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.