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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ