SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST: Juliet Rieden’s powerful memoir
As Hitler’s troops advanced on Czechoslovakia, a Jewish couple made a heartbreaking decision that saved their eight-year-old son’s life but changed their family forever. Juliet Rieden’s powerful and shocking memoir uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of
Two years ago on a stopover in Prague, I made a discovery that became the catalyst for a life-changing journey. On the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial I was shocked to see the Rieden name, my name, written over and over.
My knees buckled as I tried to take it in. These were not people I recognised – Berta, Emil, Felix, Ota – but I instinctively knew they were something to do with me. I have never believed in fate, but I know that I was meant to be there on that day. I was meant to see those names. I felt a shiver run down my spine, tapping on each vertebra, and had an eerie sense that someone was behind me looking over my shoulder.
I later discovered I was right.
Behind me on the opposite wall yet more of my family were listed, this time taking up two rows. These were my grandmother’s brothers, sisters and nieces. Before me was the evidence of a massacre of epic proportions
I’d known nothing about.
The walls of the synagogue are painted with an artistic roll call of Jews from Bohemia and Moravia who were murdered by the Nazis. Names are listed with their dates of birth and death. It takes your breath away, and the hundreds of thousands of tourists and pilgrims who come to this place fall silent as the enormity of the unconscionable war crime that stripped a nation of its Jews strikes home with a chilling knell.
A quick internet search confirmed my fears. These were my Riedens. Emil was my great-grandfather, Berta and Felix my great-aunt and great-uncle. And Ota ... well, Ota should have read Otto (an innocent spelling error from the calligrapher who painted the name) – he was their brother, another great-uncle. All three were siblings of my grandpa, Dr Rudolf Rieden – Emil was his father. And all, I later discovered, lived with my dad, Hanus Rieden, before he fled to England from Czechoslovakia, part of an elaborate and desperate escape aged eight. He never saw them again.
Those on the other wall were Hoffers, my grandmother’s family.
How could I have been so ignorant to their fate? Why didn’t my father tell me? I was about to find out.
Family secrets
Growing up in leafy suburban England, I always knew our family was different. Both my parents were immigrants and both only children. My Australian mother was a feisty, smart science teacher, and my dad a quiet, deep-thinking Czech who worked as an insurance underwriter all his life. My father’s Czech accent was imperceptible. Even though he was raised in a children’s home with other Czech refugee children, all saved from certain death, he had won a scholarship to one of England’s private schools where he boarded in term-time. The result was he sounded like any other well-spoken English schoolboy, so his Jewish refugee background flew under the radar.
I would see my Australian grandparents every second or third
year, when they would cruise to England from Perth on extravagant visits. But my Czech grandparents – Helena and Rudolf – were locked away in Prague behind the Iron Curtain, inaccessible.
They couldn’t visit us because the communist regime wouldn’t let them, I was told. And Dad couldn’t visit them because he had fled his homeland in a rush in troubled times, and if he went back he feared he wouldn’t be allowed out again.
I knew my grandparents had spent the war in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp north of Prague, and that they had somehow made it to liberation. I also knew they had sent their only child to safety in England with a Christian mission called The Barbican Mission to the Jews. A week later the Nazis arrived in Prague. Dad had escaped in the nick of time and while the Mission leader, Reverend Davidson, had courageously managed to save 68 Czech Jewish children, it was on the proviso that he could convert them to Christianity and should they then be willing, baptise them when they turned 16.
Dad was born Jewish, but his family weren’t especially religious, and the man I knew abhorred organised religion. So I don’t think he ever missed his Judaism, nor did he succumb to Christianity, although the Reverend actually baptised him at 13, I later discovered.
It would have seemed a small price to pay for escape from Hitler. Dad never spoke of the Holocaust and refused to watch any TV shows or films on the subject. When he talked of his childhood in Prague it was about hanging out in coffee houses with his mum, so the idea of wider family never really occurred to me until I stumbled upon the writing on Pinkas Synagogue walls.
On my return to Sydney, I immersed myself in research. I lodged requests with Holocaust and national archives in England, the Czech Republic, Poland, Israel and the US. I wanted to find out who these people were, what they were like and how they had died. I had always longed for relatives and now I had found them.
I quickly realised I would need to go back to Europe, visit the camps at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz in Poland – where I discovered Felix Rieden was in all likelihood murdered – and then go to England to trace what happened to my father, a lost boy alone in a foreign land. I also decided to write a book about my journey. I wanted my family to be remembered, not forgotten. I wanted to break through the wall of silence. The Writing on the Wall is that book.
Flight to safety
I had no idea what, if anything,
I would find. But I especially wanted to solve the mystery that had always baffled me about how my grandparents managed to survive when so many others around them were executed. Did they collaborate to save their skin, or was my grandfather one of the elders in the controversial “Altestenrat”, the Jewish council which ran Theresienstadt and chose those who were transported east to their deaths, and those who were saved? And then having gone through all that, why, oh why, didn’t they come back to find their son?
My investigations uncovered far more than I imagined. What I found was shocking, revelatory and deeply personal. This was about family I never knew I had and the dark and twisted tales of their fates. The more I found the more I needed to know, and it started to become a pilgrimage to remember my kin, to follow in their footsteps and pay homage to their stories.
But it then also became something else. It became about getting to know my dad all over again, to really know what he went through for the first time with my eyes wide open and my journalist’s brain on high alert.
On the night before Dad died, in 2006, when we were all sitting around his bed with his favourite Mozart sonata playing, he looked straight at Nick, my eldest brother, his first born, and said in a clear voice: “the plane is in the hangar”. He was hallucinating, morphine and cancer playing tricks on his brain. But what was he talking about? Was this the airplane that had taken him away from his parents and his homeland in 1939?
Dad would never see his father Rudolf again.
I have a photograph of Dad, aged eight, climbing the stairs of the KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) charter, a little cloth knapsack on his back (see page 105). Was he going back to that pivotal moment when his life changed forever?
There was so much Dad experienced and didn’t talk about. I know now he was protecting us from it; he didn’t want to pass on the weight of the misery. But I always hankered to know more.
Over the next 18 months I gathered hundreds of documents and records which charted two families – the Riedens and the Hoffers – running for their lives as the Nazi net closed around them. They really didn’t stand a chance.
My grandfather Rudolf had five adult siblings and one niece, and all but one were murdered. My grandmother Helena had nine adult siblings and two nieces, and only one of her family survived the Holocaust. I discovered that all had suffered horrendous deaths in a number of different places, all the while trying to escape their fate at every turn.
Aunt Ida
As I unpicked their stories these siblings started to become incredibly real to me, and one in particular stood out. Aunt Ida, I soon realised, I knew well by sight from our family album, only my father had never identified her. One especially poignant photo shows Ida by herself, taken in 1937 in Karlovy Vary, a beautiful spa town in Bohemia which my father visited regularly with his parents. Ida looks incredibly stylish, with a fashionable cinched-in jacket and a jaunty beret. The photo is on a postcard which was sent to Dad at the first school he went to not long after he arrived in England, and on the back is a note.
Curiously there was no stamp or postmark on the card, but I know it must have arrived some time between 1939 when Dad started at the school and 1942 when Ida was shot. Dad definitely received it and cherished it, as we have it along with his meagre belongings from that period. Ida writes in German and says, “A photo taken in Karlsbad in late summer 1937. Dedicated to my beloved Hansi to remember. From his aunt Ida.”
I discovered that Ida, aged 59, was deported from Prague to Theresienstadt concentration camp with her younger sisters Klara, 50, and Laura, 46, on July 23, 1942. Then, just over a fortnight later, the three sisters left on a train with a transport of 1000 Jews travelling at first in passenger carriages and then crammed into freight carts to the dreaded east.
In the village of Maly Trostinec, on the outskirts of Minsk (now Belarus), was a Nazi extermination camp that operated between July 1942 and October 1943. This was the destination for the three sisters.
On arrival at the camp, Ida, Klara and Laura were told to hand over their valuables and, along with their fellow deportees, were then taken to Blagovshchina Forest, where they had to undress to their underwear and line up on the edge of vast, recently dug pits. SS officers lined up behind them.
They shot Ida, Laura and Klara in the back of their necks so their bodies would fall into the pits. It was a lengthy operation, and it is highly likely not all three sisters were shot at once. Reports note that some prisoners tried to run, but they didn’t get very far. Tractors then flattened the ground.
It is unknown exactly how many were killed here over time. In
Maly Trostinec itself the death toll was around 65,000, with a further 200,000 murdered in the surrounding area.
My great aunts must have been petrified as they cowered in the woods, and it’s an image I can’t get out of my head. No doubt this is what my father was trying to protect us from with his silence.
Private letters
In England I managed to gain access to the archives of The Barbican Mission to the Jews, now part of a global organisation, Christian Witness to Israel, and in here I found my father’s personal file. Inside was my grandparents’ application pleading their case for Dad to be included on the airlift from Prague. There was also my father’s passport, which had been hurriedly prepared, his baptism certificate and his school reports.
One item that brought tears to my eyes was a child’s handmade Christmas card, with the artist Hans Rieden signed in the top corner. By this time I had discovered that my family came from the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, so German was their mother tongue although they also spoke Czech. And in German, Dad was called Hans.
On the front of the card my father had created coloured-in letters that read “A Merry Christmas” and drawn an aeroplane with “Christmas Plane” written in English along its fuselage , with the red, white and blue of a national ensign on its tail. Was this the Czech flag colours or the Union Jack colours, I wondered, and was this the plane that brought him from Prague or the plane little Hanus hoped would be taking him back home, the perfect Christmas present for his parents?
Inside Dad had written, “I wish you all a very happy Christmas”, along with drawings of a couple of Christmas trees, and a pink Christmas ribbon glued onto the front and inside. Was this Dad’s first homemade Christmas card? As a Jew I imagine he was unlikely to have celebrated Christmas before.
The other items that stopped me in my tracks were letters from my grandparents to my father’s guardians, Reverend and Mrs Davidson, written after they were liberated. In broken English, no doubt typed with a dictionary on hand, Rudolf and Helena explain how ill they are after three years in a concentration camp and that they are unable to come and get my father. They say life is not good in Czechoslovakia, and it’s best if their son stays in the UK and tries to apply for British citizenship. It is heartbreaking to read and I imagine my father feeling utterly abandoned.
Dad’s struggle from this moment on to make his way in Britain all alone was revealed in a locked box in the British National Archives. It was a startling discovery. The box contained 172 documents all about my father. I had to file a Freedom of Information request to have it opened and the contents, including private letters from my father to the Czech Refugee Trust, proved explosive. The most affecting was a letter written when Dad was finally reunited with his mother in 1965, 26 years after they were parted. By this time Dad was a married father of three and I was two years old, his youngest. Rudolf had died in Prague some months before, having never seen his son again, and Helena was now visiting us for a few months, eager to meet her only family for the first time.
Dad was pleading for help so he might move Helena full time to England, to live near us. The letter is 1000 words long and it is the only time my father laid out the truth of what had happened to his family.
Dad didn’t manage to find the help he needed, the letter received a curt negative response and Grandma died alone in Prague eight years later.