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