THE MYSTERIOUS GOTTSCHALKS WERE THE ONLY part of the family I still knew very little about, since I hadn’t been able to track down any descendants. In the course of my searching, I came across a book called Jewish Burghers of the City of Berlin by Jacob Jacobson, which confirmed that Isadore Gottschalk had indeed lost his citizenship because of debts and had ended up languishing in a debtors’ prison at one stage of his life. Later in the book, Jacobson wrote that Isadore was released and had his citizenship returned without going into any of the sordid and scandalous details on how that was achieved. So many of the pieces of the story were beginning to fit together, but still no one was able to explain to me what had happened to Charlotte after the prince’s death, or how she had become a Gottschalk. I needed that information to complete the whole picture.
Whenever I visited relatives, I was always asking questions, hoping that I would stumble across some forgotten nugget of information that would lead on to a new strand of investigation. Freddy’s widow, Alice, once suddenly came out with the news that she remembered my uncle had told her that Charlotte had grown up in Hamburg. No one had ever mentioned it before, and it came as a revelation. I wondered if there was any chance that she might have left a trace of herself somewhere in some archives. I had discovered that in those days travelers entering that city, which was situated in an entirely separate state, would have been required to sign an entry book on arrival at the border control. I wondered if we would be able to find any sign of the Gottschalk family’s arrival there from Berlin. I somehow managed to persuade Ken to travel with me to Hamburg, even though he was completely convinced that we wouldn’t find anything.
At the State Archive in Hamburg we requested copies of the entry books for the years after August’s death, and very soon the archivist came back with all the relevant books.
“We’re looking at the years around 1845,” Ken explained, “although it’s pure guesswork.”
We thought that if Charlotte was moving to Hamburg, it could be a year or two after her father’s death. The archivist searched for a while and then found Isadore’s signature, pointing it out to us. “It says he arrived ‘with family,’” I said excitedly.
“Yes, that would mean he had a child with him,” the man confirmed.
Although there were no details of the child’s name, it seemed very likely it was Charlotte. All the facts fit with her story. She would have been about seven, and maybe Isadore was taking her to be raised by his daughter Friederike, who we had discovered from another source had moved to Hamburg with her husband after Agnes was born. Isadore himself would have been elderly by then, and there was no mention in any of the archives of his wife still being alive, so bringing up a child would probably have been a daunting prospect for him.
This trip to Hamburg would have meant Charlotte was breaking her last remaining link to Emilie. She would have had only the notebook to remind her of who her father and mother were and what they had meant to one another. She had written notes in the book about what might well have been her last meeting with Emilie, when she said “my beloved mother gave me a beautiful dress for Whitsun,” and then very tellingly in her own childish scrawl, “this book once belonged to my beloved mother.” There were no further mentions of any meetings with Emilie.
“You are very lucky that they had saved all these records,” the archivist said. “Many archives were destroyed in the war, and very little has survived.”
It was a huge step forward. I had caught a glimpse of young Charlotte Gottschalk for the first time in her life, but that still didn’t tell me how and why she became a Gottschalk in the first place.
When we returned to England, I could see that Ken was exhausted. He believed that after all the years we had been searching we had now found all we were ever likely to find.
“It’s enough,” he would tell me when I would start going over the same ground yet again, trying to see if there was some obvious clue that I was missing. I simply had to get to the bottom of this and was aware that it had become something of an obsession for me. On most days I would be talking to contacts in England and in Germany on the phone or writing them letters, going over and over the same facts like a dog with an old bone just in case it still has a shred of meat clinging to it somewhere.
“Evi,” he said one evening when he found me asleep over a table of papers, “it’s time to let go. It’s time to face facts. There’s nothing there. The king destroyed all the evidence. Do you think he wanted future generations to find proof of Charlotte’s existence? You have done incredibly well to find as much as you have.”
“I need to know, Ken,” I protested, shaking myself awake. “I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Evi, we have the family to think of, and we can’t have a normal conversation any more. You’re working at this all the time, day and night. Isn’t it about time you gave yourself a rest and started living with your family again? The ones who are actually alive?”
“We’ve only got a little more to do,” I said, realizing he was right but not being able to face the prospect of giving up now, after so many years of searching. “We’ve got to keep going, Ken. I’m sure the end is in sight.”
For the eternally patient and understanding Ken to have finally spoken out so vehemently suggested to me that maybe I had allowed the whole hunt for the truth to take over my life to an unhealthy degree. But there was still that one missing piece in my jigsaw, and if I could just find that I was confident the whole picture would finally come into focus. I was going to have to face the fact that I had become an ancestry addict, always thinking I would be able to give up my habit after one more fix, but never quite able to.
The questions that were tantalizing me now were all connected to how Charlotte had disappeared and suddenly, on her own admission, appeared to start a completely new life at the age of five. How did August and Emilie hide and protect Charlotte from their enemies? Where was she officially registered as a Gottschalk? Where was her birth registered?
For inspiration I re-read Emilie’s pleading letter to the king, written soon after August died and just before her whole world fell apart. I had formed a real and vibrant connection with Emilie, a friendship and an understanding. Poor Emilie, without August and her father, who could she turn to? She must have been in a desperate situation. I was asking her to give me answers about so many things; I needed her to help me solve the puzzle. Emilie was a woman of integrity and apparently a good mother. Surely, I thought, she would have wanted to baptize her first-born child, but would that baptism have been recorded, and where?
I knew that Ken was right, and I made a big effort to ensure that I didn’t neglect him or my sons in the following months, but I can’t say that I ever stopped thinking about this one last puzzle because I didn’t. I had started my searches in Merseburg in 1973 and nearly fourteen years later I was still racking my brain, trying to imagine what those last days together must have been like. During a quiet moment one evening, while Ken was happily reading his book, I was imagining myself in the Berlin flat with Emilie and Charlotte. August was still alive and they were still a family. I allowed my mind to roam around the imaginary room, becoming completely lost in my thoughts. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a statue of the Madonna on the imaginary sideboard.
“Of course,” I shouted, making Ken jump and snap his book shut, losing his place. “That’s it.”
“What now?” he asked testily.
“It’s been staring at me all the time.”
“What has?”
“Charlotte wasn’t Jewish.”
“Yes, yes, we all know that, Evi.”
“No, don’t you see?” I ignored his irritability, too excited to be able to contain my own excitement. “We’ve been looking in the wrong places. We’ve been looking in the Jewish archives. Emilie would have baptized her baby, I’m sure of that. She was from a Polish Christian family. So there’s only one place Charlotte can be. We need to go back.”
“Not back to the East,” he said, and I could see he was adamant.
“No, not the East,” I said quickly, wanting to reassure him. “Just to Berlin. I need to go back there, Ken. Just one more time. The answer’s there, I can feel it.”
I knew that I was stretching his patience to breaking point, but I also knew that he would ultimately do anything for me when he understood it meant so much. I knew that because he had proved it so often before. I was right, and a few days later we were back on the plane to Berlin for our umpteenth visit since the hunt began. When we landed, we went straight to the Church Registry Archive, hoping against hope that August and Emilie would have registered Charlotte’s baptism. The archivist understood exactly what I was looking for and left us to see whether she could locate the relevant information. She returned within no more than five minutes.
“Another dead end, Ken,” I sighed as I saw her approaching. We were about to thank the lady and say our good-byes when she said, “Here it is, Mrs. Haas.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied. “Here is what?”
“The entry you are looking for.”
No, impossible. The archivist handed the book to us. It couldn’t be. I covered my face with my hands, peering through my fingers, terrified that at any moment I was going to wake up and discover the whole thing was a dream. The year was 1838. I said out loud to Ken, my voice quivering with the effort of holding back some tears: “Charlotte has been registered by August as Dorothee Louise Charlotte, and look at this, August has registered himself as the father, August Gottschalk, a shoemaker’s apprentice, and Emilie as his Polish wife, Dorothee Granzow.”
“We’ve found them. We’ve done it. They hid her from danger and at the same time legitimized her.”
It was all over. We had reached our destination. The archivist stood there bemused as I poured congratulations and gratitude over her. Ken knew exactly how much this discovery would mean to me. We were both ecstatic. This simple little entry would have thrown up a dozen different questions if we had come across it at the beginning of our search, before we had managed to find so many other details about both the Hohenzollern and the Gottschalk families. But because of our research, we already knew that Sophia Dorothea was the name of August’s grandmother—she was also the daughter of England’s King George I—so registering their daughter as Dorothee Louise (“Dorothee” being the German equivalent of Dorothea) and Emilie taking Granzow, a fictitious but Polish-sounding name as her own, clearly referred both to the Hohenzollern connections and her Polish descent. So I was certain that this was Emilie disguising herself but leaving just enough clues for me to find her.
August’s princely pride hadn’t quite allowed him to hide his identity completely either, even at the moment of perpetrating this deception. While he had been willing to pretend to take on the name of Gottschalk to save his daughter’s life, he had still retained his own first name at the last moment. It was typical of August to register a Jewish family name in a church archive, thumbing his nose at the anti-Semitic establishment. At the time of the registration, Emilie and baby Charlotte would have been back in Berlin, ensconced in the flat that August had arranged for them in Jaegerstrasse.
The Berlin registry entry stated that the child was registered on October 28, when the couple came back from Prillwitz and Emilie had recovered from the birth. The date on Charlotte’s gravestone must have been a guess, much as the date on the marriage certificate had been, because Charlotte would not have known her real birth date without access to any of the legitimate records or papers. Everything about Charlotte’s existence—when, where and how she had arrived on this earth—had been based on falsified information.
Suddenly, I had to get used to this whole new situation. As I chattered excitedly away with Ken, I could tell that he had truly believed there was nothing more to find out. In one sense he may have been right, but somehow I still felt that we had not reached the end of our quest. Though we now knew the trail that led from August and Emilie, through Charlotte to her daughter, I did not know the fate of my grandmother, Anna. Therefore my journey would not be over until I had truly discovered the ending of her story.