As I pieced together the life of the family, I was intrigued by Otto and Ella’s small oasis in Libčice. Did the house still exist? Should I make the forty-minute drive from Prague, walk down Vltava Street, and knock on a stranger’s door? If I found it, perhaps the owner could tell me something about its history. I knew that it was so cherished by Ella, by the entire family. Some initial research revealed that while many families lived in the house during the Communist years, it had not legally changed hands since the Neumanns sold it after the war. A look on Google Maps suggested that the house was now more a cluster of buildings arranged around a courtyard, perhaps a warehouse or a light industrial compound. Magda, the Czech researcher in Prague who has been tracing families like mine for many years, confirmed this. There seemed to be little point in going to the house, which would be nothing like it was, modified and stripped of its memories.
And yet I remained curious. I wanted to see what it looked like now, what it looked like then. I tried my luck online. By searching an address and a name from the 1948 Czech property registry, I traced the current owner online. Michal Peřina, more searching told me, is a well-known and award-winning furniture designer. Facebook revealed a smiling man on a sailboat, with kind eyes and cropped graying hair under a baseball cap. I hoped I had the right person; the address and the last name were the same. I emailed, explaining who I was. Michal replied immediately, confirming that his grandparents had bought the house from my family.
After describing my investigations, I asked if he happened to have any old documents or photographs of the house that he could share. He replied that if I could wait a few weeks, he would send me something; first he had to have it restored. He attached a photograph of piles of papers laid on a surface. I was thrilled to have found Michal, at first simply because he said in his email that he, like my grandparents, loved the Libčice house. In my excitement, I forgot to ask what precisely he intended to restore. I zoomed in on the picture that he enclosed in the email, but all I could see were stained illegible papers on a long wooden table. I expected he would send me a few old photographs, perhaps some house plans, or, if I was lucky, the bill of sale from 1948.
A few weeks later, thanks to Michal, a fourth box to add to those received from my father, Lotar, and Greg the Californian cousin, found its way to me. Inside it was a handwritten note from Michal. He told me that, as a young boy, he had wondered about the contents of a mysterious safe that stood in an unused room in his grandparents’ house. He had tried all the keys that he had found to open the lock to no avail. At first, he had been too young to indulge his curiosity seriously, and during the Communist years, it had been too expensive to have the safe opened. However, when he inherited the house and refurbished it after the floods of 2002, he took the opportunity to find a way through the battered steel that had fueled his childish dreams of secret troves.
I can only imagine his disappointment when the old safe yielded no treasure, just damp and crumbling papers. The names mentioned in them meant nothing to him. Yet he had kept them out of an attachment to his boyhood imaginings and because they were part of an important period in history. Perhaps the fact that the carefully typed correspondence had survived at all gave it a sense of value, a feeling that it must be important to somebody, somewhere. This was why, when my email came out of the blue, Michal took enormous satisfaction in sending a photograph of the tattered sheets of which he had been custodian for so long and insisted that they be professionally restored before they could be shared. When this work was concluded, they arrived at my home in London, carefully protected in acid-free tissues within a vellum portfolio.
Michal’s box was filled not with photos or plans but again, extraordinarily, with documents belonging to my grandparents. Otto and Ella had left them behind in their home in Libčice. These papers had survived in a safe for eighty years in a house that no longer had anything to do with my family. They had been locked away throughout World War II, forty years of communism, its fall, and even the dreadful floods that had for weeks submerged the house and much of the Czech Republic. I traveled to Libčice the next May, to the building that Michal had lovingly restored, to thank him personally. He walked me through the house as it was, the room that held the safe, the other areas, the outhouses, the tiered garden. We sat under the old flowering trees on the same wrought-iron garden furniture that had been there in Otto and Ella’s time. Michal’s mystery had been solved, and the documents’ journey was complete.
These were my grandparents’ papers, a mass of them, which they had deemed important enough to guard in a safe. Against all odds, they were now in my hands. Some were fragments, some had lost any trace of ink or writing. A snapshot of their lives, catapulted across the distance of place and time. Many of the documents delineate a tedious paper trail of a normal life, bank statements, share certificates, newspaper clippings. But there too, among the administrative familiarity, falls the shadow.
In between the carefully restored papers, protected by the crisp white wrapping, lay their applications for immigrant visas to the U.S. That winter they had not just been planning the holidays. They had not just been laughing in Libčice. Hans, who was seventeen at the time, had submitted his papers to the American consulate in Prague on December 23, 1938. Otto, Ella, Lotar, and Zdenka had handed in their applications two weeks later, on January 7, 1939. The entire process had been preserved in Michal’s safe. Envelopes addressed to the Hon. John H. Bruins, American consul in Prague, letters from U.S. banks and employers in Washington, D.C., and Detroit, Michigan, signed and notarized, certifying that Victor owned a house, had a job, and enough funds in the Bank of Detroit to support his European family. Documents with the United States of America seal, dated 1936 and 1938, set out the application rules for those seeking visas as students, as tourists, as immigrants, as refugees.
In every faded, water-stained document bearing the heading U.S. State Department, one can clearly see handwritten circles or underlinings in red pen, again and again, around one term: Non-Quota Immigration. By the end of June 1939, some 309,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had applied for visas in this way and awaited a reply. America had established quotas in the 1920s to curb immigration from people deemed undesirable. Many, like the Neumanns, faced a portcullis of unyielding arithmetic. Only 25,000 visas per year would be made available under the quota. These three words, non-quota immigration, were the simple bolt that had slid shut for my grandparents behind the last door that led to safety.
Now I knew beyond any doubt. Even the wild waters of the river flooding the town in 2002 had not destroyed the evidence that Otto and Ella had kept locked in the basement safe. Their laughter in Libčice was real, but so too must have been their fear. Of course, they did not know how far it would go, but they knew enough. They dreaded it enough to want to leave behind the life they had built. All four of them tried to get out. But they could not. There was a quota. The U.S. had restrictions on immigrants, on refugees, and specifically on Jews. There was a slim chance that they would fall within the quota and be allowed to migrate, but it was dwindling. So it was despite the fear of what might be coming, and despite the frail hope that they might be allowed to move to America, that they continued to focus on their daily lives.
The first piece of evidence that the family was trying to work the system, to somehow evade the scourge of anti-Semitism boiling up across Europe, comes from January 1939. Lotar and Ella were baptized by Josef Fiala, a priest at the Basilica of St. James, in the center of Prague’s Old Town. The priest was a friend of Lotar and Zdenka and was eager to help the family. I now know that Fiala aided many and even risked death by providing shelter to a Jewish man during the war. After Ella and Lotar, Hans followed suit and was baptized on March 24, 1939, soon after he turned eighteen. But not Otto; he had refused. “I would rather listen to Gandhi’s words than the advice of any rabbi or priest,” he had declared. He never stated a religious affiliation on any official document. On each form that I have found in archives, that line was left blank. I will never know whether this was out of some ideological conviction or fear of discrimination. What I understand from the stories and documents is that Otto believed that religious institutions and zealousness too often brought out the worst in people.