The Secrets Of The Notebook

By Eve Haas

The Secrets of the Notebook: A Woman’s Quest to Uncover Her Royal Family Secret is a nonfiction mystery, with history and aspects of a love story, all wrapped up with a satisfying conclusion. Eve Haas spent thirty years searching for an explanation as to why her great-great-grandfather’s family had apparently disappeared from historical records.

She was born Eve Jaretzki in 1924 and spent her childhood in Berlin. “I remember Hitler coming to power and wearing my ‘Ja for Hitler’ sticker with the same enthusiasm as all the other children,” she writes. “I was nine years old when I huddled beside the wireless listening to Hitler’s victory speech, unnerved by the somber mood of the adults all around me and finding it hard to understand why their fears were so great.” Then, walking home from school one day, she “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.” Her Jewish parents escaped with her and her brother to London in 1934, leaving behind the elderly grandmother, Anna Jaretzki. They made a new life for themselves in England.

In 1940, on Eve’s sixteenth birthday, her father showed her the notebook he’d received from his mother, Anna. It had been passed down by Anna’s mother, Charlotte, who received it from her parents, Prince August and Emilee. That’s when Haas learned her family was descended from Prince August of Prussia, hero of the Napoleonic wars and member of the Hohenzollern family. A nephew of Frederick the Great, he had apparently married a Jewish girl against the king’s wishes.

When the Jaretzki family stopped hearing from Anna in 1942, they assumed she’d been killed in the Holocaust. As Haas would learn years later (in 2005), Anna died anonymously in the crowded Theresienstadt prison camp, even though she was “the direct descendant of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Prussian princes who ever lived, a member of a family that Hitler himself held in the highest possible regard.”

Eve Jaretzki married Ken Haas and raised a family in London. As Eve Haas, she pursued a career as a writer of children’s books. It was not until 1973, after her parents died and her husband retired, that she decided to find out what had happened to Emilee, Charlotte, and Anna. The Secrets of the Notebook is the story of the search and discoveries she and Ken made over the following years.

This book held my attention throughout, both the travel experiences and the successful unraveling of the mystery. As German-born Jews, the Haases put themselves at risk by going behind the Iron Curtain. “You were born in East Germany,” Ken tells Eve in an attempt to change her mind. “They could hold you there forever if they chose to. Just the thought of being within their reach is unbearable, don’t you understand that?” But she was willing to take the risk, and because he loved her, he went with her.

After flying from London to West Berlin, they drove their rented Mercedes through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. “These streets had once been as much a part of the beautiful, prosperous city I had been brought up in as the ones in the western sector that we were leaving,” Haas writes, “but it looked like that area had had its heart eaten out and that nobody had cared for it.” They stuck meticulously to the speed limit. “The last thing we wanted to do was give the police any excuse to pull us over and demand to see our paperwork,” she says. “Any hitch like that could end up delaying us for the whole day or might even precipitate the arrest that the consul had warned us about.”

They eventually received permission to visit the Merseburg Archive, where Prince August’s records were stored. But when they checked into an East German hotel, their passports were confiscated and not returned for three days. “The thought of going outside and being stopped by the police, without having any papers to show who we were, was even less attractive than remaining imprisoned in the hotel,” Haas writes. “Without our passports, we couldn’t even return to the West to wait in comfort until things were sorted out by the police. I could tell that this was fueling all of Ken’s worst fears, but he didn’t say anything.”

Haas provides a history lesson as she summarizes the life and history of Prince August found in the papers that had been hidden since his death in 1843. Although she never learns why the records were hidden, she does discover that Emilee was royal and not Jewish. August and Emilee, who feared for the safety of their infant daughter, had hidden Charlotte’s identity by recording her birth as a daughter of a Jewish tailor.

Haas describes the journeys and research and people they met over the years, along with the waiting and frustration. “We had come all this way to visit August’s family’s former home,” she says at one point, “only to find that the East German establishment still wanted to forget that Prince August had ever existed. It seemed there would never be an end to the layers of mystery surrounding the family.” She and Ken become acquainted with her distant relatives, the descendents from August’s first two marriages.

The Secrets of the Notebook focuses on the story at hand, without wandering to unrelated aspects of Haas’s life and family. We experience the setbacks and discoveries of her family history along with her and Ken. I highly recommend this engaging and informative story.