Hans was to be examined there, with four other men from the area, by a Dr. Mandelik, who would attest to his fitness for the camp.
Councils were coerced to fill the places in Lípa. The surviving records show that on August 30, 1940, a representative of the Jewish Council in the town of Kladno in central Bohemia urgently telephoned the Council in the city of Slaný, which had authority in Libčice. They requested the names of five men who were needed immediately for work in Lípa. These five men were to report to the Lípa labor camp the following day, Sunday, September 1, 1940. The conditions of the selection process were unchanged.
Hans met all the criteria. He was the correct age, without employment or dependents. A mere 412 Jews of both sexes and all ages lived in the area of Slaný. Only a few dozen were men of the right age. To complicate matters further, there were only six Jews in Libčice, a married couple with a young daughter, and Otto, Ella, and Hans.
Hans was the only eligible one. There was an obvious onus on the authorities in Slaný and the doctors to deem him fit for work and send him to Lípa. And yet Hans seems to have obtained a medical deferral from this roundup of the very few local young men. The papers indicate that he would have had to attend a further examination in November 1940, but somehow, he does not appear on the list of those obliged to report to Lípa on September 1.
Perhaps the family took the huge risk of bribing the doctor, or Hans feigned a mental illness, or there was indeed some physical disability that he played up and subsequently outgrew. I have photographs of him playing volleyball and skiing as a teenager, so the medical issue that proved his salvation on this occasion was clearly not terribly marked. Possibly his double-jointedness, his then unnamed dyspraxia, played a part and helped him escape the forced labor. The records of his medical examination did not survive to tell us how he evaded Lípa.
Meanwhile, in early June 1940, the Slaný Council asked Otto to represent them as a trustee and take charge of the Jews in the town of Libčice. A trustee was the most junior position in the hierarchy of the Council. The role of the trustee was to distribute information and orders from the superior Jewish Community Council at a local level and to ensure that these orders were carried out. While they had no actual power or authority to make decisions, trustees were engaged with maintaining order and reporting those who were not obeying the decrees to the Central Jewish Council.
Otto resisted this appointment.
A letter to the Council from Otto has survived in the archives of the Jewish Community in Prague all these years. In it, Otto politely but firmly refused to take on the role:
Even though there is no abjuration to this appointment and I willingly acknowledge the utility of appointments of trustees, I would nonetheless like to express a differing opinion as toward the competency of my person for the contemplated position.
He went on to explain that he was too busy to take on the role. He also pointed out that he did not know many people in Libčice, as he had lived and worked in Prague for many years. These were just excuses. The family had spent most of every summer in Libčice for years and knew most of the families in the town of three thousand people. I know that they were friendly with the other Jewish family in the town, as it is mentioned in his letters.
However, Otto, who had always disliked clubs and considered himself something of an outsider, did not want to be part of the system. I do not know to what extent it was a moral stance, but he clearly did not want to comply. He may well have sensed that to be cast in even this limited role in the new hierarchy of power would serve no purpose other than to make him an unwilling accessory in the deepening persecution.
His letter to the Council was answered immediately with a note that summarily dismissed the points that he had raised. Otto thus found himself appointed as the trustee in charge of his own family and the other three Jews in Libčice. He was consequently to be held responsible for ensuring that each carried out the required tasks, obeyed rules, and promptly filled out forms correctly. However, despite this official role, Otto’s name, along with Hans’s, appears on a Council document dated July 1940 listing people who had not filled out their obligatory migration papers on time. This did not signify any desire to stay. It seems instead part of a considered strategy to delay the grinding bureaucracy and, above all, to disclose as little information as possible. By mid-1940, it was obvious that the migration maps and forms were simply a ploy to induce families to declare all their assets and economic interests. Nonetheless, to drag heels remained a risky approach; however, experts assure me that it offered the best chance of evading the teeth of the system. And so the Neumanns played for time.
At the same time Hans was being called up to Lípa, there was a further letter from the Council in Slaný requesting that the Council in Prague do something about this Otto Neumann of Libčice who is not performing his duties and is exasperating everyone.
They requested that the authorities in Prague deal with him directly to ensure compliance. Otto was too disciplined a man to have taken the stance for any reason other than as part of a broader effort to distract and resist the real issue, the Council’s instruction that his son report to Lípa.
Hans’s first cousin Ota, who in 1936 had written to his family in America expressing his concern about rising anti-Semitism, was a single young man of twenty-nine, also without useful employment or dependents. He lived in Třebíč and, like many other Jews, had been fired from his job months before. His brother, Eric, on the other hand, could prove that he was needed at the Montana factory in Prague. No such reason for delay could be found for Ota. He was duly summoned for labor at Lípa on December 14, 1940.
One of the letters mentions that my grandfather Otto arranged to have food parcels sent to his nephew in Lípa. Ota’s parents had named him after his uncle, and Otto had always felt a close bond with the young, thoughtful Ota. In February 1941, my grandfather neatly listed in his notebook the items that he had sent to Ota: salami, cinnamon biscuits, and oranges. It is unclear if Ota ever received them.
Otto’s 1940 letters to his brothers Victor and Richard in America catalog the tightening restrictions in the Protectorate. But they are also filled with assurances that the family was well and healthy despite the difficulties that they faced.
Otto had written in October 1940 to thank the American family for their letters and good wishes and to summarize the general situation: Erich was still working in Montana. On Ella’s side, the Pollak and Haas families were managing fine. All were separated and unable to travel, which made life difficult. Luckily, Zdenka could move around freely, visit the elderly relatives, and relay messages, money, and supplies to those in the family who needed it. All the employees at the factory were taking the changes in stride and showing the Neumanns nothing but kindness, except the eldest worker, who refused to greet Otto on account of the new laws.
Otto expressed his frustration at the lack of opportunities to learn anything. But his letter retains an upbeat tone. He asked that his brothers not worry too much about the family: the men were working, the women helping and the children still playing Ella, he said, was a veritable fireball taking impeccable care of the stomachs and the hearts and minds of all in Libčice.
From the papers that have emerged from the archives, it is clear that by 1940, nineteen-year-old Hans was becoming more responsible, more organized. With the guidance of his brother and his father, he was tentatively navigating the system. He signed up and took a course to retrain as a mechanic. He managed to remain in Libčice despite being included in four separate call-up lists for Lípa. He assembled the necessary paperwork to secure a job at a factory called František Čermák, which was involved in the war effort and was conveniently around the corner from the Montana factory where Lotar and Otto spent their days.