And yet not one of Libčice’s three thousand people said a word. No one reported the tall young Jewish man who arrived from Prague on most weekends between September 1941 and May 1942, even though he was not wearing his star.
My parcel contained so many stars because they were intended to supply not just my family but also the other Jews in that sleepy town by the Vltava. They were intended to identify them, to label them all, without exception.
Them, the others.
* * *
My father never said he was Jewish. I am not sure he ever said it before the war, but he certainly never said it afterward. He was not a great believer in clans or clubs. I cannot be certain whether this arose from some philosophical conviction, fear, or a deeper trauma. I suppose, like most tenets in life, it came from a mixture of ideas and experiences. Throughout my life, he repeated that it was up to each individual to choose who and what he or she was. I heard him label himself only once, and that was to say that he was Venezuelan.
Yet, growing up in Venezuela in a firmly Roman Catholic culture, attending a school run by Ursuline nuns, I felt out of place but never quite understood why.
I was the only child in my class who was born of a second marriage, whose parents had been divorced. A classmate once solemnly pronounced that I was the product of sin. With equal solemnity, I told her that she was the product of imbeciles.
As I grew up, I thought that was the extent of it. I was different because my mother and father had defied Venezuelan religious mores. I had unconventional parents. This both irked me and made me love them even more.
The fact that my parents were perceived as liberal, that my father was an immigrant, and that my mother worked full-time all served to compound the issue. And the matter of my parents’ house being filled with enormous sculptures of naked women and alarming canvases of deconstructed bodies did not help.
My father had no great love of organized religion and particularly disliked Mass with sermons. I thought this was, as he always explained, because he objected to men affecting to have a direct line to God. In fact, it was my mother, who came from a traditional Catholic family, who refused to take me to church. It occurred to me that this further segregated me from my contemporaries, who dutifully observed the Catholic calendar. Like most children, I wanted more than anything to be like everyone else. I distinctly remember one Ash Wednesday, during my first year in the Ursuline school when I was ten. My maternal uncle and aunt had taken me to church. I was thrilled to have the gray cross thumbed in ash on my forehead. I tried desperately to keep it intact for school the next day. In the bath that night, I kept my face away from the water. I took cushions from the room next to mine and placed them all around me on my bed to stop me from rolling over and inadvertently wiping the ash from my forehead in my sleep. I wanted to show them I belonged. This was the evidence needed that I was just like the other girls at school.
The ash did nothing to further my cause. No one else appeared at school with a dusty forehead the next morning. The problem was more intrinsic. I was set apart because those children and their parents determined that, somehow, I was not one of them. I know now the reason that some of the girls sniggered as I sat silently during the Monday discussion of the Sunday sermon was not because my mother had not taken me to church to hear it but because they suspected that I, like my father, was a Jew.
All of this I have discovered in recent years from classmates, family, and friends, who have given me their candid recollections. I was absolutely oblivious to it as a child. I never heard the word Jewish uttered by anyone in reference to me, my father, or anyone else. My time with the Ursuline nuns in Venezuela did not last long. At thirteen, I asked my parents to send me to boarding school, and, as their marriage was falling apart, they thought it best for me to study abroad. The secular American school I went to in Lugano in Switzerland had girls and boys representing over fifty countries and of all religious affiliations. The sense of not belonging disappeared. In that melting pot of cultures, I was relieved to find that no one cared whether your prayers were directed to Jesus, Hashem, Allah, or someone else entirely. And nobody visited my home to be shocked by my father’s peculiar taste in art.
In fact, I was first called Jewish by a complete stranger in an auditorium at Tufts University, when I was an undergraduate.
It was the end of the orientation process for international freshmen. The university had invited us to arrive a few days early to meet others in the class and familiarize ourselves with American campus life. I, together with hundreds of others, had duly complied.
As I left one of the talks, I was approached by a slight young man with short brown hair and intense eyes. Unlike most of the other students present, he had a rather formal manner, not least because he was wearing a jacket and tie. He spoke to me in Spanish and introduced himself as Elliot from Guadalajara.
“I was told we should meet,” he pronounced benignly. “Because we are both good-looking, Latin American, and Jewish.”
He beamed. I was baffled.
I have never been good at witty comebacks, but I was pleased to manage: “I am sorry, but you are mistaken. You see, I am not Jewish, and you are not good-looking.”
“You need glasses,” Elliot responded cheerfully, undeterred. “But you are Latin and, of course, you are Jewish. With a name like Neumann, you have to be.”
“Wrong. I was raised Catholic.”
“Where is your father from?”
“He is Venezuelan, but he was born in Prague,” I answered.
“You can call yourself what you want, but you must be Jewish. Many Jews left Europe before and after the war; your father must have been one of them.”
I had genuinely never thought about it until then. Was my family Jewish? Was my father a Jew? Was I? What did that even mean? Is one’s identity predetermined by inheritance? Or are you who you choose to be?
My roommate had brought her treasured telephone from home and connected it to a socket in our freshman room. It was in the shape of a laughing Mickey Mouse. To emphasize his laughter, one white-gloved hand was placed as if he was holding his belly just above his red shorts. The other held a plastic yellow receiver. The buttons were set out by his yellow boots. I used Mickey to call my father and tell him that all was well after my first week.
“Something funny happened the other day,” I added. “A Mexican boy I had never met before, all dressed up in a suit, came up to me saying I was Jewish.”
My father was intrigued and asked who he was. I told him and explained that Elliot had said that Neumann was a Jewish name.
My father’s initial laughter quietened.
“He said I must have Jewish blood.”
There was a pause.
His voice now came through, coarse and tremulous. He was upset. I had seldom heard my father upset. “Jewish blood. Jewish blood? Do you realize what you are saying? You are never to use that expression. Do you hear me? Never. That is what the Nazis said about us.”
Without further explanation, he hung up. I do not know if I started to cry before or after he did so. I stared at the enormous frozen smile on Mickey Mouse’s face, his tongue sticking out, and put the bright yellow receiver back in his white-gloved hand. I called back, kept pushing the buttons by the yellow boots, but all I heard was the continuous beeping of a busy line.
CHAPTER 7 A Spring Morning in Prague
In May 1990, two years after we spoke about Jewish blood through the Mickey Mouse telephone, my father and I traveled to Prague. The Berlin Wall had fallen on November 9, 1989, and this was followed by peaceful student protests in Czechoslovakia. By December of that year, the country had peacefully transitioned into a parliamentary democracy led by the playwright Václav Havel. A cathartic winter had given way to a gentle spring. The city’s buildings and cobbled pavements were still blackened from years of neglect and economic stagnation. The restaurants and shops were almost empty and devoid of variety, their frugal offerings bearing the mark of the austerity
that had settled like dust during forty-one years of stark communism. In contrast, the people of Prague seemed to buzz with ideas and possibilities as they became ever more emboldened by the success of their quiet revolution. The May sunshine heralded the first democratic elections in many people’s lifetimes, set to take place that summer. On almost every sidewalk, students perched on stands made of old wooden boxes, distributed pamphlets, and vociferously exercised their newly acquired right to free speech. It was an exciting time to be Czech.
Earlier that year, the Czechoslovak ambassador in Caracas had visited my father. He bore an official letter of invitation from the new government, which was trying to engage and draw successful émigrés back to their native land. My father had initially refused the offer to return to Prague even for a visit. At that time, paradoxically, he was working with the Venezuelan government to bring skilled European immigrants to Venezuela. He had been planning trips to other Eastern European cities, but his itinerary avoided Prague.
When I heard about the invitation, I pleaded with him to accept it and take me along. My father lived alone in Perros Furibundos. He had been divorced from my mother for many years by then, and if we flew there during the summer holidays, I could be his travel companion without missing any classes. I was curious to find out more about my father’s family, and I thought that going there, especially as things were changing, might open something inside him that had been sealed for decades. At that stage, I knew nothing of their fate during the war. More important, I also did not know who or how many they were. I imagined that he would show me the places where he had lived, tell me stories of his youth, and finally open up to me about his family and his past. He reluctantly agreed to the trip.
Instead of the emotive journey I had envisaged, we spent three days being led ceremoniously around tourist sites. Wenceslas Square with its darkened museum, Old Town Square and its fifteenth-century mechanical and astronomical clock, the imposing castle on the hill, the half-forgotten baroque churches, the fabled Charles Bridge with its statues standing sentinel in the fog, the gilded and hand-painted libraries in the Strahov Monastery were all intriguing but seemed entirely unrelated to me or my father. Whenever we were alone, my father was more interested in discussing Kafka’s novels than he was in his own past.
Pavel, our guide, was a rotund, balding, and slightly nervous government official with whom my father insisted on speaking English. Pavel’s English was rudimentary, and my father’s was itself weighted with a heavy Czech accent, which made it even odder that they should not speak in their mother tongue. If Pavel understandably reverted to speaking Czech at any point, my father would just stare at him blankly and wave in my direction. For my father, Pavel with his crinkled suit and thick round glasses was a character straight out of the pages of The Trial. As for Pavel, I cannot imagine where he thought my father hailed from, with his fashionable suede jacket and Adidas tennis shoes. As Pavel determinedly showed us each landmark of their shared homeland’s history, my father insisted on quizzing him about Communist-era bureaucracy and expounding on the natural marvels of Venezuela. Pavel dutifully persevered.
It was not until we were left alone on the afternoon of the second day that I realized there was more to my father’s behavior than just obduracy. He simply could not remember the streets of his old city. This amazed me. Although he had recently turned seventy and had been away for over forty years, Prague had been his city for his entire youth. His mind worked perfectly, and he remained sharp and focused, so I knew that it had nothing to do with age. It was odd, as if he had never been there before. We would amble around in circles in the center of town near our hotel, losing track of what should have been familiar routes. He scarcely spoke as I ushered him through the streets of Malá Strana and the Old and New Town. He just firmly held on to my hand. I had dozens of questions, but it was clear to me that he could not answer them. So instead, I asked him to teach me Czech words. I only knew a handful: nazdar (hello), papa (goodbye), dêkuji (thank you), and hubička, an old-fashioned way of saying kiss. As I carefully repeated each word, my terrible pronunciation made him chuckle. When he laughed, I knew my father was there with me. The rest of the time, he was far away, lost in some distant corner of his mind. As we walked alone, there was a freshly marked frailty to him, hitherto unseen and transmitted through the bony grip of his hand. This scared me and made me realize that he needed me. We wandered the streets, and for the first time, I felt our roles had reversed. My remarkable father, the powerful Renaissance man, was not guiding me through the cobbled streets of Prague. I was leading him as I would a child.
Despite my awful sense of direction, my brief perusal of some guidebooks on the flight over seemed to have left me with the better, albeit limited, sense of the city. We became so lost trying to find the Basilica of St. James that we had to stop and buy a map. Only some of the names had changed, but clearly, my father had entirely wiped the web of Prague’s streets from his mind.
He had arranged our trip to coincide with the fiftieth reunion of his class from industrial school. On our last night in the city, he was collected from the hotel by a friend who would take him to the celebratory dinner. I offered to accompany him, but he said that it made no sense, as I did not speak Czech and no one there would talk any language I knew. I spent a quiet evening alone at our hotel.
At breakfast the next morning, my father seemed unusually tired. When I asked about his reunion, he simply said it had been fine, without much further elaboration.
“Just old people, some interesting, some not,” he proffered.
“And the man who picked you up?” I asked. “Who is he?”
“Zdenêk. He is a friend. A good friend,” he answered. “He saved my life.”
“He did? How? What do you mean, saved your life?” I had never heard the name Zdenêk before.
“It’s a complicated story,” he said quietly. “One day I’ll tell you. But not now.”
His hand trembled as he stirred his coffee with a minuscule spoon, and there was such sadness in his eyes as he spoke that I just could not ask more. We ordered our breakfast and talked about summer plans.
Selfishly, I had been looking for answers that my father was not able to provide. I suspected by then that many in his family had died during the war, and I had innumerable questions. I wanted to know the details, hear anecdotes. But it was clear then that it was wrong to ask more. Witnessing this newly emerged frailty, seeing his quivering hand, I felt guilt at having asked him to bring me to this city that he did not recognize.
That last morning in Prague, as we left the breakfast room, he announced that he wanted to take a short car ride to the place where the family had lived. We would have just enough time before heading to the airport.
He seemed thrilled to have remembered the address. So we set out in a taxi that morning to the industrial area of Prague called Libeň. We approached what seemed to be a group of largely commercial buildings set within a gated development. My father and I got out of the car and entered on foot. He stopped by a detached house, set apart from the more industrial buildings, surrounded and separated from the road by tall trees. It was a three-story nineteenth-century building divided into apartments. We stood outside together, before a wide front door.
“The family lived there,” he stated plainly. He pointed up at the first floor.
Taken aback, I suggested we ring the bells by the door. My father refused.
“We had a factory called Montana that was just around the corner.”
I thought he had made a mistake. “Montana like your paint factory in Venezuela?” I asked.
“It was also the name of the paint factory here. The one my father started.”
I was astounded not to have heard this before. “Did you work there with your father?” I asked tentatively.
“No, I never worked with him.”
“And were you happy when you lived there?” I pointed up to the window.
“Yes,” he uttered after some t
hought. “But we were happiest in the country house in Libčice.”
“Why don’t we go there?” I urged, encouraged by this unusual outpouring of information.
“Libčice is far, and we don’t have time.”
“Shall we try to find the factory?”
“No,” he said, “there’s no time. It won’t exist anymore. You asked where the family lived, and now you know. There’s no time for more. We have to go back. We can’t be late.” And then, rather tersely, he added, “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is—in the past.”
As we headed back to the hotel, my father noticed something through the window. He spoke quickly in Czech to the driver, who halted the taxi. All I could make out was a lot of Czech thank-yous and a name that my father said a few times. Bubny? Bubny. We had stopped in a part of town that, as far as I could tell, seemed deserted and almost derelict. We were still outside the center of Prague, and the beautiful landmarks were far away.
“What is this?” I asked.
“There’s a place here that’s important, a station.”
He pointed at a building some hundred yards away. All I could see across the unkempt grass by the side of the road were train tracks leading up to a group of brown and gray buildings. We were not at the entrance but to the side of the station. The tracks were edged with wire-mesh fencing. There was no way of getting closer, no gap in the fence as far as I could see in either direction.
“Important?” I asked him, puzzled.
My father seemed once more to be lost with his memories as he stood next to me. The driver had hung back by the car and was leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. As I studied the map in search of a way forward to the buildings, I noticed that the fence was swaying. It was shaking. My father’s fingers were clutching through the wire diamonds, and he was sobbing silently. He could only mutter, between short gasps of breath. He mumbled over and over, that this was where he had said goodbye. I did not know what to do. I called him Papi, as I had always done, but I did not think he could hear me. I gently unclenched one of his hands from the wire and stood between him and the fence. I held him and reminded him that I was there. For an instant, he leaned the side of his face on my head. We stood there frozen, holding each other, him petrified by his memories and me terrified of the monsters that I sensed were lurking there, unseen.
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