Also, I was intrigued by the idea that there were traits in my children’s personalities that I could not recognize in my husband, their grandparents, or myself. And as we reared our family, other, more intrinsic questions arose about identity, to do with heritage and traditions, about what it is that one, as a parent, needs to pass on. Gradually, I realized that uncovering what had remained concealed concerned me and my children as much as it did my father. Finding out about those who came before us had as much to do with the present and with the future as it did with the past. The desire to understand my father was there all along. And despite my original hesitation, my burgeoning little family provided further motivation. Yet I was still afraid.
Finally, my maternal aunt, who had just retired from working at the Department of Peacekeeping at the United Nations in New York, in an act of boundless generosity, offered to spend the many hours necessary to read the letters alongside me. She loved history and had known and been close to my father in Venezuela, so she too was curious. Having a fellow reader, a companion with whom to share the emotional burden that came with a detailed knowledge of the letters, made the deciphering easier and the journey bearable. It was her offer of support that emboldened me to finally delve into the words and the world of my lost family, to attempt to retrieve their unspoken story.
So, four years after first receiving the translations of the family correspondence, I plunged fully into the past. The majority of the letters were from the 1940s and gave an account of daily life in Terezín, the concentration camp a few miles northwest of Prague. The Nazis had established it in 1941 to hold Jews as prisoners before sending them on to extermination camps. Over 140,000 residents of Central Europe went through it. There were no gas chambers there, yet tens of thousands died within its confines.
I read and reread the letters until the names, the dates, and the places interconnected seamlessly. I familiarized myself with the authors’ writing habits. My grandparents modified first names slightly, reflecting affection or humor or frustration and sometimes from melancholy or fear of reprisal. My grandfather Otto was at times Ota and even Grumpy. My grandmother Ella could be Elka, mother, or Dulinka. Their boys were darlings or dearests or golden ones. Lotar could be Lotík. Hans was often Handa, and later, from mid-1943 on, he was seldom mentioned and became an oblique reference, H.
Once I was able to navigate the distress and gained a fluency in the way the letters were written, familial lines were revealed that had hitherto been invisible, lost in time. I noted each name in the letters and tried to ascertain who they were. Often there were clues that helped me to deduce the approximate age of these new acquaintances, details that hinted at their previous professions or where they hailed from. Armed with this, Magda—a tenacious and resourceful researcher from Prague—and I scoured lists from the camps, trying to find the correct record for each person mentioned and, wherever possible, identify his or her fate and find the family. Thus I traced unheard-of relatives and their friends of over half a century before. In many cases, I actually found the children of those friends of my grandparents, now older themselves. The openness of all those I contacted amazed me then, and it does so still. They warmly welcomed me into their own histories, recalling anecdotes and experiences of their childhood and adult lives. Their stories connected with my own family—the one I had never met. My questions sometimes led to answers and often also to further puzzles, to more documents, photographs, and objects stored in boxes, stowed away in cupboards and attics.
A letter from my grandfather dated December 1942
And so was it that additional boxes filled with clues from the past began to appear—usually unannounced and unexpected, and always as if by magic.
With the help of Magda, who scoured public records, I found out that my great-uncle Victor had left Prague for America in 1919. For reasons unknown, there, he had changed his last name slightly by dropping the last n. I traced his grandchildren to California. After scrolling through phone books online and leaving messages on a dozen answering machines, I located his grandson, also Victor, the first of many long-lost cousins, in San Diego.
Victor Neuman is an American engineer who was wholly unaware of his Jewish heritage. After our initial Skype call, what struck me was that we had spoken for over an hour, and somehow the conversation had flowed easily. This was in spite of many apparent differences between us. Victor is a few decades older than I am and grew up in California. He received a master’s degree in engineering from Cambridge and is a practicing Methodist, while I was raised in Venezuela, studied humanities, and have no formal religious leanings at all. We had never spoken before, and yet we laughed at the same things with an unexpected familiarity. During our call, Victor mentioned that he had lost touch with another California cousin, Greg, who was involved in real estate and might have more information on the family. But Victor did not have any further details and could not help me find Greg. I played with the spelling, googled every real estate agent named Greg Neumann on the West Coast of the U.S., and even stalked a real estate agent called Gregg Neuman on Facebook. That Gregg finally answered numerous messages and calls with a very polite, if slightly alarmed, email. He clarified that he had initially thought I might be part of a scam, and while he would love to help, his family had been in America for generations, and his background was not Czech but Hungarian. Eventually, the California White Pages yielded some possible phone numbers. I left a few messages on answering machines, and the correct Greg replied with a joyous email. I had found another cousin. On Skype once more, I tried to explain our very large family tree, told him how to get in touch with his cousin Victor—who, it transpired, lived close to him—and explained about my father’s box of papers.
To my astonishment, Greg told me that his own father had also left a box behind. He believed it was still in his attic and contained some old postcards written in German and Czech. As a boy in California, his father, Harry Neuman, had been a keen philatelist who kept the letters simply for the collectible stamps on the envelopes. A few days later, Greg graciously posted this box of his father’s stamps to me. Carefully packaged with layered cardboard and secured all around with strong-bonding brown tape, it was filled with postcards, envelopes containing letters, and photographs sent in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s from my grandparents and the family in Europe to their relatives in the U.S.
I opened the box and, for a moment, understood what people mean when they say things are fated. Greg had not known whom these cards were from. He had never seen our family tree. I turned around the first postcard at the very top of the pile that he had sent, one with a French stamp dated 1936. I immediately recognized my grandfather in a bathing suit, nonchalantly sitting on a beach, smiling. It was an instant of inexplicable concordance, one of many that drove me on with the research, echoing the luminosity and magical realism of Latin America more than the darkness of Europe during World War II.
Items from Greg’s box included a postcard photograph of Otto on the beach in Cannes in 1936
In a similar manner, I traced and spoke to a dozen other people. I located cousins in California, Paris, Leeds in England, Bern in Switzerland, Prague, and the Czech town of Teplice. I discovered connected friends in Florida, New York, Australia, Indonesia, and the Czech village of Staré Město. I have collected memories and evidence from every reliable source I could find. Each unhesitatingly opened and shared troves of family documents, photographs, written memoirs, saved notebooks, and childhood tales to help me piece together the puzzle of my father’s family and what happened to them during the war.
I have now listened to and read so many stories from people who knew my family in the 1930s and ’40s, and read enough of their written words, to be able to sense the personalities of those who have gone, to hear their voices, to glimpse the people they were. I have gone to the paint factory that the family owned, to the houses and apartments that were once theirs. I have paced the same rooms and hallways, climbed the same stairs, held on to the same
railings, crossed the same streets, tripped on the same chipped cobblestones of Prague sidewalks, walked on the paths of the Vltava that smell of the same magnolias and geraniums, knocked on the same doors, turned the same handles, and entered the same rooms. From their windows, I have looked out at their world. I have imagined them so many times that it is almost as if I have my own memory of my grandparents and of who and how they were.
Perhaps all remembrance is a process of compilation and creation. Every day we absorb what is around us and assemble observations of a specific time: sounds, smells, textures, words, images, and feelings. Of course, we prioritize and edit as we go, subjective witnesses to our own lives, providing recollections that are often biased and incomplete. It is, I suppose, why even honest and reliable witnesses in a courtroom can describe the same event differently. And yet I am told that they tend to agree on the essentials even while the details can vary wildly. As a number of witnesses provide their diverse accounts, a distinctive picture frequently emerges—even if it is a mosaic of impressions rather than a series of identical overlapping images.
I realize now that I too have created a mosaic of assembled reminiscences. It is a remembrance because the words, the feelings, the impact left on others mean that those who shaped them are still present, retained as a mental perception. I have collated these recollections that capture my grandparents’ essence and consolidated them with the photographs and the hundreds of documents. Now my family are no longer a passed-over palette of faded shadows.
I can conjure them.
I can see them vividly.
Hans with his uncle Richard, Otto, and Ella Neumann in Prague, c. 1934
CHAPTER 2 The Watch on the Plate
The first time I saw a photograph of my father as a child, he had been dead for over fifteen years. Halfway into my research, my uncle Lotar’s daughter, my cousin Madla, brought me an album from her father’s house. She had forgotten about its existence, though, as a small girl, she had been shown the contents. It is covered in black vinyl and, despite its obvious age, is in perfect condition. An adhesive black label reads Famille Lotar in lettering of white relief. Its cardboard pages are laden with black-and-white photographs, some with corners curling as they have become unglued. As I turned the pages carefully, trying to recognize my family, the tiny image of a boy jumped out at me. It startled me because the face was so familiar. It does not immediately remind me of my father, it just looks like my son. The way my eldest holds his hands is the same. Their noses are different, the shade of the hair is dissimilar, but the eyes are uncannily identical. I have seen that expression, that half grin, the eyes gazing up, a million times. In the photograph, the family is in the woods near their holiday house in Libčice just outside of Prague. My grandparents Ella and Otto, and Otto’s youngest brother, Richard, pose for the camera while two smiling boys sit on picnic blankets in the foreground. They are my uncle Lotar and my father, Hans. It must have been taken in 1928 or 1929. Lotar appears to be about ten, and Hans could not be more than seven or eight. The boys are dressed in pin-striped jackets and shorts, and their hair is styled in matching pudding-bowl cuts. When I look closely, despite the blur of time passed, I recognize my father’s smile. There is a distinct impishness in his eyes.
Lotar and Hans with their parents and uncle Richard, c. 1928
I have read, researched, asked, and asked again so many questions of so many people who knew of them that I can almost hear their breaths, their laughs, their sobs.
I can picture the family in 1936, moving about their lives. When it is quiet enough, I can hear their voices.
They are in a large, airy living room with a beamed high ceiling and a chimney at one end. From the windows, you can see the wind create waves of needles on the pines in the garden. It is a weekend in late September, and the chill of the winter’s evening has already impregnated the air. Otto leans against the back of an armchair next to the crackling fire, absorbed in a book about Mahatma Gandhi. He is forty-six, but his white hair and downturned lips make him seem older. Ella is almost forty, looks closer to thirty as she floats about the rooms humming a melody. They have two teenage boys, Lotar, who is eighteen, and Hans, who is fifteen. That evening Lotar is at home with his parents. He has just brought more firewood from the supply outside. Again, they are in their country house in Libčice, about twenty-five kilometers north of Prague, on the banks of the Vltava River.
Ella had received a gift of money from her parents and bought the farmhouse in Libčice, ignoring Otto’s protests about the extravagance of owning a second home. In the city, they had a comfortable apartment in a nineteenth-century building chosen specifically for its location: a two-minute walk from the main building of the family’s paint factory. “It is most practical to live nearby,” Otto would say over and over, as Ella complained that being so close just meant that home and work fused into one. “It is so much better to have to travel a little,” she protested, “to have a journey that allows you to separate and disconnect.” She would say to Otto, who was no longer listening: “You have to have a different place to rest, a place that is just for family and that allows you the space to think of other things. In Prague, the factory just there means that someone is always knocking on the door whenever there is a problem at work.” Even though he never admitted it, Ella knew that her husband also came to treasure their weekends away.
Ella had spent her childhood in a rambling house in Chlumec nad Cidlinou, a small medieval town in northeastern Bohemia. She had met Otto there, when he had been employed as an accountant at the local sugar refinery. He had conducted a determined courtship of Ella that had been as respectful as it was resolute. Ella’s father, a successful stockbroker, had immediately approved of his serious prospective son-in-law. Ella had found Otto’s gravitas and candor endearing. She and her three siblings had grown up with the easy nonchalance that comes from a childhood unclouded by financial worries. Her family baffled Otto. He considered them too preoccupied with trivia. They certainly did not spend their time studying politics and philosophy, as he did. They seemed to devote most of their attention to parties and music.
Everyone in her family played either the piano or the violin, and as a young girl, Ella had loved to sing. She had wanted Hans and Lotar to learn an instrument, but Otto had not allowed it. It was not that Otto did not enjoy music, it was just that he considered playing an instrument inconsequential. He did relish listening to the composers from the last century, Smetana and Dvořák, though Otto maintained this was mostly from a sense of national pride. Ella, on the other hand, liked the more modern composer Martinů, and shared her boys’ love of jazz, swing, and political cabaret. She missed the constant music and the happy chaos of her childhood. Her older sister, Martha, who had married Zdeněk Pollak and had three children, had died of pneumonia in 1923. The remaining family and Martha’s brood regularly gathered in Roudnice, where one of her brothers and her parents still lived. Every moment there was a hubbub of discussion, music, and laughter.
When she first moved to Prague with Otto, Ella had been exhilarated by the bustle of the capital. Yet, with the years, she would come to take pleasure in it only sporadically. She longed to live outside of it, where time passed more slowly. This was why she loved the house in the sleepy town of Libčice. They spent most weekends and school holidays there. Otto would join them only when circumstances at the factory allowed. Hans and Lotar had grown up cycling on the paths and rowing their boat on the Vltava. They had caught butterflies, built huts in the woods, swum in a calm part of the river—in Libčice, they had found the space and freedom to be boys. Ella especially enjoyed the people and the natural life that bustled and thrummed around the river. She would walk its banks every morning after breakfast and watch the colors and shadows thrown by the rising light change with the seasons.
A portrait of Ella from the early 1930s
Otto was the seventh of eight siblings. He had grown up in the area of České Budějovice in southern Bohemia. His par
ents had struggled to keep some order in a household with seven boys by imposing strict rules. His father had died when Otto was twelve, and he had found comfort in discipline and order. He had embraced the role of the sensible and cautious one in the family, and took pride in having all rely on him for advice. All the Neumann children were earnest and hardworking. They had, by turns, taken care of their mother until her death in 1910. When one of the brothers faced difficulty, the others rallied around to help. Otto had studied business because he enjoyed the predictability of numbers. He remained close to all his brothers, and especially to the youngest, Richard, with whom he had started the Montana paint factory in 1921. Letters show that he also often spent time with his elder brother Rudolf and with Oskar, who was only two years younger and ran one of the factory branches. His older brother Victor, an engineer who had helped the Austro-Hungarian army build bridges, had migrated to America after World War I to try his luck there. Despite the distance, they were in constant contact.
A portrait of Otto from the 1920s
Otto and Ella had worked on the house for years, modernizing it, decorating it, planting the garden. It had been three years since they had begun using it regularly, and it was just coming into its own, shaped to the contours of the family. The rooms were by now cozy and familiar, the walls filled with prints, every nook explored and cherished. The trees and shrubs in the garden surrounding the house had rooted deeply, filled out, and blossomed. The path to the riverbank had been repaved and weeded, and, in spring and summer, was traced with wildflowers. In autumn and winter, the damp fallen leaves plastered the stones.
Early that evening, as his father worked at his desk, Lotar sat in an armchair and gazed out the window, warmed by a fire that crackled and danced in the hearth. He sat upright, supported by a needlepoint pillow, with a half-read book facedown on his knee. Ella bustled about him, going in and out of the kitchen as she checked on the stew. She chattered and pestered Lotar for more information about his sweetheart. Lotar tried to concentrate enough to tune out his mother’s nonsense and focus on his book.
When Time Stopped Page 4
