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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       The CALL to ADVENTURE

      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 СКАЧАТЬ