When Time Stopped

by Ariana Neumann

  But Zdenka, being Zdenka, would not wait. She could not be dissuaded from action. As soon as she heard that Ella was in Terezín, she decided to enter the camp and find her. This was difficult, but nothing had ever seemed impossible to Zdenka. She was, at this point, already driving between the homes of various family members and friends, shuttling letters, medicines, and currency. She had already helped Lotar with the false identity card. But this idea established a new level of resistance more defiant and immensely dangerous. It could easily have cost her her life.

  Zdenka during an afternoon stroll in Czechoslovakia, late 1930s

  She asked questions of friends and sought advice from people engaged in resistance. It was difficult and very risky for a gentile to access the camp, but it was not impossible. Zdenka discarded her sleek modern skirt suits, covered her hair with a handkerchief, found a pair of comfortable walking shoes, and dressed in the plainest clothes she could lay her hands on. She stitched a yellow star onto her oldest coat. She had been told there were two options. She should either look like one of the few locals who entered and left Terezín, employed to do laundry and cooking for the SS, or like one of those interned. She chose the latter.

  The easiest way in was to go just before noon and meet up with the groups of inmates who worked the fields surrounding Terezín. She would then walk with them as they headed back into the camp for their midday soup. The town had two main gates that were guarded on rotation by Czech gendarmes and German SS guards. Yet Terezín was self-administered, and the people responsible for counting inmates in the fields or barracks were Jews. The fieldworkers were led and monitored by a higher-ranking prisoner and usually returned at the time when the SS guards were on their lunch break. They entered via a gate near the gendarmes’ headquarters, which, rumor had it, was patrolled by friendly Czech guards. Chances were that the Jewish inmate in charge of the group of field workers would not denounce her, so Zdenka needed simply to blend in and avoid any contact with the SS.

  Her knowledgeable friends had shown her a map of Terezín, upon which were marked the various entrances and barracks. She managed to locate the group of buildings that, Pišta reported, included Ella’s dormitory and workplace. Zdenka knew how to do it: she knew where to go.

  She chose a busy weekday and packed an old cloth bag with items that Ella had requested: a black sweater, a wool dress, and a small pot of marmalade. She drove her car to the town of Bohušovice. There she borrowed a bicycle from a contact and cycled the remaining two kilometers to the fortified town of Terezín. When she spotted the country unit of workers in a field, she hid her bicycle in the nearby shed she had been told about. She donned her jacket with the star and joined them in their labors until it was time to go in for their lunch.

  She walked into Terezín with a large group of inmates who pushed handcarts and lugged tools and sacks of potatoes. As if she entered the camp every day, she brazenly smiled when she walked past a gendarme with his bayonet. I do not know why they did not stop her. Once through the ramparts, she found her way toward the buildings that housed the workshops and eventually reached Ella. Zdenka had a limited amount of time to spare before she had to return to the fields with the agricultural workers headed for the afternoon shift. Otherwise, leaving the camp that day would be impossible. Zdenka’s written recollection paints her bold adventure as an easy feat. The reality is that there are very few historical accounts of people illicitly accessing Terezín.

  Many years later, an elderly Zdenka remembered her encounter with Ella in the camp: Reunited, we touched each other’s hands and faces over and over in disbelief, we held each other and talked and wept. We cried out of joy and sorrow.

  A few days after the visit, Ella sent a letter to Otto and the boys:

  This encounter with my beloved Zdenka has brought me so many beautiful memories and such happiness it has shaken me out of my apathy. Today I am back at work and hopeful once more. I miss you all terribly. I live for you and pray that this will only be a short chapter and will not be in vain. I never thought I had it in me to be so brave. I’m on good terms with all and with none… I have never found so much evil anywhere before and I fear I will not be able to forget it as long as I live… It would be best if you never had to see this human misery… but should it come to it, remember to put as much as possible into the hand luggage, food, lard, soap, medicines, warm clothing, etc.

  Thanks to the devoted and resourceful Zdenka, who had not thought twice about risking her life, the Neumanns once more had, albeit temporarily, a reason to be joyful.

  CHAPTER 9 Vyreklamován

  A delicate piece of paper headed with the word Telegramm in neat print was stored in the box that my father left for me. It is browned with time and missing a corner. To the left, it is dated November 18, 1942. The addressee is Hans Neumann. The faded handwriting, in German, is hard to decipher, but one can still make out within the body of the message the words Transport CC and the date November 17, 1942, the day before the telegram was sent.

  Around November 12, 1942, a second transport notice had been delivered to the house in Libčice. This time Otto and Hans were instructed to present themselves at the deportation center in Bubny on November 17. Once more, they had less than one week to muster evidence to prove that they were indispensable in Prague.

  This time, Otto, Hans, and Lotar knew the drill. They dispatched the frantic letters, made the desperate calls, and bombarded anyone with the power to help with nervous pleas. Again, Hans and Otto beseeched their employers to provide supportive letters. Hans succeeded in securing one from his boss at František Čermak. At Montana, Karl Becker, the original Nazi-appointed administrator, had left to fight with the German army. He had been replaced by the more empathetic Czech Alois Francek. Eager to help the family, Francek typed a letter emphasizing to the authorities the importance of Otto’s work. To capitalize on this momentum, Lotar took the letters straight to the Jewish Council offices himself and handed them to their friend Pišta.

  However, this time it seemed that their efforts had been in vain, and they received no news from the Council. The weekend before they were set to depart, Lotar and Zdenka drove to Libčice to make plans. Hans’s girlfriend, Míla, and his friend Zdeněk also took the train to visit him in the country house. They buoyed him with poetry, jokes, and some plum brandy that Zdeněk’s mother had procured. As the friends left Libčice, they reminded Hans that there was still time to get off the list and they promised to visit him wherever he ended up, as if he were off on an army posting.

  But Monday passed without any word from the authorities. The Neumanns had heard that the young and strong fared better within the Nazi system. The vulnerable were cast aside. It was important to appear hardy and capable of hard labor. That last evening, Mr. Novák, one of the managers at Montana, arranged for his cousin, a hairdresser, to visit Libčice. He was to dye Otto’s thick silver head of hair a dark brown in the hope of making him appear more youthful than his fifty-two years.

  Otto and Hans bore in mind the instructions from Ella’s first letter from Terezín. They packed their bags with warm clothes and put the most useful things in their hand luggage, including, in Otto’s case, a small bottle of hair dye that the hairdresser had given him.

  Otto and Hans headed to the assembly point first thing on the Tuesday morning of November 17, 1942. They carried their bags along the shortcut of empty paths between their house and Libčice’s station. They showed their Nazi-approved work travel permits and boarded the early train to Prague. Zdenka and Lotar met them in the city, and the solemn quartet made their way to the annex near the Trade Fair building at Bubny, where months before Ella had said her own farewells.

  Otto forbade Lotar and Zdenka to even approach the entrance. They had heard stories of the SS guards at the doors bundling those who escorted the deportees along with them to the camps. I can imagine my uncle Lotar watching from a distance, supported by Zdenka but stricken with grief and guilt as the figures of his brother and father
became submerged in the throng. Lotar would have been struck by the unnatural changes. Hans’s characteristically easy saunter would have been replaced by the deliberate step of a frightened man. Otto’s hair was now dark, and his commanding bearing was bowed under the weight of his bags and his trepidation.

  Lotar was inconsolable, but the next day brought merciful news from Pišta, their friend at the Council. Miraculously, they had succeeded in taking Hans’s name off the list. He could be vyreklamován, “reclaimed,” from the transport. There was nothing, Pišta explained, that the Prague Elders could do for Otto. He was simply too old to be deemed sufficiently important to the war effort. Otto would have to make the journey that they had all worked so hard to avoid, but Pišta himself would collect Hans from Bubny.

  The telegram that I had found had been sent from the Jewish Council to Libčice on November 18, 1942, the day after Otto and Hans had registered at the assembly camp near the Trade Fair building. It was stored in my father’s box along with an official document from the Reich Ministry of Armaments in Prague stating that the work at Čermak of the Jew Hans Neumann was deemed crucial to the war effort.

  Armed with this official document to retrieve Hans and a handwritten note for Otto, Pišta went into the assembly area by Bubny Station. In his note, Pišta encouraged Otto to try to find strength in being reunited with Ella. He assured him of his friendship and wished him well in facing the road ahead. He concluded by writing that above all, Otto must keep his faith in him. He signed off Pištek, the affectionate moniker that Otto had always used for him. When I found this note in one of the boxes over seventy years later, it was clear, even out of context, that the writer was consumed with a desperate regret at his helplessness.

  * * *

  After I pieced together the episode at Bubny I told Ignacio, my older half brother from my mother’s first marriage, about it. It brought to the fore a childhood memory of his with my father. Ignacio recalled distinctly that, one day, when he was in his early teens, my father had taken him into his study and shown him a handgun. Venezuela at the time had seen a slew of kidnappings, and I remembered that in addition to stationing more guards around the house, my father had also taken to carrying a small gun in an ankle holster. Ignacio had been startled when Hans explained that the gun was not there just to fend off criminals. He had looked intently at his stepson and quietly explained that he was to tell no one, but that the gun held a special bullet for the guard who had separated him from his father at the station in Prague. The weapon and, even more so, this remark were entirely incongruous with my calm and measured father, a man who never raised his voice. Ignacio at the time had not understood what Hans meant and, scared of the gun and this strange disclosure, sensed that it was best not to pursue the matter. He obeyed his stepfather’s instruction to keep the secret and, over the decades, more or less forgot about it. When I mentioned this story to my mother, she remembered that my father had also told her something about being saved at the station. She thought it had been traumatic for him and she had not dwelled on it, as she felt it compounded his terrible feeling of guilt.

  Hans and Otto had been ordered to turn up at the assembly point at eight a.m. on November 17. They had registered with the authorities at Bubny that morning, queued at the desks, and started to fill out the dozens of forms required for deportation. Hans had spent the day and night with Otto and the thousand others in the same transport in the grim conditions of the hall. At some point after the telegram from the Jewish Council was sent the following day, Pišta had traveled to Bubny with the official Reich Ministry of Armaments vyreklamován notice and the handwritten message for Otto. Pišta was not allowed to enter the area where Otto and Hans were seated with their belongings, so an SS guard had delivered the news. The guard did not allow time for embraces or lengthy goodbyes. He hurried Hans into gathering his bags and escorted him out. Hans would have had no choice but to comply, bundle up his things, and tear himself away from his father, who would be deported alone.

  Hans was saved and Otto stayed behind at the station. That evening, the four of them, Hans, Pišta, Lotar, and Zdenka, sat down and took what little comfort was available in the discussion of practicalities. Lotar was protected for now by his marriage to Zdenka, but it was unclear how long this dispensation would last. He could continue to work at Montana. They reckoned that if Jews in mixed marriages were to be transported, the friendly treuhänder Francek might succeed in making a case that, because of his youth and expertise, Lotar was crucial at the factory. Hans would be sure to work the longest hours possible and maintain his position at Čermak. He too needed to make himself indispensable. They would all take care of one another. They would keep a low profile and behave sensibly in daily matters. They would live on their wits and trust only the very close chosen few. Together with Zdenka, they would arrange for parcels to be sent into Terezín, and they would use every contact to prevent Ella or Otto from being sent east.

  The family now battled on two fronts, ensuring that the boys stayed in Prague and that Otto and Ella were kept safe and fed in Terezín. Lotar reminded Hans of Otto’s words of caution uttered a few weeks earlier. Any deviation from the rules could cost their lives and those of others. It was imperative that Hans particularly understood this, given his tendency to flightiness. Otto had always been the one to be stern with his younger son, but now it was Lotar’s turn to try to talk some sense into him. Hans was fortunate to still be in Prague. Despite the positive noises to date from Čermak, it was critical that he stop fooling around with his friend Zdeněk. He must resist the temptation to take any unnecessary risks.

  Somehow, on the back of the note that Pišta had written to him, Otto managed to scribble a message to his boys and get it out of Bubny on November 19:

  So far all is well. We have loaded our luggage onto the train now and will depart tomorrow. I have managed to identify someone in Terezín who will help. It will be another sleepless night as it is simply impossible to sleep here. I hope it will be better in Terezín. Please don’t worry at all about me, I will adjust to everything. I kiss you with all my heart.

  Otto was transported from Bubny to Terezín the next morning.

  * * *

  As my own research was drawing to a close, I decided that I had to go to Terezín. Initially, I felt I should go alone but was grateful when my husband and children insisted that they would accompany me for support. My mother, who lives in New York, announced that she had to be there for her grandchildren. Her sister, my aunt, who had worked with me on the family letters and knew as much about Otto and Ella as I did, clearly had to come as well. Dr. Anna Hájková, a professor at Warwick University and an expert on Terezín who had helped me with my investigations, offered to guide us so we could find the places where my grandparents lived. Her partner, an architect who had never visited Terezín, joined for good measure.

  This disparate band of French, Venezuelan, American, British, and Czech travelers, ranging in age from twelve to seventy-six, assembled in Prague early on a foggy Sunday morning in October 2018. We drove out of Prague to Terezín, each of us a little sleepy but apprehensive for our own differing reasons.

  After just under an hour on the motorway, we followed the country roads that lead to Terezín. We passed along an access road over the old moat and through one of the entrances built into the redbrick-fortified walls. The early mist had cleared, and an unseasonal sunlight poured onto the caramel stone of the eighteenth-century buildings. We pulled up and set off down a quiet street on foot, with Dr. Hájková leading the way.

  At first, Terezín seemed like any one of the countless historic towns that dot Central Europe, with a formal square outlined by rather grand buildings arrayed around a church, complete with bell tower, and a town hall. The square was covered in lawns, a little dry after a long summer, but well tended. As we adjusted to the scene, it became clear that we were almost alone. The streets were empty and the windows dark. Apart from the occasional passerby and the few patrons of t
he only small café open, which offered a lunch of stew or fried cheese, the town was more or less deserted.

  When Terezín was a detention camp, the church was locked and its bell silent but the town was far from quiet. It was obscenely swollen with people, every room and attic crammed with confined humanity. This square had been hemmed with barbed wire and tented in canvas to provide an additional roofed area as a workplace for the prisoners, who hammered, sawed, scrubbed, and sewed within. These perfectly perpendicular and silent streets were thronged, and the metal bars on every darkened window would have framed the faces that craned for a view of life beyond the stifling rooms.

  In the stillness, we walked as Dr. Hájková spoke and my children took turns holding my hand. Overcrowding, disease, hunger, and misery were most of the factors that led to death. Originally a garrison town built to accommodate 4,000 people, by September 1942, Terezín housed nearly 60,000 souls. More than 140,000 Jews were sent to Terezín throughout the war. Over half of them were from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the rest from Germany, Austria, and other parts of Central and Northern Europe. Only one of every ten survived the war.

  As one ventures around the perimeter of the town toward its cream-and-gray crematorium or the area known as Small Fortress, which housed a Gestapo prison, there are sculptures commemorating the victims, a stone menorah, a field of graves around a Star of David, stark reminders of the many who died there or passed through on their way to death camps farther east.

  Two of the buildings now serve as museums, and here the visitor can view re-created barrack rooms, with crude bunks tightly serried as they would have been. Photographs and examples of the deft artworks produced by Terezín inmates are on display in glass cases. Each charcoal sketch evokes the events that took place there and that left the streets deserted for all these decades after the war. The works invariably portray a teeming, overwhelming desperation. And yet all this is punctuated by incongruous notes of solace, the musicians still playing, even composing, the poets somehow still finding inspiration, and the artists drawing and painting it all. The human spirit fought on and continued to produce poignant works in a place that was designed to numb, silence and dehumanize. Norbert Frýd, a Czech theater director who was deported to Terezín in August 1943 and survived the war, wrote: If Terezín was not hell itself, like Auschwitz, it was the anteroom to hell. But culture was still possible, and for many this frenetic clinging to an almost hypertrophy of culture was the final assurance. We are human beings and we remain human beings, despite everything!