Читать книгу The Secrets of the Notebook: A royal love affair and a woman’s quest to uncover her incredible family secret - Eve Haas - Страница 13

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.