The Secrets of the Notebook: A Woman's Quest to Uncover Her Royal Family Secret
Not everyone tracing family roots discovers a connection to one of the wealthiest and most powerful royal families in history. Haas was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1924. At age 10, she fled Berlin with her assimilated Jewish family to escape the Nazis, but her beloved fragile grandmother, Anna, would not leave, and she later perished in transport to the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. But was Anna really Jewish? From London, Haas is obsessed with tracing her family’s history right back to the Napoleonic Wars, poring for years with her husband and sons through files, documents, letters, libraries, archives, and graveyards across Europe; she was sometimes in danger of being arrested as a spy during the Cold War. Descriptions of the slogging do get, well, boring at times, but readers exploring their ancestry will recognize the authenticity of the dense detail and many dead ends. The astonishing discoveries lead to more questions, and the climax makes you go back to the beginning. What else is missing from the history books? --Hazel Rochman