I am Hanna Albrecht. It is terribly unfortunate that I am depicted in this photo wearing a hideous dress that you might confuse with a tablecloth.
Hanna again. Mummy said I could write about her although she demanded script approval. As you can see, she is utterly gorgeous. Everybody says she looks like Marlene Dietrich. Even Marlene Dietrich! Most of the time mummy is relatively calm, but when she looses her temper, as dad can attest, you’d better watch out. Granny says it’s our Russian temperament.
Daddy said he didn’t care about his photo, which may be true and he left it up to me to say something about him. He’s an incredible brain box He’ssupposed to be doing research at Berlin University but he ends up teaching quite a bit. Fortunately, there aren’t a lot of female physics students, let alone pretty ones. Before that he worked on rockets for Fritz Opel.
I asked dad’s best friend Leo for a photo, but instead he gave me this drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks that he thinks looks like him.
The last member of the family is the bus. That’s what we call the Bentley that dad inherited when granddad passed away. Dad says he only got it because grandad wasn’t able to sell it at his car dealership. English luxury vehicles aren’t very popular in Germany for obvious reasons. Dad says it didn’t help that the steering wheel is on the wrong side. I didn’t see very much of granddad just before he died because he was in disgrace. He took dad and mum out to a restaurant for a treat and felt mum’s legs up under the table. After grandad had gone home she told dad and he hit the ceiling. Mum just laughed and said if she was given ten marks every time somebody felt up her leg she wouldn’t have to go to work. I’m responsible for making sure that the bus has water in the radiator and for topping up the oil. Sometimes I just sit in the back. I love the smell of the leather upholstery. The only thing that I don’t like about the Bentley is that people think that we must be rich and we’re not.
Leo says Dad hardly seems to have noticed that we now have a Nazi government. He says that Hitler is in power partly thanks to the Sturmabteilung, who are the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party. They are also known as ‘the SA’ , ‘Stormtroopers’ or ‘Brownshirts. Leo says that they are just paid thugs. You see then everywhere. Leo thinks there may be as many as 2 million of them. The total population of Germany is 50 million! They are always on the lookout for Jews, who they might attack, not because they are doing anything wrong, but just because they are Jews.