I CAREFULLY HID MY ANXIETIES FROM Ken, as I crept into our front room day after day to watch the mailman making his way up the road toward us. Each time he approached our front door, I wrestled with my emotions, wondering whether he would realize my dreams and deliver the treasured prize from Merseburg. After ten days of mail watching, and hiding my disappointment when a letter failed to show up, an envelope from the archive suddenly appeared, just when the minister’s letter dropped on our doorstep. Picking it up off the mat with trepidation, I gave it a surreptitious squeeze, hoping to feel a microfiche inside, but even before I opened it I knew that it was only a letter. Ken was standing beside me as I carefully slit open the envelope, unfolded the letter, and read it out loud:
Your two hundred and seventy-five documents are now ready, and they will be forwarded to you immediately on receipt of the documents from Washington.
There was no invoice. I didn’t know whether to laugh at the ludicrousness of their attempt to recruit Ken for their impossible mission, or to cry at my disappointment at yet another delay in finding out what had happened to my ancestors. It seemed they had decided to ignore Ken’s refusal to be recruited for their secret mission to Washington and intended to continue as if it were going forward.
“This could spell disaster,” I said once I’d had a few minutes for the importance of it to sink in. “They’re trying to trap us, Ken. We have to report it. We should go at once to the Foreign Office and explain what has happened.”
Everyone in authority in those days took the communist threat to the Western way of life very seriously. At that time the Soviet empire was perceived to be a superpower, and no one ever imagined that the whole façade would crumble away to nothing fifteen years later. There were still stories appearing in the papers all the time about agents being murdered all over the world, and John le Carré’s bestselling spy novels were believed to be an accurate picture of the espionage world of the time. Just because we were back in London wouldn’t mean that we were beyond their reach should they decide to come looking for us.
All intelligence matters dealing with Eastern Europe were always treated seriously. The communists were seen then in the same light that terrorists are now. So we had no trouble persuading the person at the Foreign Office who took our call to make an appointment for us to come in for a meeting immediately. In fact, we found ourselves in Whitehall the very next morning. The man we were taken to meet towered over us as he came out to shake hands. I noticed he had the biggest feet and the longest fingers I have ever seen. I would say he was in his mid-forties. He introduced himself as James Howard.
“I’m Head of Station,” he said, once we were sitting down in his office. “Tell me what I can do for you.”
I spun out our story for him as best I could. There was so much to tell, and as I talked I wondered whether my words sounded believable. He listened with rapt attention, absent-mindedly tapping a pencil on his desk as tea was brought in.
Mr. Howard shook his head as I reached the climax of the story. “They are very naughty,” he said, when I finally finished and pulled out the letter we had received the day before. It was as if he were talking about a bunch of schoolboys who had been caught smoking behind the bike sheds. “This is no way to behave. You have been put in danger and in an impossible position. As you know, we have no diplomatic relations with East Germany, so we have to handle things a bit delicately. Do you still need these documents, and do you want to maintain your relationship with the people at the archives?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, very quickly. “I most certainly do. I need those documents, I really do, and I must be able to talk to Herr Waldmann on the phone whenever I need to check something. It will be a complete disaster if I lose my access to them.”
He nodded his understanding. “Leave it to us,” he said. “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it for you.”
We said a big thank-you to the spymaster and took our leave.
“Ken, I am impressed,” I admitted once we were outside. “Should I be? How could they possibly fix it? The East Germans are under no obligation at all. They can deny that the documents even exist, can’t they?”
“These people know exactly what to do, Evi,” he assured me.
“But, we don’t have any diplomatic relations.”
“We have to wait, let them do their work,” he said. “It’s the waiting game again.”
I was relieved to have the Foreign Office involved. Now I felt that we had some protection, although I couldn’t see how the Foreign Office would have much effect if there was no diplomatic contact between the two countries. I had a horrible feeling I was never going to hear another word from Frau Steglitz or Herr Waldmann and that my research might now have come to an end.
We went home, not knowing what was going to happen next, sifting eagerly through the mail each morning and going away disappointed each time. After three weeks, however, another letter with an East German stamp arrived. I opened it and held my breath. It was short and to the point, and there was an invoice attached for around three hundred pounds. I read the brief letter over and over to make sure I had understood it.
On receipt of your payment we shall send your documents.
“Ken, Ken, we’ve done it,” I shouted. “Our man at the ministry is a magician.”
I ran to find Ken, waving the letter excitedly, bumping into Timothy and throwing my arms around him and jumping up and down in my excitement. “They somehow managed it.”
Three hundred pounds was an awful lot of money in those days, but if it produced the documents it would be worth every penny. To send money to East Germany we had to make special arrangements in person with our bank, so we headed off into Hampstead the same day. That night we talked of nothing else, wondering if we had lost our money, since there would have been no way to follow it up.
But fate was on our side once more. The crucial evidence that Ken and I had gathered in East Germany, the microfiche with all of the 275 documents that we had selected, plopped through the mail slot as promised ten days later. As if by magic, all that I had hoped and prayed for was literally delivered to our doorstep. This time we actually went out and bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate. I was ecstatic. Now I could spend as long as I needed studying the papers in my search for the answers, and I could take the evidence to show to the network of historians and experts I had built up in the West since my search first began. Most important, the microfiche that arrived that day spurred me on and made me even more determined to find the missing piece of the jigsaw. I was sure that whatever had happened to Emilie and Charlotte after the king’s refusal to allow Emilie to keep the title “Frau” could help to explain why Granny Anna met the fate she did.