The Writing On the Wall Page 2

  But it then also became something else. It became about getting to know my dad all over again, about really understanding what he went through – for the first time, with my eyes wide, wide open and my journalist’s brain on high alert. 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.

  In my research I came across letters from my grandparents sent to Dad’s guardians in the Mission just after liberation, which explained a great deal. I also stumbled upon a locked box in the British National Archives with Dad’s name on it: John Rieden. This was astonishing; a whole box file all about my father that was locked in 2012 and was intended not to be opened until 2040. I had to file a Freedom of Information request to gain access to it, and in the 172 documents inside that box my father’s struggle was laid out.

  This is his story.

  Part I

  Discoveries

  Chapter One

  The day everything changed

  I was born in 1963 in Surrey, one of England’s green and pleasant home counties, an hour’s drive from London. I was the youngest of Elizabeth – always known as Betty – and John Rieden’s three children and the only girl. Initially Mum and Dad had wanted four children, but when I was born they decided to stop. Mum told me that following two sons, she and Dad had really wanted a girl but she was certain it wouldn’t happen. So they were so shocked and delighted when I came along that they reconsidered their plans for a fourth child. As a precocious teen I would joke that I was so fabulous there was no need for a new arrival, while my brothers would quip it was more likely that I was such a handful it put our parents off procreating further. This was typical of our sibling scraps.

  It’s true that I was a fairly lively child, prone to temper tantrums when I couldn’t get my own way, which, with two elder brothers ganging up against me, was often. But I always knew I was treasured. My mother told me when I was young she feared she would lose me because somehow she felt she didn’t deserve me, which was a surprisingly irrational emotion for Mum, who was always grounded and unsentimental. Around age four or five I contracted mumps and Mum told me she was sure I was going to die. She sat up for three nights watching me breathe, afraid to leave my side.

  Mum was born in Australia. Her father was a ship’s engineer who served in the navy during the bombing of Darwin in World War II; her mother, a teacher and gifted musician. After studying at the University of Western Australia, Mum trained as a dietician and worked at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics in the athletes’ kitchen before sailing for Britain: the ubiquitous Australian trip to the mother country. She’d bought a one-way ticket to London and was looking for adventure. In England she landed a great job working for the Flour Advisory Bureau, travelling around the country giving cooking demonstrations to women’s institutes. She met my father – who by then was an insurance underwriter working in the City of London – on a skiing holiday, ironically in Austria (Hitler’s birthplace), and from the photos I’m pretty sure the attraction was instant. They married in 1959 and settled in the south of England. After having children, Mum retrained as a teacher and taught biology and chemistry at one of the local state schools.

  As an adult my father didn’t identify as Jewish, and even if he had wanted to raise my brothers, Nick and Peter, and me in the faith, we wouldn’t have been considered true Jews since Judaism follows matrilineal descent and Mum wasn’t Jewish. We certainly never grew up with any Jewish traditions. In fact, we didn’t grow up with religion at all. My mother had been raised with a nominal nod to the Anglican church. She went to Sunday school, knew all her hymns – and recently I was surprised to find a leather-backed prayer book as her ninth birthday gift from her mother in her library. But she was the most confirmed atheist I have ever known and, if anything, this was the family credo.

  In our comfortable home in suburban Surrey, we five were a tight-knit unit with no nearby extended family. Mum’s parents were a very long way away in Perth, Western Australia; Dad’s were in Czechoslovakia and both were only children. Though money was always tight, our parents worked hard and ensured we always went on an annual holiday. These trips, usually to Europe, were the highlight of our year and planned in intricate detail by my father at least six months in advance. But it was on these sojourns, when we would often encounter Germans, that I also sensed some dark shadows in Dad’s past. They were definitely connected to his Czech childhood but were not something he readily discussed.

  I loved school and was a hard worker, often stressing too much around exams. Both our parents were mighty serious about education, and the pressure was at times intense. Dad would check my homework and frequently test me on my French vocabulary and Latin declensions. Theatre was our family’s guilty indulgence, and even though my parents could only afford tickets up in the ‘gods’, we went up to the West End and the National Theatre in London, and visited the local repertory companies regularly. This was the Rieden mind food. My first outing, aged three and a half, was to a three-hour production of Toad of Toad Hall. Mum was worried I might get fidgety, but afterwards I famously announced that the play ‘wasn’t yerry yong!’ (very long).

  Theatre developed into a passion for me and I studied English literature and drama at university with the firm intent of becoming a newspaper theatre critic. With an honours degree secured, I then took a postgraduate diploma in journalism. Despite freelancing as a theatre reviewer for the newspapers, I quickly realised the established critics kept their coveted jobs for life and none were looking like they would be falling off their perch any time soon. So I would have to expand my journalistic horizons. I worked mostly in entertainment journalism, where I met my partner, Katie. Later, when she was offered a magazine editorship in Australia, I also found a job on a magazine there and we headed for the sun.

  Dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. He and Mum assured me the prognosis was good as he started treatment. And at first he responded well. But by 2004 he was becoming very sick. I was heartbroken, and Katie and I moved back to the UK so I could help care for him. For the next two years I worked as a senior journalist at a UK national newspaper in London, and most Fridays and weekends headed to Surrey as Dad battled his illness with dignity. Losing him hit me hard, and after his funeral we scurried back to Sydney. We bought a flat in the Eastern Suburbs and I began working for the venerable Australian Women’s Weekly, travelling Australia and the world to interview fascinating people and adding Royal Correspondent to my list of reporting duties.

  Every year since 1997, we have returned to England to see our family and friends, and we were in Prague that day in 2016 for a three-day stopover on the way back to Sydney. Prague was bulging with tourists, the sun was out and the city was achingly beautiful.

  And then I went to the Pinkas Synagogue in the heart of the Old Jewish Quarter and everything changed.

  Out back at Pinkas Synagogue is the famous Old Jewish Cemetery, where graves, some ten deep, are piled on top of each other, stabbing through the earth, reaching, reaching for a shaft of sunlight. The headstones are packed in, jostling and tumbling in what at first glance seems to be utter chaos. The deep layering and overcrowding in this burial ground is the result of limited space in what was once part of an ancient ghetto, a testament to shameful centuries of legalised anti-Semitism.

  Here, apart from a brief flourishing of tolerance around the turn of the twentieth century, Jews were forced to live in segregation, banned from other Prague neighbourhoods, and though this cemetery was expanded a couple of times, it still proved far too small for the community’s dead. There are some 12,000 tombstones crowded in, dating back to the fifteenth century, some just poking up their heads above ground level as others grandstand above. It’s an unsettling sight that, in the context of the names on the synagogue wall, can’t help but conjure up ghostly echoes of the pyramids of twisted bodies in Hitler’s gas c
hambers, each gasping for a last breath.

  Between the tombstones, wildflowers and grasses have claimed the topsoil, delivering a softness to this arena of death. So despite the pall, there is serenity here. This historic place, this tiny patch of religious calm and respect in a city of Baroque gilt excess, Gothic flying buttresses, swirling romantic Art Nouveau and intellectual sharp-edged Cubism, belongs to the Jews – and today it felt as if it belonged to me.

  Pinkas, the second-oldest synagogue in Prague, was turned into a memorial back in the late 1950s for the 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust who came from Bohemia and Moravia. Two painters took on the Herculean task of inscribing the victims’ names on the walls, an epitaph for those who had no real graves, many no longer families even, to remember them.

  And it was here, in this synagogue, for the first time in my then 52 years, that I grasped the point of tombs and memorials, or at least how they related to me. For this simple, eloquent evocation gave voice to the intellectual hearts, the deep thoughts, the conversation, the vibrant lives, the sartorial style and the soaring musicality of so many, brutally snuffed out and carelessly tossed in pits or rivers, shot in the head or back, choked by gas and engulfed in flames.

  Here the inhumane became human and my family took shape. Pieces of who my father was and who I am were all thrown up in the air, and I felt a searing need to grasp them and pull them back together. After reading the names of my relatives on the wall, I crouched down in the courtyard outside the synagogue and started to search the internet feverishly and email my two brothers, Nick and Peter, in England. I felt dizzy and a little lost. Something elemental had shifted.

  While I knew that my grandparents, Rudolf and Helena Rieden, had been sent away to Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech), my understanding had always been that they had survived the Holocaust relatively unscathed by the horrors so many others had endured. Dad preferred to call Theresienstadt a ghetto rather than a concentration camp. He said it was a sort of walled town where his mother and father lived, not in comfort and not willingly, but it wasn’t a death camp and they got through it. Indeed, at the end of the war they came out and simply resumed their lives back in Prague. Or so I thought.

  The existence of a wider family – of Rudolf and Helena’s brothers and sisters, Dad’s aunts and uncles, of their parents, of cousins – this was never mentioned. But here they were, and as my crude internet dredge started to reveal, they were not only murdered, but their various journeys to that full stop took nearly all of them through Theresienstadt, that name I knew so well. Grandma and Grandpa would have been there in the camp when their kin were sent East to their deaths. What’s more, Emil Rieden, Rudolf’s father, Dad’s grandpa, actually perished in the ghetto just four months after Rudolf and Helena were transported there. Were they with him when he died, I wonder, and did Emil have any sense of what lay ahead for his children?

  I couldn’t take it all in. Who were these people and why didn’t I know more about them?

  I raised myself back on my feet and headed back inside Pinkas, drawn to that spot in the heart of the synagogue where six lines up from the bottom I had spied Rieden, a personal hieroglyph pregnant with meaning. I needed to check what I had seen was still there. That I hadn’t imagined it. But there was no mistake.

  After staring at the letters compulsively I eventually turned away and followed the crowds to the rooms upstairs, unaware of what lay ahead. It was an exhibition of children’s drawings, evocative paintings and sketches by the children who were sent to Theresienstadt. They have become incredibly important to those who want to understand the Holocaust and what went on, because from the innocence of youth comes a poignant and powerful dialogue depicting exactly what the inmates knew about what was happening to them, how they felt and the brutal conditions of their incarceration.

  If Dad had not escaped to England, his drawings would have been in this exhibition and I would not be here. Nine thousand children under the age of 15 passed through Theresienstadt, 1633 lived there when the camp was liberated. Most of these young artists were all murdered.

  Their pictures are of Nazi soldiers with guns, buildings with black smoke pumping from chimneys, emaciated prisoners crammed into dark, dirty dwellings with ragged clothes, bunk beds piled high. And then there’s another world painted here: of life before Theresienstadt, an exaggerated imaginative paradise with butterflies, green meadows and naive houses where families live happily together.

  They stay with you these drawings, they reach into your soul . . . and I had seen them before.

  It was 1990 some months after the Velvet Revolution, when the Communists were finally overthrown in a bloodless coup and, like a page from a children’s fable, playwright Václav Havel was elected as president of a new Czechoslovakia. Only this wasn’t fiction, this was reality and everyone was rejoicing. Now for the first time, Dad could go back to his birthplace without fear of reprisal.

  It was my idea that he, Mum and I book a holiday as soon as possible, and when I mentioned it to Dad he was surprisingly eager. By this time his parents, Rudolf and Helena, had both died and there was no mention of any other kin we should be checking on, but Dad really wanted to see Prague again. He was aching to show it to us, and Mum and I wanted to be with him when he was at last reunited with his homeland. It didn’t feel like a sombre or tortured pilgrimage, but a chance to celebrate Czechoslovakia’s emancipation and enjoy the beauty of this place that was so much part of our family – and, as I was soon to discover, so much part of Dad.

  It was early October and the air was crisp. The city was in the throes of waking up after grey Communism had cramped its style. Hotel rooms were in high demand, mostly from young West German tourists, whose Deutschmark made them very rich in this secret land that had been shut away from Europe for so long. These large groups of beer-swilling holiday-makers seemed oblivious to the part their Fatherland had played in Czechoslovakia’s painful history, and I sensed that their presence irritated both my parents.

  We could only secure five days in the Intercontinental Hotel, and our travel agent then promised he could arrange a further three nights in a private house. We’d receive the final details when we arrived, Dad was told, and we had to pay the owners in person in Deutschmarks, presented in a sealed envelope. It all felt very shadowy and underhand, and the reality, sleeping in a cramped one-bed flat while the occupants and their baby moved in with their parents a few doors down, was pretty awkward.

  This was my first step behind the Iron Curtain I had thought so much about as a child. And it was another world, one to which I was definitely connected but had no knowledge. Communism hadn’t dulled Prague’s charisma, the squares twinkling with golden baubles atop spires, the cobbled streets and painted houses straight out of a Bohemian fairy tale, the medieval astronomical clock striking on the hour, a ghoulish delight with its skeleton turning the hourglass on life. The only upside of occupation was that Prague wasn’t bombed during the war, and though updated a little and with new grey concrete buildings added from the Communist era, Dad’s homeland was right there, in all its resplendent glory, as it always had been, waiting for him to come back.

  The hotel was dated and beige, stuck in the 1970s with a brutalist concrete exterior. Service was clipped, verging on rude. Like most of Eastern Europe at the time, consumerism in Prague was virtually non-existent. Shops were empty, with one sad dusty item on display in the window, and restaurants were basic and always supposedly fully booked – even when they seemed half-full. These establishments were all still government run and they catered for one booking per table per night. There was no incentive to serve more, so they turned hungry tourists away. It was all very strange to a child of capitalism.

  What was most surprising though was the effect Prague had on Dad. He was proud, comfortable and confident. He seemed immediately at home, with a deep-seated contentment, as we meandered around the streets, across the bridges and up through t
he parks heady with trees.

  Dad loved trees. When a neighbour once wanted one of the trees in our garden cut down because it created too much shade, Dad was pained and agitated. It was as if some part of him was being attacked – the severed branches were his limbs. When I saw the richness of the urban forests of oaks, limes, plane trees and giant sequoias along the banks of the Vltava below the castle, I wondered if this was what Dad was trying to recreate when he settled in verdant Surrey in England.

  Very quickly my father’s Czech started to come back; he understood the announcements on the trams and read the street signs with ease. He taught my mother and me some words, and our nightly dinner game was to see if we remembered them. Otherwise he spoke German.

  As children we’d had many holidays in Austria when Dad easily spoke German to all we met. His accent and command of the language were exemplary, although he faltered at times trying to remember.

  Early on in my research I discovered why; this was actually his mother tongue – a punishing irony considering his family’s fate. The Rieden family hailed from the Sudetenland, part of the Austrian empire before the formation of Czechoslovakia, and at home, to his parents, Dad spoke German. Even after the war, after all that had happened to them, Rudolf and Helena spoke German to each other. Interestingly, on a form I discovered hidden in the British National Archives, Dad was asked to list the languages he spoke. He wrote ‘English and a little French’, even though his German never left him.

  Although Dad spoke little of his parents on this trip, he did want to find out if his childhood home, the apartment he was raised in and had been bundled out of in such frightened haste, was still there. To my astonishment he didn’t consult a map or ask for directions. He simply guided my mother and me onto a tram heading into the suburbs.