On a sunny morning in Prague’s Old Jewish Quarter, Juliet Rieden stumbles across a cluster of names on a wall. All share her own unusual surname.
The list is inscribed on a memorial to Czechs murdered in the Holocaust: Emil Rieden, Berta Rieden, Felix Rieden, Otto Rieden.
She stares, confused. Who are these people?
Growing up, Rieden had long believed her family tree to be bare – no twigs, no branches, leafless.
Both her parents were only children. Her father Hanus, born in Prague in 1930, was the son of a decorated Jewish former soldier and doctor, Rudolf, and his wife, Helena. He had escaped on a charity flight to England in March 1939, age eight, just days before Hitler’s troops marched into the city.
She had only a few clues to the past: a sepia photo of a solemn Hanus boarding a KLM flight holding a little cloth knapsack; the presence of a mysterious network of elderly Eastern European family friends, a shadowy grandmother locked away behind the Iron Curtain who emerges just once, in a brief visit to London in 1965, like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairytale bearing gifts of woollen jumpers and scary handcrafted string puppets.
The young Rieden is only dimly aware that a few distant relatives had died in the Holocaust. They are phantoms: no detail, no identities.
Read the article by Sharon Verghis in The Australian.