“Don’t pay attention, he is like that at times,” she replied casually. “It doesn’t happen usually, but sometimes he is a little afraid.”
Then she told me about a similar incident during their last skiing trip. On those journeys, my parents usually flew direct from Caracas to Zurich while I stayed at home and went to school. They traveled regularly, and I particularly liked their trips to Switzerland because they returned home laden with giant boxes of chocolates for me.
My mother explained that when it was nearly time to land, the pilot announced that due to bad weather, the plane might have to be diverted to Vienna or Stuttgart. My father’s reaction had been striking. He clutched the metal hand rests and started to shake and sweat, she said, so much that just patting his forehead had soaked his handkerchief completely.
“Was it the turbulence? Were there thunderstorms?”
“Oh no, he wasn’t scared of the weather,” she said. Hoping to reassure me, she continued: “It just happens sometimes, he is afraid. He has not been back to Central Europe since he left all those years ago. I just told him to stay calm, reminded him that as a Venezuelan, he had nothing to worry about. And in the end the storm cleared, and we landed in Zurich after all. There was no reason to be anxious.”
“So things to do with some countries in Europe make him nervous?”
“Not often, but they sometimes do,” she said. “He is very far away from Europe now. And you, my little mouse, certainly should not spend any time worrying about it.”
I did not understand at all but left the issue there.
Why had the murder of a man at a bus stop in Europe made my father uneasy at home in Caracas? How was Switzerland different from Austria or Germany? Why would being Venezuelan have made a difference? Why would my father be scared for no reason? Who were they, those people who could just kill you? And what did all of that have to do with red dots on your shins? I had no clue how mosquitoes, nationality, poison, spies, and turbulence could be connected. I did not understand why any of these things made my formidable father afraid.
There were no immediate answers, but if my mother thought it was fine that my father was nervous at times, then that meant I must do the same. She evidently was not remotely worried about anyone trying to poison him. Like her, I would try to not give the matter further thought.
Anyone observing us then wouldn’t have noticed that anything was out of kilter at all. Our lives carried on as normal, the usual routines unaltered. My father’s bites healed, and no one mentioned poison again. For a while, I forgot about it too. My father’s days continued to pass in Venezuela, replete with work, philanthropy, hobbies, friends, and family. Seemingly, he had no real worries at all.
* * *
Could my family in the Czechoslovakia of the late 1930s possibly have imagined what was coming? If you look at the letters and photographs of the time, everything suggests that life for them during the mid-1930s retained a sense of normality. And yet, behind the smiles in the pictures, concealed within the words that filled their letters and emphasized the positive and the mundane, doubtless there must have been intimations of fear.
As Otto read the papers and oversaw production at the Montana factory, as Hans and Lotar continued with their studies, pranks, poems, and boyish romances, it must have been there. Silent, ever present, but just out of sight.
Perhaps Hans was a bit too immature, but Lotar was more thoughtful. Otto was anything but a fantasist; he must have been apprehensive, even perhaps foreseen it. He must have discussed it with his brothers. By the middle of the decade, Victor, one of his brothers, had already asked the family to join him in America, and the youngest, Richard, had been arranging to emigrate. Surely, Ella’s every instinct, even with her perpetually optimistic disposition, would have been to protect her brood. Perhaps during her walks along the Vltava, when the noise of everyday life quieted and she allowed her thoughts to wander, she had some presentiment, felt some anxiety at the impending threat.
Czechoslovakia was surrounded, landlocked by Romania, Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Germany. There was no escape to the sea, just the 430-kilometer river that starts in the west and runs southeast with gathering strength along the hem of the Bohemian Forest before turning north to cross the heart of Bohemia through Prague itself. Both its Czech and German names, Vltava and Moldau, come from the Old German words for wild waters.
I have a photograph of Lotar and Zdenka taken on a spring or summer day in 1937. They stand next to each other dressed in matching exercise clothing with the emblem of their local YMCA. It looks as if they have just shared a joke, and they are smiling. They are in the garden at Libčice, probably coming back from canoeing in the waters of the Vltava. Lotar holds her proudly, and Zdenka laughs with raised eyebrows. They do not appear to have a care in the world.
Zdenka and Lotar in the garden at Libčice, 1937
Yet with every passing week came new laws, fresh restrictions for Jews in Europe. Between 1933 and 1939, fourteen hundred anti-Jewish laws were passed in neighboring Germany. In 1933, Jews were banned from state-sector jobs in government, law, farming, publishing, journalism, and the arts. On April 11, 1933, anyone with one Jewish parent or grandparent was officially defined by German decree as non-Aryan. In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed. In 1935 Poland modeled its own laws regarding Jews on Germany’s. Jews and political refugees arrived by the thousands in Prague in the mid- to late 1930s, escaping open hatred in Germany, Austria, and farther east. Czechoslovakia was then seen as a safe haven, a bastion of democracy in Central Europe. As anti-Semitism metastasized across the continent, Czechoslovakia remained relatively politically progressive and stable. Many prominent Jews held positions in the Social Democrat government, which was adamantly opposed to Nazi ideology. Czechoslovakia was more receptive to migration than Holland, and unlike in France, one could get by speaking German.
I have found photographs of my father’s first cousins from the late 1930s. In one, two young women confidently flank a cheerful, middle-aged man wearing a fedora. They are Zita and Hana, Ella’s nieces, the daughters of her adored sister Martha. The man is Uncle Richard. The photo catches them mid-stride, mid-conversation, mid-laugh. It is impossible to see anything in it other than happiness. Yet already Richard, who owned the paint factory with Otto, had spoken of leaving and selling his share of the business. He was applying for a visa to join his brother Victor in the U.S.
Richard Neumann with Ella’s nieces Hana and Zita Polláková in Prague, 1938
In the box of letters that I received from cousin Greg in California, there is a letter, written in July 1936 to Victor in the U.S., by Rudolf Neumann, one of his older brothers. Rudolf was married to Jenny, with whom he lived in Třebíč, a town southeast of Prague toward the Austrian border. Jenny appears from the photographs to be a large woman with a commanding presence. Together they ran a double-fronted store that sold fashionable clothing in the main square in town. I have traced their granddaughter, who lives in Paris, and she recalls Jenny as good-natured and with a hearty and infectious laugh.
Rudolf and Jenny’s two sons, Erich and Ota, were ten years older than their cousins Lotar and Hans. Ota, the younger and the quieter of the two, still lived with his parents in Třebíč. Erich, who was more jovial and adventurous, had just moved to Prague and joined the Montana factory to work in sales. I have a photograph of Erich from the late 1930s. He is tilting his round face expectantly toward the photographer. His dark hair, already receding despite his being in his twenties, is neatly brushed back. He wears a striped suit over a shirt that is just a bit too tight around the neck and a polka-dotted tie. Despite it being a passport photograph, his eyes glow with a certain dreaminess. I have a single photo of Ota taken before the war. There are no others in the family albums or boxes. It is a passport photo. Like his brother, he also wears a pin-striped suit and a plaid wool tie. He has high cheekbones, and the corners of his mouth are downturned. His eyebrows are close together as if he is about to frown. His light-colored eyes
are looking down. He seems sad.
In the letter from the summer of 1936, Rudolf explains that business is not as good as it was, but that the shop is still trading, and his family and brothers are all in good health. He describes a month’s holiday in the spa town of Marienbad and anticipates his wife’s upcoming trip to Bad Gastein in Austria. He closes by expressing the wish to see his brother Victor again soon.
The general economic climate in Europe in the 1930s explains Rudolf’s gloom about the business. Aside from that, his letter seems positive, almost carefree. Below his father’s words is a carefully handwritten message from Ota to his American uncle and cousins. His words are much more somber. Ota, aged twenty-five, wrote:
My dears,
I often remember the wonderful moments that we spent together. I cannot even believe that so long has passed already. I am taking English lessons! Our life is generally still quite good but the prospects for the future are not promising. It thunders everywhere around us and things are especially difficult for us young people, as we are struck with the uncertainty of our future. And yet the situation in Czechoslovakia is better than everywhere else but even here, especially in Moravia, the anti-Semitism is growing. I suppose this is not surprising given how newspapers are reporting on the actions of our neighbors. Enclosed Harry will find a new series of Czechoslovak stamps that I was able to source in Třebíč. I do hope that he will like them.
Warm regards and kisses from your nephew and cousin,
Ota.
Ota was worried about the future. He knew.
The following summer, in August 1937, Jews were officially accused of sacrilege in the town of Humenné, Czechoslovakia. By then open discrimination and even violence against the Jews in Prague seemed to have become a regular occurrence. And yet the Neumann family carried on with their lives. As far as can be discerned from the photographs, they focused on the positive: they worked, studied, spent their weekends in Libčice, and traveled and laughed. If they had not before, they must by then have felt it. Otto, Ella, Lotar, and Hans must have known that the net was tightening.
In March 1938, the Nazis marched into Vienna, and Hitler annexed Austria in a union known as the Anschluss. Austrian Jews lost their right to vote; they were deprived of legal rights and subjected to systematic public humiliation—made, for example, to scrub the streets with their toothbrushes or consume grass like animals. Hungary too passed anti-Semitic laws, which, like Poland’s before them, were similar to Germany’s. By the time Hans was seventeen, four of the countries with whom Czechoslovakia shared its borders were openly and officially anti-Semitic.
In October 1938, Hitler occupied the Czech Sudetenland.
At this, Otto’s brother Victor wrote from America again, urging his family in Czechoslovakia to leave without delay. This plea was followed by the events that became known as Kristallnacht, the night of crystal, so named for the hundreds of Jewish-owned shopwindows that were shattered by Nazi paramilitaries and civilians across Austria and Germany. That November night, ninety-one Jews were killed, thirty thousand men sent to camps, and Jewish property and synagogues vandalized. In 1938 Germany and Austria ruled that all people classified as Jews were to carry special identity cards, have their passports stamped with a J, and change their name to include either Israel or Sara. Across Europe, people of Jewish heritage who could, fled.
In almost every photograph of the family in Libčice, those pictured are smiling. In Lotar’s album, there are photographs of Ella as a baby, Ella as a teenager dressed up in a flamenco dress, and Ella smiling with her sister. Otto and Ella can be seen as a young couple, on family holidays, all of them with their boys at the beach or skiing. Most of the photographs that fill the album were taken in Libčice in the 1930s. Almost every inch of the album’s black card pages is covered in photographs, some enormous, some so small that I need to use a magnifying glass to see the detail of the faces. The boys are playing shirtless in the summer heat. In some they are wearing shorts or holding a ball. In one picture, the family delightedly cram into an uncle’s motorcycle sidecar. In another, they are playing tennis, pristine and smiling in their whites. In one, Ella is standing in the garden, biting her lip in expectation as she waits to hit a volleyball. The family embraces, frolics, and dreams. In a few others, they play with the dog, holding him in some or making him jump. Then there is the tiny photo that is filled with pure joy. On a hot summer’s day, Ella stands in the garden by a wooden picket fence and pours water over herself from a large watering can.
Ella in the garden at Libčice in the late 1930s
You can see the perfect combination of mischief and delight in her posture, in the way her face is turned up, her eyes are shut, and her lips are open and happy. Elsewhere, Otto and his brother-in-law, Hugo, sit on some stripey deck chairs. They have just stopped to look up mid-conversation and are about to crack a smile.
The only photographs I have in which Otto is smiling are taken in the garden at Libčice. In one, he grins as he reads a newspaper in the sunshine; in another, his customarily slicked hair is a little out of place as he laughs. I am surprised by his happiness and carefree ease. It seems inconsistent with the accounts I have of his character. It is true that one keeps photographs of joyous moments; most family albums are not filled with portraits of people looking worried or upset. And yet these photographs are not posed—they capture natural moments of joy. It seems that even in the late 1930s, in that sleepy town on the Vltava, the family was able to escape, forget any worries, and just be.
As I pieced together the life of the family, I was intrigued by Otto and Ella’s small oasis in Libčice. Did the house still exist? Should I make the forty-minute drive from Prague, walk down Vltava Street, and knock on a stranger’s door? If I found it, perhaps the owner could tell me something about its history. I knew that it was so cherished by Ella, by the entire family. Some initial research revealed that while many families lived in the house during the Communist years, it had not legally changed hands since the Neumanns sold it after the war. A look on Google Maps suggested that the house was now more a cluster of buildings arranged around a courtyard, perhaps a warehouse or a light industrial compound. Magda, the Czech researcher in Prague who has been tracing families like mine for many years, confirmed this. There seemed to be little point in going to the house, which would be nothing like it was, modified and stripped of its memories.
And yet I remained curious. I wanted to see what it looked like now, what it looked like then. I tried my luck online. By searching an address and a name from the 1948 Czech property registry, I traced the current owner online. Michal Peřina, more searching told me, is a well-known and award-winning furniture designer. Facebook revealed a smiling man on a sailboat, with kind eyes and cropped graying hair under a baseball cap. I hoped I had the right person; the address and the last name were the same. I emailed, explaining who I was. Michal replied immediately, confirming that his grandparents had bought the house from my family.
After describing my investigations, I asked if he happened to have any old documents or photographs of the house that he could share. He replied that if I could wait a few weeks, he would send me something; first he had to have it restored. He attached a photograph of piles of papers laid on a surface. I was thrilled to have found Michal, at first simply because he said in his email that he, like my grandparents, loved the Libčice house. In my excitement, I forgot to ask what precisely he intended to restore. I zoomed in on the picture that he enclosed in the email, but all I could see were stained illegible papers on a long wooden table. I expected he would send me a few old photographs, perhaps some house plans, or, if I was lucky, the bill of sale from 1948.
A few weeks later, thanks to Michal, a fourth box to add to those received from my father, Lotar, and Greg the Californian cousin, found its way to me. Inside it was a handwritten note from Michal. He told me that, as a young boy, he had wondered about the contents of a mysterious safe that stood in an unused room in his grandparents’ ho
use. He had tried all the keys that he had found to open the lock to no avail. At first, he had been too young to indulge his curiosity seriously, and during the Communist years, it had been too expensive to have the safe opened. However, when he inherited the house and refurbished it after the floods of 2002, he took the opportunity to find a way through the battered steel that had fueled his childish dreams of secret troves.
I can only imagine his disappointment when the old safe yielded no treasure, just damp and crumbling papers. The names mentioned in them meant nothing to him. Yet he had kept them out of an attachment to his boyhood imaginings and because they were part of an important period in history. Perhaps the fact that the carefully typed correspondence had survived at all gave it a sense of value, a feeling that it must be important to somebody, somewhere. This was why, when my email came out of the blue, Michal took enormous satisfaction in sending a photograph of the tattered sheets of which he had been custodian for so long and insisted that they be professionally restored before they could be shared. When this work was concluded, they arrived at my home in London, carefully protected in acid-free tissues within a vellum portfolio.
Michal’s box was filled not with photos or plans but again, extraordinarily, with documents belonging to my grandparents. Otto and Ella had left them behind in their home in Libčice. These papers had survived in a safe for eighty years in a house that no longer had anything to do with my family. They had been locked away throughout World War II, forty years of communism, its fall, and even the dreadful floods that had for weeks submerged the house and much of the Czech Republic. I traveled to Libčice the next May, to the building that Michal had lovingly restored, to thank him personally. He walked me through the house as it was, the room that held the safe, the other areas, the outhouses, the tiered garden. We sat under the old flowering trees on the same wrought-iron garden furniture that had been there in Otto and Ella’s time. Michal’s mystery had been solved, and the documents’ journey was complete.
When Time Stopped Page 6
