Helena’s Precious Dinosaur
Text by Claire Baiz
“Yes. I was there.” Frieda Fligelman forced a smile. She said it again, softer the second time. “Now, let’s talk about something else.”
I was eighteen, she was eighty-five. Fligelman was treating me to lunch upstairs at the historic Montana Club, a block off Helena’s Last Chance Gulch. She refused to say what she witnessed in Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in October 1918.
Though we met several more times, I never pried. Was there a lost love in Prague? Perhaps, after fifty-seven years, she was still overcome by World War I, the