When Time Stopped

by Ariana Neumann

  The train was packed. It was the second week of April and outside you could feel that spring was approaching. The carriages were not heated, but it was swelteringly hot inside the train.

  It was evening and there was no light inside the carriages. Lights attracted attention, made trains and stations easier targets from the air. Our periodic stops were pointless, as no one could get on the train. There was simply no room. In the dimness, you could see the desperate faces on the platforms, the shoving, the fights for a small space. Everyone wanted to get out of Germany.

  Only a handful made it into the carriages and, then, only when another handful had disembarked. The movement of the train didn’t affect the passengers at all, as we were all closely wedged together. We were a dense human mass with no air in the gaps, composed of hot, malodorous bodies that seemed to melt into one.

  In front of me in the throng, a man stepped on my shoe. He turned to apologize, his breath full of onion, garlic, and weeks without toothpaste. I could not escape the smell. I could not kneel to tie my shoelace.

  I was wearing an old striped shirt, an even older pair of trousers, and tennis shoes. No socks and no suitcases. Just a small valise with my papers, the case of cyanide, some Reichsmarks, and Míla’s good-luck doll. Everything else had stayed behind in Berlin. Not that there was much.

  One of the later bombs in the recent raid, one that caused destruction using air pressure, had razed the building next door. It half destroyed ours too. I took it as a warning and had been lucky to escape before a second bomb fell and caused our building to collapse into a pile of dust. No one from our building had died. For one more day, we were the lucky ones.

  This was still Germany, of course; there were formalities even to escape. I still couldn’t believe that I had managed to get the paperwork from the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Labor. I had walked into the hall and picked the person who looked the most terrified, a fidgety middle-aged man. I watched him as I awaited my turn and then told him, “I have been in Berlin for two years. I have my papers. If you give me a permit to return to Bohemia, I will not forget you and will report that you have helped me.”

  He had a nervous tic that made his eyes blink repeatedly. He carefully explained that they were only issuing travel permits for exceptional cases, cases of importance to the Reich. I looked at him and focused my eyes intently on his. I said in a hushed tone,

  “This is not a matter of importance for the Reich. This is a matter of importance to you. If you deny me the permit, I will remember you and you will regret it.”

  I continued slowly to ensure he heard my every word.

  “I will remember your name and your face. If you give me the permit to go back home to Bohemia, I will give you my address and you can find me. If there is a case against you, I will be a witness to your kindness when the Reich falls apart.”

  This was a risky approach, but it was the only leverage I had, my only hope. If I didn’t leave now, I might not be able to do so later. I looked at his face as he blinked furiously back at me. He looked around, sweating copiously, and stammered out something unintelligible. He cast his eyes downward and nodded. He had filled out the permit.

  No one bothered to check the tickets or the permits in the chaos. Twice during the journey to the border, the engines of approaching planes terrified us. The noise made by the aircraft outside and above us was overwhelming and seemed to seep into all in the carriage. We froze. We held our breath. During the second approach, we heard explosions and gunfire. From a corner, there was a sob. For a moment, we all thought the train was under attack. And then, as we neared the Czech border, the noise receded and disappeared. All fell silent, and once more, all I could hear was the sound of the incessant rumbling and churning of the wheels of our train.

  We crossed the frontier and the first colors of morning started to light up the train. I tried to imagine the smells outside, the flowery breeze of the Bohemian countryside in spring. The man next to me started retching. I could not move away, and he stained the shoulder of my only shirt. I had never stopped to think before about how sour the smell of vomit is.

  The metallic screech of the brakes heralded our arrival into Prague. The hordes started to sputter from the wagons, each person eager to get off, to flee.

  Míla had been waiting for me at the station. I locked my eyes on hers as I pushed through the crowds. Even from afar, I was grateful for their blue beauty and their peace. I could barely speak as she held me.

  “You are home, Handa, we are together, it is safer here.”

  We walked through Prague to Lotar and Zdenka’s apartment, where I would hide again, hopefully not for long and for the last time.

  It was a beautiful morning. I felt the familiar uneven cobblestones through the thin soles of my shoes. Míla and I walked side by side, one small hand around my waist, the other clasping my hand. I was so tired, so hungry. I just wanted to feel the sun on my face and eat and sleep. There was so much to tell her, but I had no words.

  There were still some German soldiers on the streets, but very few. The city seemed surprisingly calm and whole. We walked along the river. The cool breeze erased the acrid smell from the train. To one side of us were the remnants of shattered buildings, mistakenly bombed by the Allies in February. Next to us, the Vltava flowed, indifferent and calm.

  My only identity card bore the name Jan Šebesta. I would have to wait until the city was liberated to become Hans Neumann again.

  Hans was reunited with Lotar and Zdenka in their apartment at Trojanova 16. From Zdenka’s writings, I know that the city now concealed many others alongside him, and so did the apartment. Conditions in Prague were typical of the chaos that reigned across Europe. Though Terezín itself was not liberated until May 8, some of the concentration camps had been liberated as early as the autumn of 1944. This continued through to the spring of 1945, as the Allied armies advanced deeper into Europe.

  Several survivors of the camps, whom Lotar and Zdenka had helped during the war, showed up on their doorstep, homeless and destitute. A German cousin of Zdenka’s, who had deserted from the army, also appeared, asking for shelter. The apartment was filled with people of all creeds and political factions, united by hunger, exhaustion, and desperation, all scared of every doorbell ring and of every noise. They passed the days just trying to stay alive and to get along in this makeshift refuge. Zdenka and Lotar distributed their clothes and shared the contents of their pantry. Through friends, they sought extra blankets and a little more food. Zdenka wrote that for weeks, they were like sardines sleeping on the floor or the sofa or wherever they could and that, for her new guests, anything was better than the camps or the fronts.

  The resistance in Bohemia and Moravia had regrouped after the Heydrichiáda in 1942 and grown to a few thousand after years of war. In early May, its members organized an uprising against the remaining German forces in Prague. Emboldened Czechs took to the streets, vandalized German property, tore down Nazi flags, painted over German signs. Fighting ensued between the residual SS forces and the Czechs who had been joined by the so-called Russian Liberation Army, a faction of Russians who had been fighting with the Nazis but had switched sides. Prague was bombed by the Luftwaffe while the German troops on the ground massacred, tortured, and injured thousands. The Czechs, in turn, after years of oppression, exacted retribution from the Germans and their collaborators. The brutal fighting in the streets, train stations, and within key buildings in the city lasted for four days. Eventually, on May 9, 1945, a day after the liberation of Terezín and a day after the official Victory in Europe Day, Prague was liberated by the Red Army. After more than six years, the occupation was finally over. On May 23, 1945, Zdenka wrote to Otto’s brother, Uncle Richard, in America. I have the letter:

  Dear Uncle Richard,

  We are using the first opportunity that we have had to report to you what remains of us. We are devastated to tell you that only three of us are left from the entire Neumann family, Lotar, Handa, and I. Fr
om the Haas side, only our cousins Zdeněk Pollak and Hana Polláková survived. We do not know about the others. There is very little chance that any will come back. The three of us only survived because we lived underground, Lotar and me in Prague and Handa in Berlin. All three of us are completely healthy and we are trying to earn our keep somehow. We need you and your advice, as we will have to take care of various family matters and issues relating to Montana, which withstood the war reasonably well. We are living in an unimaginable chaos and we really could use your opinion on all matters. As you can see, the family suffered terribly.

  What a price we paid for not listening to your advice in 1939.

  Please, please send us your reply by return.

  Gradually, weakened survivors began to trickle into Prague with news of the concentration camps in the east. That summer, Zita Polláková and Erich Neumann returned home. I do not know precisely when Lotar and Hans discovered that their mother had traveled from Terezín on transport ES with her niece Zita Polláková, but it was in those days of appalling reckoning immediately after the war that they learned their mother’s story.

  On arrival at Auschwitz, there had been a selection process: 250 men were selected for work in the coal mines, and a few dozen women, among them Zita, were chosen to be transported farther east to work in the camps. Zita was one of 51 people on a transport of 1,500 who survived the war. Ella, along with the rest of the sick, had been sent directly to the gas chambers. I cannot imagine the grief that Hans, Lotar, and Zdenka must have felt on hearing the news.

  Lotar wrote the American family a five-page letter dated June 29, 1945, informing them that Ella had been gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. This was the document my father had shown me on the dawn that followed my brother Miguel’s funeral. After sending the letter, none of the three, Hans, Lotar, or Zdenka, wrote or spoke about Ella’s death for the rest of their lives.

  Stella Kronberger, Otto’s protégée from the camp, returned to Prague and told the family about his last months in Terezín. He had kept up his good spirits and stayed healthy and strong. Stella told Otto’s anxious sons that he had been sent away on a labor transport, so they also clung to the hope that he could have worked his way out of the camps and might make it home.

  Records show that Otto had been sent on labor transport EI on September 29, 1944, with the number 164. On arrival at Auschwitz, he too faced the selection process. SS doctors and guards designated some for labor in various camps. Those deemed old or weak were put aside and sent to the gas chambers.

  My father recorded in his memoir the account that he had pieced together:

  Like everyone there, my father knew that the trick to maximizing your chances of surviving was to appear young. You had to look healthy, strong. Able to work. The Germans needed evidence of your potential as a laborer.

  In our family, our hair turns gray early, salt and pepper by thirty, alabaster by middle age. I had always been told that this made us look distinguished. I suppose in more normal times that might have been true. Yet our hair, to Nazi eyes, would make us look older than our years. At a crucial moment, that could make us seem useless, expendable.

  We were acutely aware of this. We had been warned.

  For my father, with his distinguished hair, it was just a matter of time until they deemed him too old. Too old and worthless, simply because he had white hair at the age of fifty-three. Between Zdenka, Lotar, and friendly contacts, we’d arranged for some gendarmes to allow into Terezín parcels of 20 kg containing currency, goods, and letters for our parents. The brave couriers would bring their letters and news back to us. At first, we had sent hair dye. And when it became impossible to source hair dye even on the black market, we had to find something else. Zdenka, Lotar, and I had tried everything and eventually decided that black shoe polish would have to do. We had tried it and it worked. It had a foul smell and it washed off, but it colored the hair well enough. Zdenka even sneaked it into Terezín herself when we could not get the gendarme to help us. And when she could not get into the ghetto, she bribed a guard there who agreed to take it to my father.

  My father, who always appeared so distant, with a sternness that seemed rooted in the worries of all humanity. He was constantly trying to solve problems, always weighed down by the existence of evil and injustice. And yet he repeated that the war would soon be over and reminded us to hold on to hope, as peace, he said, was just around the corner. He always wrote in his letters that the family would survive and maintained that soon we would all be together again.

  But then, as summer ended, we found all our efforts and letters to the Elders had failed. My father had been included in one of the dreaded journeys to the East. Always cautious, he had brushed his hair with the polish and placed the tin in the inner pocket that my mother had sewn near the seam of his shirt. In a world where little made sense, his shoe polish had become the most precious commodity. As important as food to guarantee life.

  The transports were always 1,000 people. It was a perfect round number that allowed for 20 wagons of 50 people, each with their permitted 40 kg of belongings, though whatever they had left after all the confiscations and the desperate barter of the ghetto never amounted to that. The healthy stood, the others, treated like numbed animals, lay one on top of the other. As soon as the train was ready, the doors were sealed. There was no ventilation, no fresh air inside. It took twenty-four hours to reach the destination. Then the doors opened again.

  Exhausted and dizzy from the long journey and the stale air, the people struggled to form queues. The shouts of the officers and the black of their guns would have been enough to jolt them. Links! Rechts! Left for older people. Right for the young.

  The wait for the selection seemed interminable despite the elite SS soldiers’ renowned efficiency. As they all stood there, ghosts of the people that they had once been, waiting to be examined and classified, the icy November fog slowly turned to rain. Heavier and more frequent drops came down until the rain became unrelenting.

  The shoe polish started to wash down my father’s back and face, traveling in streamlets of black that stained his face and clothes. A guard saw this and hauled him out of the queue. He called another guard. They knocked him across his face with a gun and made him go to the left, with the old and weak ones, first in line to the gas.

  I could picture it all.

  My father, with his patrician profile and dignified bearing, bent in two, hit by a German brute. I imagined him walking into the concrete room, naked, the black staining his face, contrasting with the limpid blue of his eyes. His lips contorted into a grimace of death as he tried to not breathe the poison.

  I remembered his words to me as a young boy.

  “You have to fight. Not with violence but with your mind, not for people but for ideas. Fight and work for what you believe in, Handa. That struggle is all that matters.”

  I could see his face in front of me, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, slicked-back hair that always made me think of freshly fallen snow. His thoughtful pauses that punctuated each conversation laden with advice. His struggle had not mattered to them. Neither had his sense of justice.

  “If you want to be truly just in this life, when you see people who are weak, you must stand with them. Because you are strong, and it is the weak who need you more, not the strong.”

  My strong father had stood with the weak. I wasn’t strong. I imagined or remembered, I am not sure which now, that as a boy I was sitting on his knees. He caressed my face affectionately but was still distant, inaccessible. His hand was very soft and enormous, and it made me feel entirely secure. He wiped my tears with his thumb and said, “Now, now, Handa. Strong men never let anyone see them cry. Never.”

  And now my father was gone. They had murdered him.

  I wanted to scream but my jaw was locked. I had no air left inside, my lungs were made of stone. I sat on the step of the building hallway, leaned my head against the yellowing wall, and cried.

  My father made a mist
ake in his retrospective diary. Otto’s transport did not consist of 1,000 people but of 1,500. Of those, 750 were grouped to the right and selected for labor, of whom 157 survived. One of them found the Neumann brothers in Prague and told them how their father had been killed in the camp. He recounted the story of how the rain had revealed Otto’s distinguished silver hair and washed away his luck.

  I have visited every place where my grandparents lived and worked. Their apartment in Prague, the Montana factory, their beloved house in Libčice, the many buildings that housed them as they were moved around in Terezín. And now I realize that without having meant to search for them in particular, I finally have found my family. In attempting to piece together the puzzle, in my search for my father’s past, I found his life in Europe. Amid the details of that life, I have discovered the family who was never spoken about, the one who was not so much forgotten as veiled in the silence. And I finally have the grandparents I secretly longed to meet. I now know Otto and Ella Neumann. I have found them in the photographs, through the words of their letters and anecdotes that have emerged from the boxes and the research. I have retrieved an intimate sense of who they were, and I carry them in my heart. They are no longer distant figures in a picture of faded grays.

  Maybe one day I will decide to go, but for the time being, I cannot muster the courage to visit Auschwitz. I simply cannot go to the place where they died.

  Now that, after all these years, they are finally with me, I refuse to say goodbye.

  There are two photographs of my grandparents in Lotar’s album that I particularly love. In one, taken in the mid-1930s, Ella is skiing. She is happy, carefree, and perhaps a little coquettish. In the other, Otto is relaxed, smiling with his darling Zdenka, in the garden at Libčice.