Sept. 11, 2001 was a Tuesday morning. After the Twin Towers fell, many of the businesses in New York City spent the rest of the week closed. Dust from the wreckage spread for miles, giving midtown Manhattan an appearance that Aleena Rieger had never seen before: a ghost town.
Days after the terrorist attacks, Rieger and her daughter, Randi, were walking through the empty streets. Thousands of people who had been in or near the World Trade Center were still considered “missing” — maybe in a hospital, maybe huddled somewhere in shock, maybe lost forever in the rubble.
“There were no bodies, there was no one to be found,” Rieger recalled.
And there was no Internet as we know it today —no Facebook group to centralize photos of the missing, no hashtags to comb through. Instead, people printed fliers with the loved one’s picture and name, and posted copies everywhere.
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So Manhattan seemed to Rieger to be devoid of living people, and populated instead with images of missing people.
Somewhere along that walk, the mother realized that she had seen this before. She never talked about it; her children intentionally never asked about it. But, a mystery they all figured was best left in the past had just found its way out.
“I stopped in the middle of the street and told my daughter, ‘Oh my God, this is like Germany after the war,'” Rieger, 74, recalled. “It flooded me. The history was coming back.”
And now, the personal history that Rieger brought to the surface that day is bringing her back to the Chicago area that raised her.
Rieger turned the mystery that had been her post-war childhood into a memoir, “I Didn’t Tell Them Anything: The Wartime Secrets of an American Girl.” Since self-publishing the story 10 months ago, Rieger said she has been on a “mini-book tour,” which will include a stop at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 14 at Congregation B’nai Shalom in Buffalo Grove.
“I Didn’t Tell Them Anything” begins with her parents’ tale, and becomes her own. Her father was studying at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and engaged to her mother when the Nazis invaded, Rieger said. Her parents both fled, she said, but separately, and had to find each other while on the run.
The story turns into captivity in Siberia, escape to the United States and the birth of Rieger, she said. She had always been told that she was born in Poland, but Rieger — now an attorney in New York — said she has long known that the timelines did not match.
Especially not with her own memories of post-war Germany, she said. Rieger said she could recall homemade posters with photos of Nazi-abducted Jews covering trees, bulletin boards and exterior walls. Just as distraught families clinging to hope filled the streets of New York with fliers after the terrorist attacks, so Germans had after the fall of Hitler.
“I always knew that I would be the last witness to my family history,” Rieger said. “I knew the story, but none of my younger cousins did.”
Rieger said she set out to research her family’s history, and the quest for obscure documentation took her through Europe and Kazakhstan. After completing “I Didn’t Tell Them Anything,” she said she found a literary agent and prospective publisher, but decided to pull the manuscript back, revise it and self-publish instead.
Her cousin, Alan Gans, worships at Congregation B’nai Shalom and helped bring her tour here. Her parents raised her in Chicago’s West Side, and she said she comes back for visits “irregularly.”
“The suburbs, I don’t remember them being as developed as they are now,” she said. “I just love Chicago. I’m not crazy about coming there in January, though.”
But regardless of the weather and traveling, Rieger said that piecing her family’s history together, writing the story and now talking about it had been a therapeutic process.
“I thought ‘Oh, I have to write this for my grandchildren,'” she said. “I was always very reticent about talking about my childhood, because there were so many secrets.”
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer