Inspiration behind The Lost Diary by Rose Alexander

Suffice to say that The Lost Diary took me a long time to write, if I think about the timeframe from when I first realised there was a story to tell to actually getting round to doing so, which was about twenty years! There are lots of reasons why it took this long – all of the normal ones, such as life getting in the way – and the fact that, because it is based on the true experiences of loved ones, I felt a huge duty to do right by them in the telling. 

So let’s go right back to the beginning and see how the kernel of an idea became the 100,000 word plus novel that is The Lost Diary. 

Years ago, when I met my husband, we were both working in TV and, as a director I was often away from home, on filming trips all over the UK and Europe. But nevertheless, our relationship flourished and soon we were buying a house together and, because his family lived close by in London, I began to get to know them. My husband told me that his uncle – his mother’s brother, known to all by his nickname Boy – had been captured early on in WW2 and had spent five years as a prisoner-of-war. At the end of the conflict, he had walked to Berlin where he had rejoined his regiment and, eventually, been repatriated back to the UK. The family were overjoyed that he had survived and to have him home – but almost immediately he signed up to return to Berlin and spent another five years in Germany. 

All of this intrigued me. Why on earth had he walked to Berlin? How on earth, in all that chaos, had he found his comrades in arms? Why on earth had he gone straight back? My husband was vague on the details and his uncle, who had sadly died many years previously, wasn’t around to ask. 

But his wife was. 

Inge was from Berlin and had met Boy there. That was interesting enough in itself. Marrying a German wasn’t a common thing for an English bloke to do in the late 1940s, and bringing her back to London risked all kinds of censure and acrimony. Suffice to say, Inge didn’t have it easy in her first few years here. 

But nothing she encountered in England could be worse than what she had suffered as the war in Europe drew to a close. My husband told me little snippets of her wartime experiences, but none of it was joined up and there was scant details. Whenever I met Inge, it was always in the context of a big family gathering which wasn’t conducive to finding out more. So I arranged to visit Inge in her sheltered accommodation so I could find out what really happened in those dark days of war.

Inge told me that she had been married to a German army officer who died on the Eastern front. Left alone with a small baby in Berlin as the city was relentlessly bombed, when she heard that there was a place she could go to escape the destruction, she leapt at the chance. She evacuated herself to the Sudetenland, an area of then Czechoslovakia, which had a large ethnic German population and which Hitler had annexed in 1938. Inge cared little for the politics or ideologies behind the war. But she did care about her child and she would do anything to save him. 

For a while, everything went well. But when the war drew to a close, reprisals against Germans were inevitable. Along with all the other refugees, Inge was thrown out of the Sudetenland. She, like them, had no option but to walk back to Berlin. By this point, soldiers of the Red Army, scenting victory, were running amok, snapping at the heels of the terrified, mostly female, Flüchtlinge, who lived in terror of an encounter with them. Inge told me some dreadful stories of what occurred on that walk. 

Arriving back in Berlin, Inge was astonished to find that her flat was still standing and that unlike so many others, she and her child had somewhere to live. But of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. What Inge endured in Berlin is hard to take on board for those of us who have been lucky enough to live in peacetime. 

That time spent with Inge one-on-one in her flat gave me enough information to begin writing The Lost Diary. As I researched further, I found out that what Boy had participated in was now known as ‘the long march’ and, far from the disorganised stroll across the continent that my husband had described to me, it was in fact a death march orchestrated and ordered by Hitler. 

To find out the rest of the story, you’ll have to read the book! As I was finishing writing it, Russia launched its horrific assault on Ukraine with all its terrible death and destruction, and I began to read reports in the papers of the abuse of women as weapon of war – kidnap, rape, dehumanisation. Once more mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmothers were fleeing from Russian soldiers, running for their lives, desperate to get to a place of safety. 

Inge died several years ago now so I can’t ask her what she thinks of this return of horror to Europe. But I think I know how she would have reacted. She would have been appalled, disbelieving, uncomprehending. And it make her own story, told in The Lost Diary, even more relevant and important. 

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Rose Alexander has had more careers than she cares to mention and is currently a secondary school English teacher. She writes in the holidays, weekends and evenings, whenever she has a chance, although with three children, a husband, a lodger and a cat, this isn’t always as often as she’d like. She’s a keen sewist and is on a mission to make all her own clothes.

The Lost DiaryGermany, 1945. As the ground shakes and the air raid sirens wail, Katja holds her tiny baby to her chest. She pictures Karl’s handsome face and kind blue eyes, her breath catching at the thought of him heading back to the front. She must never tell anyone about the letters she delivered for him, or the other secret she is hiding…

London, present day. In the midst of a divorce and with her mother Katja recovering from major surgery, Jo is heartbroken and lost: especially because Katja has always been distant, even when Jo was a child. Now, Katja is too frail to be alone, and has moved in to Jo’s cosy bungalow – where Jo hopes they can finally find peace with each other.

But clearing out her mother’s empty home, Jo discovers a dog-eared black diary hidden in a tiny kitchen cupboard. Tucked within the pages is a yellowed envelope with an unfamiliar, faded postmark. The scrawled handwriting reveals a shocking past Jo can scarcely believe, and she realises that she must finally learn the truth about where she came from, before time runs out…

As Katja slowly opens up, she is thrown back to the war-ravaged German countryside: where a brave young woman in love risked everything to memorise detailed maps by candlelight, and had to flee from soldiers in the early light of dawn to save herself and her child.

But Jo can see the pain in Katja’s eyes. She is still holding something back, and the key to her silence lies within the pages of the diary.

Will uncovering the devastating truth about a forbidden love affair kept secret for decades tear mother and daughter apart forever? Or will confronting the past finally help Jo and Katja heal?