He quickly regained his composure and whispered: “Thank you, Coquinita. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
I tried to catch and hold his gaze while I told him I loved him. I realize now that there are sorrows that cannot be conveyed, wounds with which you learn to live but that never completely heal. I was nineteen at the time and thought that words and love could assuage every sadness. I ventured that I was there to listen if he ever wanted to speak. He never did.
* * *
The transports began leaving for Terezín in November 1941. Initially, some Jews—those in mixed marriages or their children under fourteen and those employed by the Jewish Council—were kept off the transport lists. The Central Office for Jewish Emigration decided the date and number of between twelve and thirteen hundred people for each transport. The lists were then sent to the Jewish Council for each region, who compiled the actual names and were then compelled to send a summons to each individual deportee.
Those deported from Prague and its surrounding towns left from the Bubny station, on the other side of that wire fence my father had clung to.
Summonses were delivered at night. Those served also received details of timings, assembly points, documents, and belongings they were to bring. Families were usually deported together. Those from Prague and its outskirts were called to some makeshift buildings near the old Trade Fair building or in Czech Veletržní Palác, close to the Bubny station. The premises consisted of dirty and poorly ventilated shacks with no heat or sanitary facilities at all. They were guarded by Czechoslovak gendarmes outside and SS men inside. Deportees were assigned a piece of floor as their “living area.” Each spent a minimum of three days filling out forms and being questioned by SS guards about every aspect of their lives and belongings.
Most of the deportees were sent first to Terezín, the camp northwest of Prague. Established as a walled garrison town in the eighteenth century, it was home to fewer than four thousand people by 1940, after the dissolution of the Czechoslovak army. In the fall of 1941, all of them were moved out to transform the town into a detention camp for Jews.
On April 27, 1942, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague sent a transport notice to my grandparents’ house in Libčice. The family members were to report to the Veletržní Palác near the Bubny train station in Prague on May 4 at eight a.m.
I found the document from one of my boxes.
The summons is a double-sided card, headed with the black eagle atop a swastika. It neatly lists the names of Otto, Ella, and Hans. Otto’s name has a line through it, removed by someone at the Council who decided, persuaded by the family friend Pišta, that as the head of the paint factory, he was important in Prague for the war effort.
The Neumanns knew the importance of avoiding being transported. Every month since the autumn, someone in the family had been deported. In November 1941, cousin Erich, Ota’s brother and a salesman at the factory, had been sent away; it was believed he went to Latvia. In December of the same year, cousin Hana Polláková had been taken. In January 1942, Rudolf Pollak, who had been married to Ella’s late sister, had been sent to Terezín, together with his daughter, Zita, his wife, and their fourteen-year-old son, Jiří. Hugo Haas, his wife, and their little daughter, Věra, who had attended clandestine school, had been transported in February 1942.
Many of those deported were thought to have been sent to Terezín, but communication from the camps was precarious. The only person from whom they had clear news was Otto’s brother Karel. He had been transported in March. Amazingly, a few weeks later, the family had received a letter from him stamped in Lublin, Poland. He begged the family to send food, as he faced starvation. Through black-market connections and friendly gendarmes, the family managed to dispatch a parcel to him.
They never heard whether it found Karel or received any further news of him.
The consensus at the Council was that the only possible strategy was to delay departure and stay in Prague as long as possible. The Neumanns now faced an appalling challenge. They had five days to get Ella and Hans off the list.
Hans pleaded with his boss at the Čermák factory to help him out. By then he had proved to be a hard worker, and after a few months, his boss had decided to appoint him as deputy. Otto wielded what little influence he had left and spoke to and telephoned and wrote to anyone he knew who might potentially help. Lotar drew on every contact he had.
Their efforts were not fruitless. Hans secured a letter from František Čermák stating that his work was crucial to the factory. A few days before the transport date, Hans was taken off the list. This small victory spurred them on. More calls were made to Pišta, the family friend at the Council in Prague. This was followed by more pleading with anyone who might be able to tilt the scales in their favor.
But try as they may, no one could get Ella off the list.
Ella was to be deported alone.
Zdenka drove to Libčice with Lotar and helped her pack for her departure that Monday in May.
Otto, Ella, Lotar, Zdenka, and Hans. The five of them spent that last weekend together. The Sunday night before she left, they sat down for dinner together at their home in Libčice, as they had so many times before, but now with Ella’s bag packed and waiting. I have nothing to reveal about how the hours passed beyond my own horror in contemplating them. No one spoke or wrote of it afterward. I can only imagine the relentlesss and mounting trepidation that must have filled the house in Libčice that night. Ella’s, Otto’s, and the boys’ dread would have been palpable. Zdenka, who had come to love Ella as a mother, must have been devastated. Ella would have had to wrestle with the desperate fear of being separated from her family as the hours crawled by. Otto, his need to control abjectly frustrated, would have despaired. His beloved wife of twenty-five years, the one who drove him mad and kept him sane, the mother to his children, the ever-cheerful Ella, with her smiles and music, warmth and silliness, was simply being removed from their lives, excised, taken away. And he could not stop it. He could not protect her. Hans and Lotar must have felt equally powerless, guilty, and afraid.
There is one single relic of that period between the summons of April 27 and Ella’s departure. It is a photograph of my grandparents at home in Libčice. Ella is absorbed in her knitting. Otto is dressed in a jacket, looking down, a cigarette in one hand and a pen in the other. There is a piece of paper in front of him; he could be writing a letter or completing one of the endless official Protectorate forms—it is unclear. On the table is a bottle of wine, glasses, matches, an ashtray, and newspapers.
Everything around them is darkness.
At first glance, it is just an unremarkable photo of a couple sitting, perhaps after dinner, at their home. It does not appear to record any moment of importance. The sitters seem preoccupied and are looking elsewhere. It is an odd picture to keep unless the scene holds some other meaning.
This is the washed-out photograph that always stood on my father’s bedside table, the one I had wondered about as a child, the one of my grandparents seated around a table looking old and sad. It was taken that very last week. This graying image that baffled me then is the last picture taken of Ella and Otto, relatively free and together in the Libčice house. Of all the photos in the album, casual playful shots or carefully posed and smiling portraits, this is the only one that my father kept.
Ella had to report on the Monday morning, May 4, for the same transport as her brother Julius, his wife, and their two young children. Otto’s brother Oskar, his wife, and their eight-year-old son, were on it too.
Zdenka drove with Otto, and Ella into Prague that morning before sunrise. It was decided that it was best if Hans and Lotar said their goodbyes at home and made their way to work as usual. Only Otto and Zdenka went with Ella all the way to Veletržní Palác.
They were detained before the entrance by the SS guards and ordered to leave Ella to carry her two suitcases and enter the holding area alone with the other deportees. Most Jews had to walk to the assembl
y point from their homes, hauling their allotted fifty kilograms of belongings, as they were no longer allowed to drive. Ella had been forewarned that often the suitcases never made it to the destination, so it was important that she carry essentials in her handbag. I cannot imagine how they felt, but I presume Otto continued to be stoic and Ella tried to stay positive, as she always seemed to be in the anecdotes and letters. I am sure they found comfort in thinking and saying that this would be temporary and that they would find a way to all be together again soon.
My grandmother spent three days in that transit center by the station, on her patch of floor with a straw-filled sack for a mattress, with her two suitcases and her carefully packed shoulder bag, filling out forms, handing in belongings, and answering endless questions under the watchful eyes of the SS guards. Wearing nothing of value other than her wedding ring, Ella must have watched as those around her were dispossessed of their jewelry and valuables. I pray that her allotted patch was close to her brother Julius and her brother-in-law Oskar and their families. I hope that the children distracted them and made them smile. It comforts me to think that at least during those terrible days of waiting, having left behind her husband and her two boys, Ella was with people whom she knew and loved. They will have cared for her. She will not have been entirely alone.
After the long days in the assembly point came the journey by train to Bohušovice, the station nearest Terezín. One thousand men, women, and children were transferred with Ella in the windowless wagons that left Bubny on May 7.
Otto, Lotar, Zdenka, and Hans heard nothing for three months.
In August, Pišta, the family friend who worked at the Council of Elders in Prague, brought news. Ella was alive in Terezín. She had fallen ill and fainted in the train, but she was alive. She had been one of some forty people carried off the transport in the station nearest to Terezín because they were ill. It saved her life.
Julius Haas and Oskar Neumann and their young families were ordered to stay on board while others filed into the already crammed carriages. They traveled on to Sobibor, in occupied Poland. The family never heard from them again.
Not a single one survived of the one thousand souls on that particular transport. There is a record of the departure from Terezín but no record of their arrival at the camp in Sobibor. Virtually all at Sobibor were murdered immediately. It remains unclear whether they were shot on arrival or marched into the gas chambers. A letter from Prague sent to Victor and Richard in America in June 1945 says that the family had found comfort in learning that those few, at least, had been spared further suffering.
As I now reflect on my grandmother’s fate, sitting with my own family in my own home, my thoughts inevitably pass to my father sobbing at the station in Bubny on a beautiful spring day in Prague, a day that should have been filled with hope. Exactly forty-eight years before, his mother had left that same station and had been so overwhelmed, so terrified, that she had lost consciousness. And yet I have the letters to show me that she still trusted the time would arrive when she would be reunited with her family once again.
Despite the departure from Bubny, the wrenching separation from her boys, amid the dread and grief, that May in 1942, Ella still retained hope.
CHAPTER 8 Zdenka
Ensconced among the pages of the family album from Lotar’s house was a loose and crumpled black-and-white portrait of a striking young woman. I recognized her face from the many other photographs. After Otto, Ella, Lotar, and Hans, she appears most often in the albums. In some pictures, she is with Otto, in some alone, posing, pensive, or smiling; in many others, she is with Lotar, walking or laughing.
This particular portrait was tucked away inside the album, but its condition, its creases and worn corners, betrayed that it had been kept loose for a long time, separate and unprotected by an album or a frame. It was obvious to me that it had been handled often, looked at, loved. Perhaps it had been stowed away in a wallet or a bedside drawer or between the pages of a book.
When I asked my cousin Madla about that photograph, she told me that she thought it was her father’s picture of Zdenka.
As I worked my way through all the documents and letters in my boxes, I noticed that everyone wrote about Zdenka. Zdenka the beautiful. Zdenka the clever, the resourceful. Zdenka the joyful. Zdenka the brave. She chose to be courageous when she had every opportunity, and was encouraged by those close to her, to opt for self-preservation. Unlike my own family, she could so easily have taken a simpler, safer path. Nevertheless, she decided to marry Lotar, a persecuted Jew. Her family surely would have been understandably relieved if she had settled down with a different man, one who would bring less trouble upon them. And yet in 1939 she wed Lotar, and in 1942 she did it a second time, just as Jews and everyone close to them were being deported. Many around Zdenka had urged her not to marry Lotar again. They asked her to steer away from danger. Instead, aware and defiant, she headed straight toward it.
She did not have to help her husband or his family. She did not have to risk her life. And yet that is what she did, this is what she chose to do. Over and over again.
Despite this, nobody had ever mentioned Zdenka to me.
I knew Lotar only when he was married to my elegant aunt Věra. They lived far away from Caracas in a hamlet in Switzerland, in what seemed to me as a child to be a fairy-tale castle, complete with an old well in the garden beneath a wide and ancient weeping willow. My uncle Lotar was older than my father and taller. He was gentler, more softly spoken, with enormous hands and a tentative but very kindly smile. His wife, Věra, with her graceful manner and sparkly eyes, was also Czech. She and Lotar had two daughters who were some twenty years older than me—my cousin Susana and her younger sister, Madla, who shared her father’s mementos and albums with me. As far as I knew, Lotar and Věra had married young. No one mentioned that he had been married before. When Madla and I first spoke about it during my research, Madla explained that she herself had discovered her father’s earlier marriage only as a teenager. She also made it clear that, even then, it was not a topic upon which anyone dwelled.
The brief and rare fragments of my father’s story that he managed to share toward the end of his life contained no reference to Zdenka. I suppose this was unsurprising, given that he never spoke about his family in Czechoslovakia either. Nonetheless, her name could, for example, have slipped out during our trip to Prague in 1990, but it never did.
I asked my mother if she had heard about Lotar’s earlier marriage. She admitted to a vague memory of a first wife but struggled to remember details or even her name. She did recall my father saying that Lotar had a first love in Prague, before the war, but without any precise context.
“I think I remember your father saying that she was beautiful and clever. But I recall there was something uncomfortable, something vexing about it all, about her story. She survived the war, but no one wanted to speak about her. I don’t know why, precisely.”
I asked my mother many times to try again to remember what made any mention of this person troubling, but she simply could not remember anything more. Was it uncomfortable in the way that marriages ending can be uncomfortable? Was Zdenka not mentioned because it was far in the past and everyone had moved on? Or was it something else?
Frustrated by the lack of answers, I pressed my mother on my father’s general reticence about the past. While I now understood that my father might not have wanted to burden his child with painful memories, I wondered if his relationship with my mother, whom he had loved deeply, had allowed for a fuller exploration of his life before and during the war.
Yet it had not. I realized slowly that demanding answers of my mother now, after all the time and with all that my research had uncovered, was profoundly unfair. My urging her to revive stowed remembrances in search of something that had been left unspoken demanded she return to a place that she had moved away from long ago. It was to ask her to go on a journey that would at best bring melancholy and at worst bring regre
t. And yet my mother tried to help me as much as she could. She explained that she too had been curious but that a therapist had once told her that my father’s memories were so painful and troubled that they were better left repressed, unexplored.
So my mother in her time was much like I had been, scared to ask questions. As I dwelled on these thoughts, she added as if it should be obvious: “Your father always said that life was now, in the present. He did love technology and science fiction; his favorite film was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was about possibilities sometimes, but it was always about the present for him. It certainly was never about the past.”
Perhaps he had told her, like he had told me, that the past should remain in the past.
In many ways, that must have been the correct approach for him. For my father, the past was lost, imperfect, and irremediable, unlike his watches with their mechanisms that he could always repair with patience and time and the right tools. This was how he endured and became the man I knew as my father, a strong, hardworking, magnanimous visionary man focused on the present. And yet he had retained and left me mementos of experiences that he had tried to leave behind. Was life for him never about the past? There were moments, perhaps just a mere handful, when the past pushed poignantly through. My mother was aware of them too. The nightmares, the stunted answers, the shaking hands.
When Time Stopped Page 12
