The Writing On the Wall

  About The Writing on the Wall

  ‘Memoirs such as this will ensure we do not lose the struggle against “forgetting” – that sly accomplice of tyranny.’ Magda Szubanski

  In 1939, as Hitler’s troops march on Prague, a Jewish couple makes a heartbreaking decision that will save their eight-year-old son’s life but change their family forever.

  Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s always sensing that her family was different in some way. She longed to have relatives and knew precious little about her Czech father’s childhood as a refugee.

  On the night before Juliet’s father died, in 2006, Juliet’s father suddenly looked up and said: ‘The plane is in the hangar.’ In the years after his death, Juliet comes to truly understand the significance of these words.

  On a trip to Prague she is shocked to see the Rieden name written many times over on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial. These names become the catalyst for a life-changing journey that uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of epic proportions.

  Juliet traces the grim fate of her father’s cousins, aunts and uncles on visits to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps and learns about the extremes of cruelty, courage and kindness.

  Then in a locked box in Britain’s National Archives, she discovers a stash of documents including letters from her father that reveal intimate details of his struggle.

  Meticulously researched and beautifully told, this is the moving story of a woman’s quest to piece together the hidden parts of her father’s life and the unimaginable losses he was determined to protect his children from.

  This book is dedicated to my father’s aunts and uncles and their children and especially Ida Hoffer. You are the family I never knew I had, but longed to embrace. To my grandparents Rudolf and Helena whose sacrifice is the reason I am here writing this book and to my father, Hanus, whose quiet dignity in the face of deep trauma and unconditional love for us, his family, takes my breath away.

  Contents

  About The Writing on the Wall

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prologue: Lifting the curtain

  Part I

  Discoveries

  The day everything changed

  Filling in the blanks

  Breaking through the wall of silence

  On a wing and a prayer

  Hanus becomes John

  You can run but you can’t hide

  The Rindskopf/Rieden family tree

  Part II

  The horror

  The Hoffer massacre

  The Hoffer family tree

  Walking in my ancestors’ footsteps

  Theresienstadt: survival and murder

  The terrible truth about ‘the East’

  Part III

  New beginnings

  The forgotten kindertransport

  Not in our backyard

  The house of refuge

  Unlocking Dad’s dossier

  Postcard from a train

  The Ungermann/Hagari family tree

  Epilogue: Dad, the man he became

  Resources

  Acknowledgements

  Picture section

  About Juliet Rieden

  Copyright page

  Foreword

  ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

  – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  I first met Juliet Rieden when she interviewed me for The Australian Women’s Weekly in 2012 after I came out live on television in support of Marriage Equality. I was still very nervous and felt extremely vulnerable. Juliet relayed my story with compassion, fairness and dignity.

  Since then we have crossed paths a few times, and when I launched my own memoir Juliet again interviewed me. She mentioned at the time how strongly my family’s experiences resonated with her. I suggested that she take the journey to find the truth of her own story.

  And this is that story.

  Little did I realise just how much her life and history parallels that of my own – and many other refugee families. Like me, she is the English-born descendent of urbane Eastern Europeans who were plunged into hell. Like my father, her father identified as an Englishman. And, like me, she is haunted by questions of what happened to her family.

  But there are poignant differences. My family tried to save their Jewish friends and neighbours from the flames of the Holocaust. Many in Juliet’s family did not survive. This deeply moving account reminds us that even those who did not perish in the flames were severely burned by their cruel heat.

  This brave, intelligent book is also a penetrating investigation into acts of charity. Saving people does not always come from pure altruism and can have complex, mixed motives. Juliet’s father John (or actually Hanus) was part of something similar to the famous Kindertransports, only her father travelled to England by plane not train. She uses her journalistic detective skills and storytelling ability to bring to life the terrible loneliness and exile that was the cost of his survival.

  Families usually keep secrets for one, or perhaps both, of two reasons – pain and shame. Unbearable pain. Unbearable shame. It takes great courage and compassion to prise open that locked door of the heart. To set about answering those awful questions: what happened to my family and, maybe even harder, what did they do to survive? What did they do in impossible circumstances?

  Understandably, much of the telling of the Holocaust has been about Auschwitz. But it was not the only hell on earth. Juliet also takes us into the bizarre world of Theresienstadt, the model ‘show’ camp that provided a mask for the horror of the Final Solution.

  Walking in the footsteps of her extended family, many of whom did not survive, Juliet paints vivid, heartbreaking pictures. She provides names, dates and places.

  As the last generation of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust pass from this earth, their stories will not disappear with them. They will not fade into oblivion, unremembered. Through Juliet’s diligence and love, ‘they exist once more, proof that not even Hitler can erase my family without a trace’.

  Memoirs such as this will ensure we do not lose the struggle against ‘forgetting’ – that sly accomplice of tyranny.

  Magda Szubanski

  Prologue

  Lifting the curtain

  As I stare at the wall of Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue, I feel a blaze of heat flush through my body and my heart begins to pound and stutter. The etched letters are dancing in front of my eyes, the red now taking on the ghoulish taint of dried blood. My knees buckle and I grasp the railing in front of me, gripping it white-knuckle tight, eager not to make a scene. An uncomfortable tingling is running up and down my spine, tapping through each vertebra. Is someone there looking over my shoulder? I check behind me but no one is interested in me; all are transfixed by the wall, lost in their own torment. Retreating, I turn away and bend secretively over my phone for a frantic internet search.

  And then everything changes.

  It makes me sad and a little angry that I discovered the family I never knew from Google. I think I held my breath as I jabbed in the names I had just discovered on the wall – Emil Rieden, Berta Rieden, Felix Rieden, Ota Rieden – and then added ‘Holocaust’ to my internet search. Could these really be my people on the wall of this memorial to Czechs murdered by the Nazis?

  The answers came at one click. It was that easy.

  Emil was my great-grandfather, Berta and Felix my great-aunt and great-uncle, and Ota . . . well, Ota (an innocen
t spelling error from the calligrapher who painted the names) should have read Otto, who 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 in March 1939, only a week before Hitler’s troops arrived in Prague, part of an elaborate and desperate escape when he was aged just eight. He never saw them again.

  It was the first day of September in 2016 and I was 52 years old. How could I have been ignorant to their fate all this time? Why didn’t my father tell me?

  I turn back to the writing on the wall, now feeling ownership, but still incredulous. Next to each name, dates of birth and death are carefully painted. And as I push my brain to work out their ages, tears start to roll down my face.

  I always knew our family was different.

  For a start, while we lived in the heart of commuter-belt Surrey, on London’s outskirts, both our parents were only children and our grandparents lived in other countries – Mum’s parents 17,000 kilometres away, on the other side of the world in Australia; Dad’s trapped behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia. Our Australian grandparents, Flo and Roy, came over every few years in a big flourish with exotic gifts for my two brothers and me, and tales of stopping off at places like Singapore and Ceylon.

  But Rudolf and Helena were inaccessible, shadowy phantoms whom I imagined huddled under blankets, speaking in foreign whispers, always looking over their shoulders. We had one of their blankets – smart, camel-coloured with Rieden embroidered in bright-red chain stitch in the corner. I used it occasionally as an extra layer in winter. It was only decades later that I discovered this was one of the few remnants from home they were allowed to keep with them when they were imprisoned for three years in Theresienstadt concentration camp, north of Prague. This was the very blanket that had provided a meagre barrier to one of them in the bitterly cold winters.

  Rudolf died when I was barely a toddler, but Helena was constantly in my thoughts, rattling around my head. I was told she had come over to see us when I was almost three. I think I remember it, but I don’t really. She was given my bedroom and, so the story went, I screamed and screamed until I made myself sick when I saw her in pink winceyette pyjamas smoking in my bed. After which, apparently, we got on famously – even though she spoke very little English – until she had to go back to Prague, beyond reach, again.

  It made me think of the big metal and PVC concertina curtain at school that could be pulled across to create two classrooms from one. This was the sort of structure I imagined separated my grandmother from me – one long meandering barrier stretching right across Europe. If I went to the edge of West Germany and just lifted the corner of the curtain a little, I might be able to sneak in and find her. I knew Grandma wanted to see me because she sent us presents: traditional wooden toys, thick brush-cotton romper suits, slightly gruesome hand-crafted string puppets (which I now know are typical Czech souvenirs; string puppets abound in the tourist shops of Prague’s old town), and indestructible water glasses that never broke no matter how many times we dropped them on the floor.

  I also knew that she and Grandpa had been through a really tough time in the war, and that they’d managed to smuggle Dad out to England before the Nazis deported them, which is why he was here with us and they were there, but he never went into details. I always thought it was strange that they didn’t come with him, and the answers I was given didn’t feel right somehow.

  Evidently, like many Czech Jews, they thought the Nazi threat would be over in a matter of months and they would all soon be reunited. They were wrong. They ended up being stripped of the comfortable life they knew: Grandpa’s job with the government, their flat in Prague, holidays in the mountains. And, along with approximately 155,000 other Jews, they were sent on trains to Theresienstadt. Unlike most, they survived. How they managed this and what went on in that place was never discussed.

  Nor was why they didn’t come back for Dad after liberation, something I never understood. He was their only son, serious-minded Hanus, who was born in 1930 and was separated from them when he was eight years old. And although my mother liked to hypothesise and criticise, it wasn’t something Dad liked to talk about.

  I thought if I could squeeze behind that curtain, reach Grandma and bring her over then we could sort it all out. My brothers and I were told that Dad couldn’t go to his mother now because the Communists probably wouldn’t let him out again and he would never risk that – we were too precious to him. Whenever I brought it up he seemed genuinely fearful that his life might be snatched away.

  As I grew older I would regularly berate my parents for not providing me with relatives. It became a family joke, one I trotted out like a bratty child every birthday, Easter and Christmas without fail. My best friend Mandy had loads of them – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins of all ages – always free for endless entertainment: games, parties, dinners, outings. So I adopted hers and regularly went to stay with Mandy’s nanna or her aunt and uncle. I had no idea that there had been relatives – so many – but they had all been murdered. It must have cut deep for Dad when I moaned about a lack of extended family. But still nothing was said.

  When I pressed further, Mum did tell me that Dad’s wider family had been killed in the gas chambers, but no names were mentioned. No one was identified, no numbers given, no stories told. My sense was that these were people Dad didn’t know, a few random distant cousins he had nothing to do with. One might have been a rabbi, I recall Mum saying, which made me think they can’t have been terribly close to Dad, because his family, though Jewish, weren’t really religious. Dad had never attended synagogue – his father preferred him to play football in the fresh air on The Sabbath – and he knew nothing of things like Passover and Hanukkah. At least that’s what he said.

  His memories of Prague were all about going to coffee houses with his mother; listening to classical music and playing the piano; eating gluggy bread dumplings, which he adored, and frankfurters, rollmop herrings and sauerkraut . . . and travelling on the tram. He showed me a photo of him skiing in the mountains – a tiny boy in a woolly hat on wooden skis – and I was sure he said they had a family house somewhere out there in the countryside.

  When I say I had no relatives it’s not entirely true; there were people, some we even called aunts and uncles. They called my father Hans or Hoss rather than John, the name we knew him by. It was an undiscussed fact that various strange Eastern Europeans were surrogate relatives to our nuclear family. Some seemed to feel as if they needed to nurture us – my ‘aunt’ Fine, whom I knew very little, left me a gold garnet ring in her will. I remember going to the funeral somewhere in north London and being given the ring. Fine and her husband, ‘Uncle’ Lud, were friends of my grandparents from Prague, the only ones from Helena and Rudolf’s group who had chosen to flee (at least this was the story I was told). They left with the clothes on their backs and a couple of suitcases but had to abandon everything else – their home, their money, their possessions. Fine told Mum everyone thought they were crazy. As it turned out, they were the smart ones.

  There was also ‘Uncle’ Willi, who would visit in his smart Mercedes car and take us out. From the scant details we heard, I gathered he might have had something to do with Sigmund Freud, the celebrated psychoanalyst, and I later found out he became quite famous in his own right. And then Dad had a couple of much closer friends whom we saw a good deal. They were fellow Prague refugees – Annalisa, Theo and Klaus – all with strong accents. None of them discussed their past in any real detail; all were measured in what they revealed.

  We knew they had been together in ‘The Mission’ with Dad. This was a curious children’s home called The Barbican Mission to the Jews (BMJ), where Dad was raised. The children had arrived there by a sort of religious kindertransport run by an evangelical preacher who had personally saved 68 Cze
ch Jewish children from Hitler on the proviso he could convert them into Christians. Dad didn’t talk about this place much either.

  But unlike Annalisa, Theo and Klaus, my father’s accent was almost imperceptible, and so I always assumed his story was very different from theirs and somehow less tortured.

  I was wrong.

  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 firstborn, 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 plane that had taken him away from his parents and his homeland in 1939? 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. Was he going back to that pivotal moment when his life changed forever?

  When I started the research for this book I had no idea what, if anything, I would uncover. My main aim was to find out what had happened to my relatives and if there were others. I especially wanted to solve the mystery that had always baffled me about how my grandparents managed to survive so miraculously when so many others around them were sent away for execution. Did they collaborate to save their skin or was my grandfather one of the Elders in the controversial Ältestenrat, the Jewish council of Elders that ran Theresienstadt and chose those who were transported and those who were saved? And then, having gone through all that, why oh why didn’t they come back to get their only son?

  My investigations uncovered far more than I imagined. What I found was shocking, revelatory and deeply personal. I learned 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 pay homage to their stories. I headed to Czechoslovakia and Poland to seek them out, to follow in their footsteps.