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

‘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.

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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.

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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.