To me she was always a Countess, such an adorable little thing.

I had come up to the castle because we had promised Ute a party with girls from the village when she officially became our Countess. To me she was always a Countess, such an adorable little thing.

DEEDA BY UTE CARSON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 102

My nanny’s name was Frieda but I was one year old and had difficulty pronouncing it. I called her Deeda.

In 1941 my widowed mother Gerda and I lived with my maternal grandparents in their castle on a hill above a small village in Silesia. My mother was having to regain their good graces after marrying a commoner, my deceased father. She insisted that she was perfectly capable of taking care of her baby and there was no need for a nanny. There were already many servants–cleaners, cooks, and gardeners. But my grandparents overruled her.

Nazi Germany required girls to do a year of community service. Frieda, who was 18, lived with her family in the village. She helped her parents with chores. They had a plot of land which they ploughed with an ox…