The Secrets of the Notebook: A Woman's Quest to Uncover Her Royal Family Secret

Prologue

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 Berlin 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 that 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 my life—August your protector.

I looked up inquiringly, 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 asked 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 continued 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 notebook 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 all right. I knew he was partly hoping that if she did get arrested 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 good-bye 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 traveled, 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 since she insisted 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 anymore 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-sized notebook 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 to this day feel touched and honored 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

1

GOOD-BYE BERLIN—HELLO HAMPSTEAD

MOST OF THE EARLY YEARS of my life were spent in the political turmoil of Berlin. I was born on my father’s birthday, June 26, 1924. My mother went into labor in a state of shock, having been informed by her sister, Fridl, that the Berlin evening paper had announced 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 traveling 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 hay wagon 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 Buick 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 the car 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 truck 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 my father 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 notebook, 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, a German soldier, 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. 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 practiced in Berlin. Very sadly, after a long and distinguished career the last remaining of these, Frank Jarrett, died in California in 2009, aged ninety-eight. His son, Norman, carries on the family tradition. Some of their buildings exist today, despite nearly 80 percent of Berlin having been destroyed during the Second World War first by Allied bombs and later by the Russian tanks as they invaded, forcing Hitler’s final line of defense to capitulate and surrender. After Hans was injured in 1917, 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, soft-spoken and thoughtful, different from 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 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, Fraulein Mueller, who snatched the treasured figures away when 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 the coins up before the pair waved their good-byes. 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. 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 paramilitary 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 somber 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 rumors 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 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 Kähne looked taller and prouder 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.

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 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 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, there was always a squabble now for one of us to have the honor 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 Kähne 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