In May 1940, Ella wrote to Richard, who had started his new life in America. She shared the news that, despite all that was happening, This week, Handa graduated from the Chemical Technical School. Her letter ends: Here in Libčice the trees have blooms so beautiful that it almost makes the events around us seem unimportant.
CHAPTER 5 Drowned Lights
The pages of Lotar’s album are carefully tiled with pictures of all sizes. Some are clear, posed portraits of my family in military uniform, elegant clothes, or costumes taken in a studio, the name of which is embossed on the thick handsome paper. These stand proud in the collection and mark milestones like births, marriages, or comings of age, but the majority of the pictures are small and casual. They tend to be of groups of people and candidly capture everyday life.
One of the larger photographs stands out. It is not a formal photograph, and yet it sits framed by a white margin on stark black paper. It has a page to itself. It is a portrait of Hans in his late teens. He wears a pin-striped collared shirt and a sweater. He is bespectacled, and his hair is neatly parted and brushed to one side. He is holding a Kodak 8mm film camera, many of which were produced in the 1930s for the Czech market. The photograph must have been taken in 1939 or 1940; he seems too grown-up for it to have been taken earlier, and by the end of 1941, Jews had been forced to turn in photographic equipment. I do not know if the Neumanns complied with this law, but I know enough about them now to be sure they would not have taken the risk of creating evidence against themselves. In the portrait, Hans appears to be filming, looking down, his face partially hidden by the device. I recognize his hands, his long fingers, his grasp. His way of holding things frequently struck others as awkward. He was double-jointed, so it was perfectly natural to him. I know this because I am also double-jointed. My three children, like Hans and me, have joints that bend more markedly. We hold things oddly too. Activities like riding a bicycle, catching a ball, cradling a pencil, and arranging your body in a chair, or your thoughts in a narrative, pose an additional challenge. I never would have noticed, but the teachers at my children’s elementary school pointed it out and suggested exercises to improve their motor skills. So now I know that Hans’s odd way of holding objects, and probably his propensity to fall off a bicycle, is part of an inherited condition, related to double-jointedness, called dyspraxia. I do not think Hans ever noticed that there was anything awkward in the way he held things.
Hans as a teenager, holding a cine camera
I cannot be sure who took the shot of Hans with the camera. In all likelihood, it was Lotar. Hans seems unaware of the photographer.
There is a stillness in this picture that comforts me. Hans is perfectly absorbed by the task, his right eye fixated on the view through the lens, his left eye closed. It brings me back to him as he repairs watches in that long room in the corner of my childhood memory. It is the same absorption with which he would sit, many decades later, seemingly for hours on end, gazing through the magnifying lenses and calibrating the tiny mechanisms in his watches. Unaware that he had any motor skill issues, he willed his fingers to pull the tiny pivots and chains to ensure the accuracy of timekeeping. He was also oblivious then to my questioning gaze as I peeked through the crack in the door to that windowless room at the back of our house. This very still and controlled Hans is the man whom I spied on. The Hans who has emerged from my research, this “unfortunate boy,” invariably late, carefree, chaotic, and whimsical, bears little resemblance to the father I knew.
There was more than letters and albums inside the boxes from my cousin’s house. Among the papers were poems written by my father and Lotar during the first years of the German occupation. Lotar’s were more in keeping with the times, full of darkness and dread. One of his verses depicts a family seated around a table, waiting for someone to walk through the door. It is ominously entitled “A Song of Death.”
My father’s verses, on the other hand, deal mostly with lost love, women, and heartache. They have titles like “Florist Girl,” “Evening Stanza,” “Hollow Embrace,” “Sonnet of Spring.” I read them in translation, and even then, despite my partiality, I am afraid that they are not very good. Some of the lines sound clichéd, evidently the work of a teenage boy. Since you left me, I am no more, I am no longer anything when you are not close by… I read them and cringe a little. I cannot help but find them endearing in their corniness. Despite all that was going on around him, Hans still found the time to write bad poetry and plan pranks with Zdeněk.
After many years of searching, I found Zdeněk’s son, who is also named Zdeněk Tůma. He wrote to me recounting some of the anecdotes that his father had told him of his youth. Once, on a summer afternoon in Libčice shortly after the German invasion, Hans and Zdeněk were tasked by Ella with buying a chicken for supper. Returning home late and empty-handed, Hans and Zdeněk had concocted a story and pretended to have lost the money. They had, instead, spent it on wine. I hope Otto was not at home that weekend. I have no doubt that he, unlike Ella, would have seen through their game and despaired.
But I also have evidence that Hans took some things seriously. His graduation report states that he finished his chemistry degree in June 1940. The regime was at that time forcing Jews to retrain and take menial jobs in factories or in agriculture. The Nazis had confiscated a two-hundred-hectare farm near the village of Lípa as part of the seizure of Jewish property. It had been owned by the Kraus family for over a hundred years. They were the only Jewish family in the area. Julius Kraus, the largest employer and the richest man in the town, had built a railway line and station to ease the movement of goods and people. It had been a commercial and social enterprise benefiting the entire region. Precisely because of this railway, the Nazis chose the Kraus farm to set up a “retraining center.” It began functioning as such in July 1940. It became known simply as Lípa and was what we would call today a labor camp.
The Nazis’ declared intention was to teach four hundred young Jews discipline and agriculture. Initially, the Jewish Council and its branches in the Protectorate were charged with finding healthy unmarried and unemployed men between eighteen and forty-five to send to Lípa. They were to work long hours in the fields every day for months with little nourishment or reward. The camp was guarded by two Germans and a number of Czech gendarmes. From mid-1941, most inmates there were confined indefinitely. Some young Jewish men who were unemployed and destitute went voluntarily, propelled by the prospect of work and some, if nominal, remuneration and shelter. But for most, the prospect of long hours of physical work and enforced separation from their families was daunting. The Councils struggled to meet the numbers demanded by the Nazis, and soon the criteria were expanded to include men who were employed but had no dependents. After being called by the Council, the chosen men had to be examined by their family physician to ensure fitness. They were then to be checked by a second doctor, who worked for the state and to whom the selected men would have no connection.
On August 26, 1940, less than two months after his graduation, Hans received a registered letter in Libčice from the Jewish Council. It contained the following instruction: We call on you to come on Wednesday, August 28, 1940, to the apartment of Mr. Viktor Sommer in Kralupy, for a medical examination, at 9 o’clock in the morning.