Book Review Holocaust

Juliet Rieden. The Writing on the Wall: How One Boy, My Father, Survived the Holocaust. Sydney, NSW: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2019. xi + 308 pp. + 16 plates of black and white and colour photographs.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

In the beginning, Juliet Rieden knows virtually nothing about her father’s family, their relatives, and their life in Czechoslovakia, not even that he had a Jewish background. Then she sees the writing on the wall, her family names on a memorial wall in a synagogue in Prague, and, being a professional and experienced journalist, she decides to find out more. And the more she finds out, the more there is to find out. But she does this when she is well into her forties, her father dead, and no one to whom she can speak directly about what happened.  The first part of the book is, then, mostly a series of journeys to places where she finds out her father or grandparents or other relatives once lived. In each place, reading books, searching through local archives, and speaking with other people—historians, tour guides, ordinary men and women—she begins to imagine what her father and the relatives went through.

Gradually, or should we say agonizingly, she puts together documents and finds details that relate to her family, most of whom were murdered during the Holocaust. But her real focus is on her father: how he was flown out of Prague by a Christian missionary society that made baptism a condition for rescue; how he grew up and was educated in England: knowing very little of parents, grandparents and other relations; then discovering that her father’s parents survived being in Thersienstadt, but were unable to join him in England after the war and unwilling to have him return to  Czechoslovakia; and how he struggled financially to get a degree, find a job and raise a family.

The  most moving—because personal and emotional—parts of the book have to do with her research into the missionary house that saved her father’s life and provided him with an English education; and with the subsequent struggle her father faced when he tried to make himself independent and had to wrestle with various bureaucracies in London.  The missionaries were not cruel, but they were strict and they did not understand what it meant to impose conversionary pressures on the young children—they seem not to have imagined the desperation of parents willing to say, sign and pay for anything that would save their children’s lives. Though nominally baptized, children like John Riedel, the author’s father, tended not to stay with the teachings and beliefs they were instructed in, and still the officials did not appreciate how insulting to the children and any surviving Jewish adult relatives their zeal was.  Juliet Rieden tries to be as tolerant of their views as possible. Almost choking on expressions such as “Hebrew Christians”, she nevertheless feels thankful for the chance they gave to her father to live out his life—and thus to herself and her brothers being born in a free country.

More difficult is it to forgive the various governmental agencies to whom her father had to apply for financial and other assistance, especially when he did his best to explain the special circumstances of his status in the UK. With rare exceptions, they were cold, unfeeling and rude, and they tested young John’s character to its limits. If he expressed any emotional impatience with their delays and deferrals of help, they climbed on their high horses and reprimanded him for his “bad manners”. As though, as the author puts it, they had not shown utter bad manners and faith in bargaining away the integrity of Czechoslovakia, shutting their gates to immigration of people fleeing for their lives, and suspecting anyone who had escaped from the Nazi death machine of perhaps harbouring treasonous tendencies or engaging in espionage from the very governments that made their lives an utter misery.  Her final discoveries give a clear picture of how reparations, migrant aid and educational assistance were withheld on the flimsiest of technical reasons: not a shred of human sympathy evident in the records. Combing through parliamentary debates and scanning newspaper columns and letters to the editor, Julie sees example after example of explicit and not very latent anti-Semitism.

The book does not achieve the buzzword of closure. Though she finds a few lost relatives and a lot more members of the family murdered during the Holocaust or frustrated in achieving happiness in the post war years, and comes to appreciate her father’s courage and “resilience” (another buzzword, of which there are many in this story of memory retrieval and gap filling), what she comes to is a sense of intense anger—for which she expresses some embarrassment—at a world that not only allowed Jews to be killed in great numbers during the Shoah but showed little or no sympathy afterwards, was either ready with crocodile tears or stark silence and indifference to how the survivors’ lives had been ruined. She also hints that if it were to start again—and many people would say it has—there would be little difference in how the non-Jewish world responds. Anyone looking for the kind of forgiving and hopeful Holocaust book found in Anne Frank’s diary better look elsewhere than here.