my parents’ decisions anyway; children didn’t do that sort of thing in those days. Being thrown in the deep end I picked up the English language surprisingly quickly and felt a warm glow of pride when a teacher said in front of the whole class that if she didn’t know it was me, she would have thought it was a little English girl reading her essay out loud. As my confidence grew I became a little bit cheeky and was banned from German classes for laughing at the red-haired Miss Jones’s German accent. Never allowed to attend her class again I was sent to study Latin instead. Lottie kept writing to me just as she promised she would, keeping the memories of Berlin alive, telling me how much she missed me and filling me in on everything I was missing. The moment her letters arrived I would rip them open and devour every word, feeling a mixture of excitement at her news and sadness at the reminder of everything I had left behind back home. Some of it was puzzling. She told me, for instance, that her ‘best hour at school’ was on Saturdays when she learned ‘all about Hitler’. Another letter told of her ‘joy’ at having ‘danced for Hitler’. It was 1936 and the occasion was the Olympic Games. I showed the letters to my father in the hope that he would explain why Lottie wasn’t as frightened of Hitler as we had been. His face became grave as he read. Alarmed by her tone, he forbade me from writing to her any more. It didn’t occur to me to disobey any direct order he gave me, but it made me deeply miserable as Lottie’s letters kept coming, each one expressing greater degrees of puzzlement and hurt at my sudden and unexplained silence. My father’s decision, however, would eventually prove to be more than wise. Meanwhile my grandmother, Anna, was living in Czechoslovakia with her other son, my father’s brother Uncle Freddy. He had left Berlin back in 1923, during the Great Depression after World War I, and before Hitler’s reign of terror was beginning to take hold. Uncle Freddy had been offered a new job in Brno, Czechoslovakia, working for Himmelreich & Zwicker, a large textile manufacturer, as their export director. By 1933 he had joined Victoria Assurance in Reichenberg as Managing Director. My grandfather, Samuel, died suddenly around that time, at the age of 72, from an undiagnosed twisted bowel, leaving Granny Anna a widow at 68. Influenced by my father’s plans to leave, she too must have decided that Berlin was becoming too dangerous because she went to live with Freddy and his family in Reichenberg, which was near Prague. It was while she was there that my brother Claude, who was thirteen years old by then, and I went to visit her for the last time. I spent many hours with her in her room during the two or three weeks we were there. We talked about the family and the future, and she would read me poetry. I had an autograph book, which I asked her to sign. She took it from me with a smile and sat down to write: When once you are a grandmamma, and sit in therocking chair with Grandpapa and dream of your joyfulchildhood days, remember your Oma Annchen. I can still clearly remember saying goodbye to her after that visit on Prague Railway Station. I wanted to stay wrapped in her loving arms forever but eventually Claude had to take me by the hand and lead me to the departing train, otherwise it would have rolled away without us. I wouldn’t have minded missing the train at the time so that I could stay with Anna a little longer, but I knew in my heart that that was not going to be possible. I turned to wave to her all the way down the platform and then leaned out of the window once we had boarded and were pulling away, craning my neck for one last look at her small figure disappearing into the distance as the steam from the engine settled on the platform between us. My grandmother and I were very similar in appearance. She used to say that she saw her young self in me, maybe because we were both very sensitive and thoughtful in our characters, and we both liked writing poetry. I have older cousins who say they too can see the physical likeness now that I have reached the age that we all remember Granny Anna being. At the time we left she still had Uncle Freddy and his family with her, although I knew that my cousin, his daughter, Marlies, didn’t love her like I did. Soon, however, they would be gone too and she would be completely on her own. It was memories like those which were feeding the nightmares I was suffering from on our nights in the bomb shelter in Hampstead as the war we had been escaping from finally came to London. As late as 1937 my father and mother decided we should return to Europe to visit Anna back in Reichenberg because they were becoming increasingly concerned about her health. I had recently received a worrying letter from her: My Beloved Evchen, Again a year has vanished without my being able toembrace you, my loved ones. Two and a half years youhave been away from me. Health and all good wishes for1937. Your old oma is not well health wise. In thought avery heartfelt New Year. When they told me about the trip I was beside myself with excitement at the thought of seeing her after so long apart. Claude was still with us in 1937 and the four of us travelled first to Muhren in Switzerland. Our parents must have been talking to other people along the way who had more firsthand experience of what was going on in Czechoslovakia, or perhaps they were reading things in the papers that worried them, because they changed their minds at the last moment and left Claude and me in a hotel in Muhren and went on together without us. This was deeply upsetting for me after having built up my hopes of seeing Anna again. I think that going back was a big decision even for them but they played down their concerns for Anna in order not to frighten me any more than they had to. In fact at that stage I was more disappointed than frightened, having been so looking forward to seeing my grandmother again and still not fully realising the scale of any possible danger to any of us. My sadness at being left behind was lifted slightly on the morning that I came down to breakfast in the hotel and found my idol, the dancer and film star, Fred Astaire, sitting at the next table, but even that dreamlike encounter couldn’t lift my spirits for long. Anna was being very well looked after by her son, Freddy, and Czechoslovakia was still a safe haven, being so far away from the tyranny inside Germany. We returned to England but I had not been able to see my granny again. The situation in Europe deteriorated after that, especially when Hitler was allowed to march into and annex Austria without a fight. From then on we followed the news of the apparently unstoppable march of the German Army on the radio and in the newspapers. Opinion in England at that time was divided between those who believed that declaring war on Germany was our only hope of stopping their territorial ambitions and those who thought we should go for appeasement and do everything we could to avoid starting another war like the First World War, which had wiped out almost an entire generation of young men. My parents were firmly of the belief that however terrible war might be, Hitler could only be stopped by force and that sooner or later England would have to join in to protect itself from being invaded as well. For my mother the move to England had meant making huge adjustments to her status and lifestyle. To begin with she had no help in the house at all and found it hard to have to do everything for herself. My father, on the other hand, was just as comfortable in London as he had been in Berlin. He made friends with interesting people like the famous filmmaker, Alexander Korda and his brother. He had even got to know the Elgar family when he bought Sir Edward’s derelict Netherall Gardens home in 1935 from his daughter not long after the great composer died, with the intention of rebuilding it and selling it on. The house was just around the corner from where we were now living in a ground floor flat at 51 Fitzjohn’s Avenue. While clearing out the attic my father found an old and very valuable violin hidden. It was an emotional episode for the Elgar family when my father arranged for it to be reunited with his daughter. My father was endlessly intrigued by the English and they in turn seemed to be intrigued by him. His positive attitude to our new homeland rubbed off on me. ‘The English policeman,’ he told me soon after we arrived, ‘is your best friend. Not like a German policeman.’ I decided he was right when on my way to school, I first saw a London ‘Bobby’ at the end of my road, Fitzjohn’s Avenue, holding the hands of two schoolchildren whom he was helping to cross the road. From that moment on I never felt frightened or insecure in England, even with the Nazi threat building up just across the Channel, but I often thought about my grandmother and wondered what terrible fate might have befallen her. Certain that war would inevitably be coming to Britain as early as 1936 my father had reinforced the wine cellar of the new Elgar house and transformed it into an air-raid shelter, thinking that would add to its sales appeal. He had already knocked down the original house, rebuilding it together with three other houses on the huge site. When he showed the house, a year or so later, to the famous music hall star, Bud Flanagan (the other half of double act Flanagan and Allen), Flanagan saw the air-raid shelter and promptly stormed out with his wife, accusing my father of being a warmonger. In fact it was a blessing in disguise that the sale fell through because when the air raids did start we were able to walk the few steps round the corner and shelter safely in the cellar of our own house instead of having to sleep crammed in with the hundreds of poor folk seeking shelter on Hampstead’s underground station platforms. The station was reputed to have the deepest underground shaft in London. When the headmistress announced that Kingsley School was moving out of London in 1939 to the safety of rural Cornwall I absolutely refused to go with them. There was no way I was willing to be separated from my parents again. It was bad enough being separated from Granny Anna and worrying every day about what could have happened to her: I couldn’t have borne to be in that same situation with my entire family. I would have preferred to die with them in an air raid, if that was what was meant to be, than to be left alone in the world. My memory of being in Berlin on my own, not knowing where they were or what was happening to them, was still vivid and frightening. It made me all the more aware of how acutely my father and Uncle Freddy must be suffering from being unable to look after their own mother when she was living in such a dangerous place during such a cruel time. I prayed that I would never have to face a similar dilemma to the one forced on them when they had to leave her behind in Prague. When I turned sixteen in 1940 I became a legal adult, which meant there was a possibility I would be interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, an even more terrifying prospect than being evacuated to Cornwall. Just in time, however, the law changed and I was told I had to apply for an ‘alien’s book’ instead. This entailed my making an appearance on my birthday at Bow Street Magistrates Court in Mayfair so that I could be cleared of any suspicion that I might be a foreign agent. I was flanked by two huge policemen as I entered the courtroom as a possible spy, while my father waited nervously outside on a bench, my protector as always. ‘Did you belong to the Hitler Youth?’ the magistrate asked. ‘No,’ I replied, indignant at the very thought but trying not to show it. ‘Are you in touch with anyone in Germany?’ he went on. ‘No,’ I answered truthfully, silently thanking God that my father had had the foresight to ban me from writing any more letters to Lottie. When my father was called into the courtroom the only question the magistrate had for him was ironic. ‘Does she ever need a good spanking?’ he enquired. My father responded with a polite and relieved show of amusement and at the end of the hearing the Court granted me my alien’s book and spared me the horror of an internment camp. Once I had got used to the idea of its existence I didn’t think a great deal more about the mysterious pocket-book over the following years. There were so many other things to occupy the mind of a young woman growing up in London at the time. I liked the idea that we had such a romantic tale in our past, but once I had thought about it I could see the sense of my father’s warnings about keeping it a secret and not asking any more questions. How would it have sounded if I started telling my friends that I was descended from a Prussian prince? At best it would have sounded like the foolish fantasies of a romantic young girl, at worst it would have sounded boastful. And how could I have proved my story to any doubters anyway? He was right, I decided, it was better to just forget about it and get on with our lives in Hampstead where we enjoyed as good a life as was possible in the austere days of the war. 2 (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) GRANNY ANNA – No NEWS from PRAGUE (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) BY 1940, ALTHOUGH we barely dared to talk about it, I shared my father’s fears and sadness about Granny Anna. I had such wonderful memories of her, which were being kept vividly alive by the letters and cards she had been writing to me from Czechoslovakia after we first escaped to England. They were full of love but gave no clues as to what the future might hold in store for her now the Germans were occupying Prague and Uncle Freddy was in London with us. ‘To my beloved Evchen,’ she wrote in one (in German), which I still treasure to this day. I send you the heartiest wishes, my most beloved child. Isend you in spirit a thousand heartfelt kisses, enclosedthat my little grandchild shall be forever happy and shallstay healthy in body and soul and that in life her choiceswill always be right. That she remains her parents’ greatdelight and that God graciously guides the ways of herlife so that we will soon meet in peace again before yourOma must leave this earth. Your old true Grossmuttechen, Anna. In another she wrote: My beloved Evchen, how much I would like to see youagain my beloved child, and Claude. I cannot describe thelonging I have for you. After the German invasion her letters began to arrive via the Red Cross and not the normal post. They still gave us no clues as to what might really be happening to her or what terrors she might be enduring. She wouldn’t have wanted to burden anyone else with her worries anyway, particularly not her granddaughter. When the German Army invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, where Reichenberg was situated, Uncle Freddy and the family had fled to Prague, with Granny Anna, his wife Lotte, and his daughter. But it wasn’t long before the German troops were pouring into that city too. So they had to escape the country extremely fast to avoid capture. Uncle Freddy told me how he witnessed the soldiers arriving in the Wenceslas Platz and knew that they had to get away as quickly as they could, but that he realised it would have to be without his mother, my granny Anna. By that stage it was no longer possible for a Jewish family to travel across the borders openly and Freddy was forced to flee with his wife and daughter on foot, using a secret escape route over the border into Italy. They then journeyed on to join us in London, where they settled. When they arrived without Granny Anna I was devastated. I had been so sure they would bring her with them and I could hardly bear the thought of her being the only one of the family left behind. I was told that she had been quite adamant that she didn’t go with them, insisting that she was too old and arthritic to make the trip and that she would only be a liability to them. Uncle Freddy had eventually given in, seeing that he had no choice and hoping that an old lady living on her own in a city as big as Prague would not attract the attention of the Nazis. She hardly ever went out any more anyway, he reasoned, so how would they even know she was there? With any luck she would be able to live out her days in peace and comfort if he could find her somewhere pleasant to live. Whatever happened he knew he had to save his wife and child before it was too late, even if it meant he had to leave his mother to take her chances. Before he set out to Italy he went in search of an apartment for her in a good area of the city. A man called Dr Borakova agreed to take her in as a tenant in his attic flat in the Praha 6 district, which was an affluent area, containing most of the foreign embassies. If she was going to be safe anywhere, Uncle Freddy decided, this would be the place. He left her with as much money as he could find. Their final goodbyes between mother and son must have been heartbreaking for both of them, neither knowing if they would ever see the other alive again. For me the separation from Anna was profound: it felt as if part of my very being had just disappeared. Without any warning, after June 1942, there were no more letters. As each day passed I became more frozen with fear and more inconsolable. We were left with nothing but silence and not knowing, which made space for the darkest imaginings to invade our thoughts and dreams. We all pretended to hope for a while that it was just the war interrupting the postal services, including the Red Cross’s, but in our hearts I think we realised that something much worse had probably befallen her, although none of us wanted to put our fears into words and risk making them feel more real. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so helpless. I wanted to do something, to talk to my father or my mother but I knew I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been any use anyway because they didn’t know any more than I did. Although I was fearful for Anna, I was also consoled because I knew my father felt the same way. He must have been tortured all through this very difficult time by Anna’s fate, just as I was. I knew that he worried about her every minute of every hour of every day, wondering if she was alive or dead, fearing that she might even at this moment be being arrested by the Nazis or suffering unknown horrors in Auschwitz. Even when her letters and postcards had been arriving they were taking so long to travel between countries it was impossible to tell if something awful had happened to her in the meantime. Part of him must have desperately wanted to hear her voice and see her face again, while the other part must have been telling him to be thankful that we were all safely in England. Such thoughts must have made him feel like he was being torn in two by his conflicting loyalties to his mother and his past, and his responsibility to my mother and me and our lives in war-torn London. 3 (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) MEETING EMILIE (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) I WOKE UP on the morning of 1 May 1945, switched on the little wireless in my room as usual and heard the unbelievable news that Hitler was dead. At that moment, as the news sank in, I felt a deep emotional bond with the people of Britain, from Winston Churchill and the King all the way to our neighbours in Hampstead. I felt that I was finally free and the Nazi terror had been destroyed for good, leaving the world a safer and happier place. As far back as I could remember the horrible, threatening figure of Adolf Hitler had darkened my life and suddenly that dark cloud was lifted. Since 1940 I had been working in the Medici Gallery in Grafton Street, just off Bond Street. I had been in charge of their mail-order business which included supplying the royal family at Buckingham Palace, in particular the old Queen Mary. As well as meeting members of the European royal families I also got to meet other famous names like Winston Churchill’s wife, Clemmie, and the Hollywood star, Danny Kaye. I loved the work and the hardest part of the day was having to make my way home on my own each evening in the blackout. My relationship with my mother had matured steadily as I had grown up and we had become ever closer, with her treating me as an equal rather than a child. It seemed to me that her character had changed completely once she had become used to English life, and when she no longer had the responsibility and worry of bringing up children. We were becoming more like sisters as the years passed. My brother Claude was away in the army when my father had told me about the pocket-book, having already been stationed somewhere out in the country. Soon he would become a captain in the Royal Engineers, and would be sent on active service in India, where he remained for the rest of the war. He had studied architecture, following in the footsteps of our distinguished father, and had narrowly missed being interned for the duration of the war as an enemy alien. After the war he followed the family tradition by becoming an architect and in 1950 he emigrated to Toronto, Canada with his new wife Inge, contributing extensively to the building of the city. By then I had already married. I met Ken Haas for the first time at my cousin Freddie’s 21st birthday party in North London in 1946. Ken had also fled from Germany before the war, just as we had, so we shared many of the same experiences. He had impressed me immediately. He was a powerfully built and athletic man, not tall, but tough both physically and in spirit. He was 38 and I was 21 and I was instantly captivated by his forthright, spontaneous manner. He worked for a family firm of goldbeaters, George M. Whiley, in the West End of London, who made stamping foils. He was a good businessman and as their export director he built the company up over the years, eventually moving it into substantial factory premises in Ruislip. It was love at first sight and I married Ken in 1948, embarking on a long and happy partnership of more than forty years and producing three healthy sons, Anthony, Timothy and David. Ken was loving and devoted and you certainly could never grow bored in his company. Because of his job he was away travelling, sometimes up to five to six months of every year, which I found hard but in a way perhaps it strengthened our relationship even more. Bringing up three young boys, often on my own, there was little or no time to worry my head with romantic notions about who my ancestors might or might not have been: my attention was fully occupied in dealing with the complications of each day as it came, and planning for our family’s future. In 1955 tragedy struck my family again. My father, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with cancer. He was just 65 and it seemed too early to lose him. But lose him we did when he died nine months later in March 1956. I was devastated by the loss and I was far from being the only one. He was a greatly loved public figure and many wanted to mourn his passing. Our local paper, the Hampstead & Highgate Express, wrote a headline article announcing his death and the time and place of his funeral. It never occurred to any of us that by doing that they were also advertising the fact that my parents’ flat would be empty for at least a couple of hours while we were all at the crematorium in Golders Green. This allowed plenty of time for thieves to break in and turn out every drawer and cupboard in their search for hidden booty. It is the cruellest thing to do, to invade the privacy of a family just as they are at their most vulnerable with grief. We walked in from the ceremony, my Uncle Freddy carrying the urn containing my father’s ashes, just wanting to find some peace in which to compose ourselves after the ordeal, only to be confronted with a scene of total devastation. My mother’s look of horror at this invasion of her life, just when she had to get used to the idea of living alone, was heartbreaking. Believing that she might need someone there to support her, I followed my mother as she ran through to the bedroom, assuming that she wanted to check on some piece of family jewellery that might hold special sentimental value to her. But she seemed to have only one thing in mind as she ignored the clothes and other belongings strewn over the floor and headed for the dressing table. Rummaging through the debris she picked up a white envelope tied up with the green ribbon that I instantly recognised as being the one that held the ancient pocket-book. It was still in the same envelope from which my father had removed it the morning he had shown it to me sixteen years earlier. ‘Thank God,’ she said, holding it to her heart as if that were the only possession that mattered to her in the whole apartment, a last precious piece of my father that she could still cling to now that she no longer had the man himself. Seeing the passion with which she hugged that elegant little book to her heart rekindled the curiosity I had felt as a young girl when my father first dangled that tempting snippet of a story in front of me. I wondered if she might be willing to pass the book on to me now that my father had gone. He had, after all, said that it would be mine. ‘Mother,’ I ventured cautiously, ‘Father said I—’ ‘He also said not to go looking, Eve,’ she interrupted me, obviously guessing exactly what I was about to say, quickly composing herself, realising that she had allowed me to see too clearly how important the book was to her. ‘But I—’ ‘It’s just a notebook,’ she said, swiftly pushing the envelope back into its hiding place. ‘Mother, please. I’m not a child any more. Why do you keep the book hidden away? What are you afraid of?’ ‘I’m afraid of you making a fool of yourself, poking around for answers that can’t be found. The story ended with your grandmother. This talk of your father is upsetting me. Come on, let’s go back to the others.’ Realising this was not the moment to press her, I immediately fell silent, but our voices must have carried further than I realised because a little while later, once we had cleared up the worst of the mess from the robbery, my Uncle Freddy took me to one side and whispered out of my mother’s earshot. ‘Come round to my house tomorrow and I’ll show you something.’ That night I stayed with my mother in the flat, not wanting to leave her on her own after a day of so much emotional turmoil. It would be terrible for her to be lying awake on her own, listening to every sound, wondering if the thieves were returning, thinking about my father and the years that now stretched ahead without him. I wanted her to know that I would always be there for her when she needed me. The following day, unable to suppress my curiosity a moment longer, I took a train to Norbury in South London to visit Uncle Freddy. ‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ he said, once he was certain I was comfortable, almost nonchalantly handing me a miniature painting of a pretty, auburn-haired young girl. She was wearing a formal red dress that showed off her shoulders despite an attempt by the artist to hide them with an artfully placed gossamer-like white shawl. This was such a profound moment for me after so many years of allowing myself to indulge in occasional romantic daydreams, before forcing myself to pushing those thoughts out of my mind in case they encouraged me to make a stand and try to get to the bottom of my family mystery once and for all. As I stared at the picture, mesmerised by her beauty, it felt as if Emilie were beckoning me into her life. Her soulful eyes stared directly at me from the tiny picture frame, a slight smile playing on her delicate lips, giving her an innocent, questioning look. ‘That’s her,’ he said, seeing my gaze locking on to Emilie’s face. I could never have imagined what a powerful effect that tiny portrait would have on me. In that instant I knew that this girl wouldn’t be easy to let go, not easy at all. Uncle Freddy had lost me for a while but after a few moments my attention returned to the room and I became aware of what he was telling me. ‘This is Emilie Gottschalk. She was your great, great grandmother, the one to whom Prince August wrote the dedication in the notebook that your mother has.’ I remembered my father mentioning that his brother had a portrait of Emilie, but actually seeing this pretty little face peeking out at me suddenly revived all the curiosity I had felt as a young girl when he first told me the story. ‘What do we know about her?’ I asked, hypnotised by the sight of this young woman who was my direct ancestor and who had lived at the very heart of the Prussian Court at a time when it was central to European history. ‘All we know is that she was young when she met the Prince, only fifteen years old. He on the other hand was in his fifties by then and was already an enormously wealthy, powerful and famous man. Despite the age gap it was a great love match. They stayed together for eleven years until he died. We believe she was the daughter of a Jewish tailor and we know that she and the Prince had a daughter, Charlotte, who was my mother’s mother. Your father and I knew our grandmother Charlotte in our childhood, and she used to tell us things, dropping tiny hints that we never really understood. But that is all we know and it is just not possible to find out any more.’ It sounded like the perfect fairy tale, the simple young tailor’s daughter who captured the heart of a great prince, like a sort of Prussian Pygmalion, but I couldn’t understand why everyone in the family kept stressing that these few facts were all that was known about the story. Surely a real-life fairy tale like this would have been talked about and written about in court papers of the time, and in history books ever since. ‘Is that really all we know?’ I asked, still without taking my eyes off her young face. ‘We do have this,’ he went on, passing me an elderly sepia photograph of another woman, middle-aged and stately of build, dressed like Queen Victoria. ‘This is Charlotte, Emilie’s daughter, and Anna’s mother. She was my grandmother and your great grandmother.’ I felt a catch in my throat as I tried to speak, remembering my grandmother again, who I had last seen waving to me and my brother on that railway platform in Prague. The photograph seemed to revive all the nightmares and fears I was storing at the back of my mind. Uncle Freddy was gazing at the picture with the same intensity that I was. ‘Charlotte once said to your father, when he was still quite small, “I am really a Duchess, you know, and I only ever travel anywhere first class.” And we both heard her talk about memories from when she was very little, when she told us she used to play wild games on the floor of a grand room somewhere in Berlin, with her father who was “a great prince”. She kept saying that “her whole life had changed completely” when she was five, but that was all she would ever tell us. If we tried to question her any further she would fall silent, almost as though, even as an older woman, she was still very reluctant to say more, or as if she didn’t really know herself what had happened between her parents when she was a small child.’ I went back to staring at the portrait, imagining the young girl sitting for the artist, trying to take in the fact that I was viewing the result of his handiwork more than 140 years after his brush strokes had dried. I was secretly hoping that if I stared hard enough at her face, Emilie’s spirit might reveal some clues as to what had happened to her and the other members of her family that could have led to Anna’s final predicament in Prague, whatever that might have been. ‘What about the rest of the Gottschalks?’ I asked, trying to piece the whole story together in my head and make sense of it. ‘Where is the family? What about their other descendants?’ ‘They don’t exist,’ Uncle Freddy said. ‘When Charlotte married their name completely disappeared.’ ‘Didn’t anyone think that was a bit strange?’ He shrugged. ‘There wasn’t much we could do about it. There are no records, no papers. There is just this picture and the pocket-book which my brother received. A lot of Jewish families have disappeared in Europe over the last century for one reason or another.’ I left Uncle Freddy’s house that day feeling inspired. Now I had a clear picture of Emilie in my head and I knew for certain that she had existed. I also knew that she and Prince August had been devoted to one another and lived together for eleven years until his death, but frustratingly that was all I knew. It was another unfinished family story, like the mystery of what might have happened to Granny Anna. Again I went back to my normal daily life, allowing the tale of August and Emilie to slip to the back of my mind. If my parents and my uncle were all in agreement that the story should be allowed to rest then who was I to argue with them? I certainly didn’t want to upset my mother by going against her wishes. From time to time I would remember the story, but over the coming years I was too busy being a wife and mother to give too much thought to an event that had taken place more than a century before. 4 (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) The CALL to ADVENTURE (#u93275aaf-a0cd-56d0-98d8-380583834cba) MY MOTHER CONTINUED living on her own in the same flat for another fourteen years after my father died. She was a fighter. Like Anna she too had arthritis in her hip. Operations had only just started in those days and were not as easy or reliable as they are today, so she limped around slowly, sometimes in great pain. Despite this, she always managed to visit us in Highgate regularly and her passing left a great void in my life. Her 77th birthday celebration on 4 October 1969 was a wonderful family occasion, but sadly it would be her last. Soon a burst ulcer, followed by a stroke, meant a six-month stay in Hampstead’s New End Hospital, which was where she remained until she died on 24 April 1970. I visited her bedside virtually every day and I was 46 years old when she finally passed away. By now I was living in Highgate in my second family home since moving out of the Fitzjohn’s Avenue flat, which had been my mother’s home for the past 36 years since we had fled Berlin. Before I even opened the front door I knew instinctively that the memories inside could easily swamp me if I let them. But my job that day was to sort out my mother’s possessions in preparation for selling the flat and I knew I must stick to it, however hard the task might be. I felt I somehow owed it to both my parents to uphold the family tradition of stoicism. The moment I stepped over the threshold I found myself drawn straight to the front room, where we had breakfasted on that day 28 years earlier when my father had presented me with the revelations about my family’s past and where we gathered after my father’s funeral amidst the chaos of the burglary. I paused in silent memory and looked around, drinking in the many familiar details of my younger life. Although I had often asked my mother about the pocket-book after my father’s death, she had always refused to hand it over. Now I prayed that it was still lying in the cupboard where I last saw her place it after my father’s funeral fourteen years before. My fear was that she might have thought better of it and hidden it somewhere else, hoping perhaps that it would lie undiscovered. Or, worst of all, was it possible that she had destroyed it? I pushed such negative thoughts aside, took a deep breath and headed for the bedroom. The old oak dressing table was still there, in the same place near the window where it had always been. I felt like I was treading on hallowed ground. The urge to see the book again was suddenly overwhelming. I pulled out the first drawer and rummaged a little, but there was nothing. Then the next one. Oh my God! There it was, still in the same yellowing envelope, tied up with the same piece of green ribbon. Thirty years after my father first told me that I would be the next keeper of the family secret, it had finally reached my hands. Opening the envelope with a slightly shaky hand I gingerly slid the pocket-book out, sitting down to read the inscription that the Prince had written with the very pencil that still remained attached to the book. At last it had come to me and the feeling was overpowering. The small book was finally passing on to a new generation just as my father had wanted. I was excited and, above all, I was honoured that I had been chosen to become the guardian of this ‘forbidden fruit’, our mysterious family legacy. I carefully turned over the pages, studying each one. The words on the inside pages after the Prince’s inscription must have been written by Charlotte, Anna’s mother, when she was still probably very young, perhaps during the years just after her life ‘changed dramatically’, as she had told my father and uncle when they were boys. The childishly written words were still as clear as when I first glimpsed them at the breakfast table with my father, even though they had been scribbled in pencil, the same little metal pencil that I had just pulled out from its place in the spiral spine of the book, its home for over a century. I actually tested it. It still worked after all those years. I put it back and pored over Charlotte’s words again. ‘My beloved mother gave me a new dress at Whitsun …’ said one note. ‘This book belonged to my beloved mother,’ read another and there were other hurried jottings about appointments and daily chores, some quite lengthy; giving tiny glimpses into this mysterious and vanished world, written by a little girl who had no idea what life held in store for her or for her future children and grandchildren, a girl who apparently didn’t even fully understand what had happened in her own past. Perhaps she did know and was sworn to secrecy. Or was she hiding some terrible secret? As I sat there in the silence of the empty flat, surrounded by all the familiar furnishings and belongings that I had known all my life and the smells I had breathed in every day as I grew up, I experienced an overwhelming urge to know more about Emilie and Charlotte. I wanted to find out why they and the rest of the Gottschalk family had been expunged from history, only allowed to live on in the oral stories of our family, as if they were some sort of guilty and dangerous secret from the past. I wanted to meet these two other women who had held this book in their hands and hear their stories, or to at least read them. I wanted to find out how this romantic sounding prince came to be with a Jewish tailor’s daughter. I took a taxi home that late spring evening, lost in thought. I didn’t make much of the pocket-book find to Ken when I got in. In fact I played it down, simply explaining the few details that my father and Uncle Freddy had told me. I could see that he was having trouble taking the whole story in, but he offered to look after the diary for me and put it away in a safe place. I was happy for him to do that because I knew I needed some time to think about what I wanted to do next. Now that I had become the custodian of this extraordinary piece of history, what should my game plan be? The boys would have to be told about the heirloom, just as I had been all those years before, but perhaps not yet. There seemed to be so many unanswered questions. Why did my mother never let me have the little book while she was alive? She was sitting right there the day that my father said he wanted me to have it, so why would she have hesitated for even a second to give it to me once he was gone? I couldn’t understand it. Now she had left us, poor soul, I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of taking advantage and going against her wishes. And the idea of disobeying my father still seemed out of the question. I struggled to push away the urges I was feeling to do something about the book. But time marches on once a life has ended and there was so much to do and much more to distract me, so again I let the pocket-book slip to the back of my mind. The pain of my mother’s final battle still hurts even today as I think about her and my father and everything they did for Claude and me. If it hadn’t been for Father’s foresight, I wouldn’t be here. We would have perished in Europe just like so many millions of other Jews. I still had no way of knowing for sure what had happened to Granny Anna. As far as I knew she had disappeared without trace, just like Emilie and her Gottschalk family. It was all so very strange and unsettling. Three years passed, the sadness of loss softened and one day it felt like everything had changed. Having recently retired, Ken was busying himself with consultancy work. At 60 he was still fit and healthy and bursting with plans for the future. The boys had their own lives; Anthony was 23, Timothy 20 and David 13. I had more time on my hands and more space in my mind for old thoughts to rise to the surface. One day I decided to retrieve the pocket-book from Ken’s cupboard and to seek refuge with it for a few hours, sitting at my bureau in the spare room upstairs. The moment I opened the delicate book and turned over each yellowing page, I felt my grandmother reaching out to me down the years. It was as if the book were our conduit, our link to one another; it felt as if she were beckoning me on to do something. I instinctively knew then that it was time for me to act, to dig deep and excavate our family’s past, but I realised that whatever I did, I wouldn’t be able to do it without the help and support of my family. Mother had never discussed Anna’s fate with me, nor anybody else as far as I knew. Anna’s Red Cross letters had stopped coming in spring 1942, that was the last I knew or had heard. Had she died in Auschwitz with millions of others? Was she so fragile she didn’t even make it to the camps? We knew that all food was scarce and she had little money. The pocket-book was only safe because she had passed it to my father before she left Berlin for Czechoslovakia. She need not have done that, she could have held on to it like my mother did. It wouldn’t have been in my hands now if she had. I felt like it had come to me for a reason and I wondered if maybe Anna wanted me to have it eventually. Whatever the truth of it, I owed it to her to find out what lay behind the fairy-tale. My father’s words took on a whole new meaning now. The more I thought about them the more I felt compelled to find out why nothing was written, why nothing existed, and this little pocket-book was all I now had to go on. I felt torn in half but unable to talk about my dilemma to anyone. I knew that Ken believed I should obey my father’s wishes and not go hunting for more information, and I didn’t feel I could talk to my sons about it without imposing the same strictures on them that my father had placed on me. It was as if the secret could not be passed on to a new generation without the same strings being attached. My thoughts were in a turmoil as I remembered clearly how both my mother and my father had expressly urged me not to look into the family history and how my Uncle Freddy had repeated the fact that there was nothing more to find. I had never even considered disobeying any instruction that my father gave me in the past. But they were all gone now, I reasoned, all three of them, just like Anna and Charlotte and Emilie, all of whom must have been instructed to guard the family secrets in just the same way, although I couldn’t imagine why that might have been. Things were different in Europe from the time when my father first gave me the warning. I had grown used to living a safe and secure life in London, I was not fearful of the consequences of lifting a few stones to see what might lie underneath. It didn’t seem possible to me that there wouldn’t be some clues hidden away somewhere in the files, which would explain what had happened in my family’s past. More than a century of European history and upheaval had gone by since the events around the pocket-book had unfurled, surely it was all history now. What harm could possibly come from trying to uncover a few hidden facts, just for the record? I was a mature woman in my forties, I told myself firmly, who was capable of making my own decisions about such things without asking for the permission of my parents. It was the 1970s after all, and we no longer lived in the dangerous times that they had had to endure and that had shaped their characters to make them so cautious about everything. We were living in a safe and tolerant country where freedom of information and freedom of speech were amongst our most prized entitlements. It was time for these secrets to be uncovered and for a light to be shone into the goings on of the Prussian royal family in order to see what had led to their creation. I knew absolutely nothing about Prussian history for that period even though it was where my family had sprung from. What sort of life would Emilie have led, having been catapulted right into the heart of such an exalted royal family at such a young age? And what could it have been like for her child to be forced to return after such a life to what appeared to be obscurity? I believed that these women had been ignored and forgotten for long enough. I was indignant on their behalf and felt it was my duty to go looking for them and to tell their stories to the world, if the world was interested in listening. Anna, my grandmother, had almost certainly been murdered by the Nazi killing machine and she, as much as her mother and grandmother, deserved to have her family story told. In one of the last letters my granny wrote to me from Prague she had wished that I would be guided to ‘make the right choices’, and I felt a growing conviction taking hold that this was the right choice. I didn’t exactly know what was guiding me to follow this path, but it felt like it was the spirits of Emilie, Charlotte and Anna. It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to break the news of my decision to Ken. I hoped to be able to convince him that once he had more time on his hands it would be fun for him to join me in the hunt. I told myself it would give him something new to focus on, even though I knew in my heart that he had a deep reluctance about going back to anything that was to do with his past, including going to Germany itself. Like me he had been born in Germany and had had a difficult time escaping and getting his family to safety. I knew I was going to have to work hard to find a way of infecting him with my own enthusiasm for the project. ‘That diary that I told you about,’ I said, as casually as I could one day. ‘The one that belonged to my great, great grandmother and had that inscription from Prince August in the front.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, blissfully unaware of what I was leading up to. ‘Of course I remember you talking about it. I have it in my cupboard.’ ‘I’m going to do some research into it.’ ‘Into what?’ Ken asked, more interested in reading his newspaper than in listening to whatever I was trying to tell him. ‘Your father said it was futile, didn’t he? That there was nothing else there to be found.’ ‘I’ve made an appointment for us to meet with an expert from Burke’s Peerage,’ I confessed, hoping that if I said it fast enough he wouldn’t object. ‘Tomorrow.’ ‘What will that achieve?’ he asked, finally giving up any hope of reading and lowering his paper in order to interrogate me more effectively. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they might be able to confirm if it actually is the Prince’s handwriting in the inscription. And perhaps they could tell us a bit about his life and even something about Emilie. It seems worth a try.’ ‘Very well,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘I just hope you won’t be disappointed, that’s all.’ I smiled to myself as he disappeared back behind the newspaper. I was sure if I could only find a way of catching his interest he would become as intrigued as I was. He just hadn’t had time to think about it yet. I had called Burke ’s Peerage in the first place because I knew they were the world’s greatest heraldic specialists and experts in the European aristocracy. They had been very helpful and given me the name of their heraldic expert, Jeffrey Finestone. Mustering all my courage, I had then called him. ‘I have a diary that once belonged to Prince August of Prussia,’ I said, expecting to have to work hard to convince such a distinguished expert to show an interest, ‘which he has inscribed in his own hand.’ ‘Prince August?’ he said, the immediate excitement in his voice surprising me. ‘I would love to see that. Do please bring it to show me as soon as possible.’ We had made a date to meet in his flat, which was not far from us in Hampstead. When the day came we found he had also invited a colleague, David Williamson, to hear my story. Mr Williamson was a man who used to appear on television as an expert in heraldic matters and genealogy; his expertise and knowledge covered handwriting and Prussian history. He said he would be able to give a second opinion and verify whatever might be said or seen. Realising that I was not going to be easily put off from my quest, and probably hoping that the experts would dismiss my foolish fancies out of hand so that he would be able to resume the peaceful retirement he had been looking forward to, Ken agreed to accompany me to the meeting despite his misgivings. As soon as we arrived at Mr Finestone’s elegant flat, he took the diary off me the moment we were through the door and sitting down. Turning it reverentially over in his hands he and his colleague squinted at it with barely disguised anticipation. ‘Forgive me for being cagey,’ he said, ‘but I have been disappointed so many times before. Would you excuse us for a moment? We just need to check on something.’ The two of them then disappeared into another room to study the book and confer in private, leaving Ken and me to wait in silence. When they came back in neither man could hide their glee. ‘This is quite sensational,’ Mr Finestone bubbled. ‘We have investigated the handwriting in the inscription. It is indeed his handwriting, and your book would have belonged to him, the Prince August of Prussia, a member of the ruling Hohenzollern family and a nephew of Frederick the Great, the famous King. We can be quite certain of that. He would have written the inscription, although the actual signature would have been done by someone else. That would have been added by another hand afterwards. Such measures were often taken in those days to disguise and hide the truth of matters. It is this obsession with secrecy and disguise that makes historians’ jobs all the harder, but in the end, of course, all the more fascinating. Do you know much about the Prince?’ ‘I have tried to find out a bit,’ I said, but he wasn’t really listening, eager to show off his own knowledge of the subject. ‘He wasn’t just the youngest nephew of Frederick the Great, he is also the forgotten hero of the Napoleonic wars. He was an immense historical figure of his time, incredibly wealthy and a mighty warrior prince. It would be impossible to overstate how important and influential a man he was, and this is most definitely his handwriting. How on earth did you come to own such a rare gem?’ I explained the family connection and about how determined I had become to find out more about Emilie’s life despite my parents’ warnings that I would be wasting my time. They seemed to be amazed to find out about the liaison and an unofficial marriage. They didn’t seem to know anything about the Prince’s private life or about Emilie’s existence or the fact that they had a child together. ‘Well, Mrs Haas,’ he said when I had finished, ‘apart from Liechtenstein and the principality of Monaco, I can safely say that you are related to every royal family in Europe. Prince August, you see, was the great grandson of George I of England. You are also directly descended from Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James I.’ At that moment I froze. What a revelation this was, but I didn’t want to reveal any of my real feelings. Ken was standing right next to me, what was he thinking? Then in his typical style Ken gave me a playful pinch. ‘I don’t remember it being in the marriage contract that I was marrying a princess,’ he piped up. ‘It’s Emilie I’m really interested in finding, Mr Finestone,’ I reminded him, ignoring Ken’s interruption. ‘And their daughter, Charlotte.’ ‘Finding out anything about either of them will not be an easy task, Mrs Haas,’ he started gushing again, ‘not easy at all. At the end of August’s life, in the mid-nineteenth century, all evidence of his past completely disappeared in the most mysterious circumstances. And of course now we have the problem of so much of the archive being stored behind the Berlin Wall in the East. It seems incredible that a man who must have had every aspect of his life written about in so much detail should simply disappear from the records, but that is exactly what happened. The East Germans absolutely refuse to cooperate in opening up their files. Historians from all over the world have been trying to find out about him throughout the last hundred years, with no success whatsoever. It is as if there were nothing written about him at all, yet he was one of the greatest Prussians who ever lived. It’s quite possible the records have been destroyed but if there is anything still in existence no one has been able to find it. ‘You must go to West Berlin, Mrs Haas. I urge you to visit the archive in Dahlem and beg them for help. You really must try and find out what happened to your great, great grandfather and grandmother. You have an extremely rare piece of history in your possession here. For Prince August, a leading member of the royal Hohenzollern dynasty, to live for eleven years with the daughter of a Jewish tailor simply cannot be explained.’ ‘It’s really just a family heirloom,’ Ken said when Mr Finestone eventually paused for breath. He was obviously not keen to see me being encouraged to go against my father’s wishes to keep our family secrets low-key and private. ‘Oh, it’s much, much more than that, Mr Haas,’ Mr Finestone assured him. ‘This book belonged to the warrior prince. He fought and defeated Napoleon and became the wealthiest man in Prussia. Your wife could have the key that unlocks the whole puzzle. A puzzle which has defeated all the most learned historians in the world.’ ‘If this were my diary,’ Mr Williamson chipped in, ‘I would be attempting to analyse it completely. I would want to find out everything I could about it.’ ‘You really should make this public,’ Mr Finestone said. ‘Absolutely,’ his friend agreed. ‘We would love to be part of it with you. Do please go public.’ ‘My wife wishes this to be kept private,’ Ken jumped in, obviously surprised and realising for the first time just how significant the little book was. ‘She doesn’t want the whole world to know her private family business.’ ‘That’s right,’ I assured them all. ‘It’s only Emilie, my great, great grandmother who I am really interested in at the moment. I want to find out how she came to be in this position and what happened to her after the Prince died.’ ‘Indeed. Anti-Semitism was almost official in Berlin at that time,’ Mr Finestone said. ‘For a Prussian prince to get together with a Jewish girl …’ He petered out, unable to find sufficient words to express the level of his amazement at such a thought. ‘Do go to Berlin, Mrs Haas. I would if it were me. You have an extremely rare piece of history here. This is really exciting. You mustn’t allow it to slip through your fingers.’ I came away from that meeting high on excitement at the possibilities of the adventure that I could now see lying ahead of me. To have had the inscription verified as being from the hand of the Prince himself was an enormous step forward. It meant that the story my father had told me had not been a mere fairy tale, passed hopefully down the generations. I was genuinely linked to this great historical figure. He was my own blood, and I knew that now there would be nothing that could stop me from continuing my search. It was as if Mr Finestone and his friend had given me permission to set off on my quest. I put my father’s warnings about not pursuing the truth to the back of my mind, reasoning that they had been made because he hadn’t wanted me to make a fool of myself and from the perspective of a very different time in history, telling myself that Mr Finestone and his friend had more than confirmed that I wouldn’t be doing that and that it was my duty to Anna and to posterity as well. If I didn’t embark on this it was hardly likely that anyone else could or would and then the truth might never come to the surface. This book was genuine and it could hold the key to solving a great historical mystery. Without even asking him, I could tell that Ken was not nearly as keen as I was. I suspect that inside he was cursing Mr Finestone for giving me so much encouragement. I think he could see clearly that there was a danger that this hunt was going to take over both my life and his and that it could take us to dangerous places. He had been hoping for a quiet life after decades of working hard, the last thing he wanted was to stir up trouble for himself and his family. ‘You have the diary,’ he said when I eventually forced him to tell me what was going through his mind. ‘Isn’t that enough?’ I knew better than to argue. I needed to save my ammunition for later. My spirits were riding too high for me to be willing to be discouraged now and I told myself I would work out how to bring Ken on board later. I was intending to contact every possible expert I could think of to try to discover where this missing information had been buried and to work out how it had all been hushed up so successfully. Who, I wanted to know, had instructed that Prince August and Emilie should be erased from the history books, and why? A few days after our visit to his flat, to my sheer delight I received a letter from Mr Finestone containing a neatly drawn up family tree written in his own hand. I could see my name linked directly to the Prince and Emilie and through them to the English and Prussian royal families. It was then that the penny really dropped. He obviously wanted to confirm in my mind just how important an historical item he thought the notebook was, although by then I didn’t need any more encouragement to keep up the hunt. One of the first calls I made as soon as we got home was to the Central Archive in the Dahlem District of West Berlin, just as Mr Finestone had instructed. ‘Prince August of Prussia?’ the unemotional voice at the other end of the line said. ‘No, we have nothing.’ I was surprised that he was able to tell me that so easily, without even having to go away and check, so I could only assume he had been asked the same question before and had already searched in vain. To counteract my initial disappointment I reminded myself that Mr Finestone had warned me that all information about the Prince was mysteriously missing. This reaction was therefore only to be expected. His excitement had temporarily led me to forget that the hunt for Emilie was not going to be easy; the call to Dahlem immediately set me straight on that. I was obviously going to come up against all the same brick walls as he and the other historians before him had encountered. ‘The only place where they are likely to have anything,’ the bored voice continued, ‘is in the East, at their Merseburg archive. But the East Germans have helped nobody, and have blocked all attempts from the West to get access to their papers. We know that they have files on the Hohenzollern royal family but I cannot imagine that they will be willing to open them up for you.’ The early 1970s were an era when the Cold War was still at its height with everyone in the West living under the two great perceived threats of communism and nuclear war, just as today we are persuaded to live in fear of terrorism and global warming. The very thought of having to have anything to do with the sinister East Germans was particularly chilling for people like Ken and me who had already escaped one totalitarian regime in our lives, but still I seized at this straw. If I didn’t at least try asking the authorities in Merseburg, I would never know for sure what their response would be. With the help of the West German embassy I managed to get a telephone number for the Merseburg archive and dialled it nervously. It took a few minutes of clicking and buzzing before the line connected and the number rang. It continued to ring for what seemed like an age and I was on the verge of hanging up and trying again when an ill-tempered voice answered. ‘Put your request in writing,’ the woman snapped as, with my heart in my mouth, I started to tell her what I was after – and then the phone line went dead. It seemed I had already exhausted her patience by daring to ask for her assistance. Only momentarily discouraged by her surly response, I sat down and wrote them a letter as the woman had suggested, requesting a meeting and asking for access to their files. Even as I punched the words out on the typewriter I knew it was a triumph of hope over experience, but I wasn’t about to let a single opportunity pass me by in my search. I posted the letter and resigned myself to having to wait some time for an answer. Still unwilling to accept that there really was no information about Prince August anywhere in the Western world, I trawled every library I could find over the following months as I waited for a response from the East. Not even the British Library, which boasts that it has a copy of every book ever printed, was able to turn anything up. Every librarian I recruited to my cause started out fired with enthusiasm and certain they would be able to turn up some clue that would move me forward. But they all ended up coming back shaking their heads, as disappointed as I was at their inability to help unearth any more pieces of the puzzle. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/eve-haas/the-secrets-of-the-notebook-a-royal-love-affair-and-a-woman-s-que/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.