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

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 Kähne 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 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 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 Führer 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 Führer’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.