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.
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