And yet he still clung to his desire to be a poet. In December 1940, as his cousin Ota began his forced labor at Lípa, Hans self-published a pamphlet containing six of his poems. There was a copy of this booklet in Lotar’s box. Hans had either lost his copy or had decided it was unimportant; there was no poetry book among his files.
Ota was interned in Lípa for six months, until June 13, 1941, when he was allowed home to Třebíč for a short break. During that interlude, on a hot summer afternoon, he decided to make the most of the sunshine and freedom by taking his ten-year-old cousin Adolf for a bicycle ride and a swim. That day, July 8, 1941, a Czech gendarme named Pelikán followed Ota and Adolf as they rambled. He later reported to his superiors that he had seen Ota, a Jew, cycling carelessly and bathing in a part of the river that was forbidden to Jews.
Nine days later, Ota was taken from his home and interrogated at the Gestapo police station in Brno, the Moravian capital. Every detail of this encounter is available today in the local archives. Thorough witness statements were written up and indeed later formed the basis of the prosecution case against Pelikán when he was tried for treason after the war in 1946.
Ota was a popular figure in Třebíč. He was a kind, polite, and rather shy young man. His long weeks at Lípa had not changed him. He had always been careful and conscientious. During the interrogations, Ota protested his innocence. He stated that upon his return to Třebíč, he had explicitly inquired of the district office as to where he, as a Jew, might bathe in light of the new rules. They had specifically advised him to bathe outside the town’s boundary. He had followed these instructions, he believed, to the letter. He had even checked a map. Ota argued that the authorities themselves had provided incorrect information.
Ota was initially released, but this was to be a short-lived liberty. He was re-arrested by the Gestapo a week later and taken for interrogation. His was a minor offense for which most people were not even reported. However, the law encouraged and compelled people to notify the authorities of all offenses committed by Jews, no matter how trivial. Ota was, therefore, at the mercy of the Czech gendarme, who, eager to advance himself, had filled out the forms detailing the offense of swimming in an area not designated for Jews.
Ota was now helpless within the system, trapped in the Gestapo machinery. After his interrogation, he was not allowed to return home. In his file, the Gestapo officials called this three-month incarceration “Protective Custody.” On November 21, 1941, Ota was deported directly to the camp at Auschwitz. The camp then had only one functioning section, as further ones, including Birkenau, where the mass gassings using Zyklon B took place, were just being built. On arrival, Ota was assigned the number 23155 and placed in Block 11 with all those who had been accused of crimes.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau archives hold the only other remaining picture of cousin Ota.
The mortality rate in Block 11 was very high. It was the penal unit, and prisoners were horrifically tortured. Even among the litany of atrocities that took place in Auschwitz, Block 11 stood apart. Holocaust historians have written numerous accounts of the conditions. While the Neumanns were aware that Ota had been sent from the prison in Brno to Auschwitz, I do not think they knew that he was in that particular block. I do not know precisely to which horrors my cousin Ota was subjected.
All I know is this.
On December 8, 1941, Ota’s number, 23155, was entered in immaculate copperplate in the register of the Auschwitz morgue. They had killed quiet cousin Ota, a young and fit man. They had murdered him in a mere seventeen days.
Among my letters of Otto and Ella is a very short one, just two lines written in uneven lettering. Signed by Ota’s parents, Rudolf and Jenny, it reads: With indescribable heartache we have to inform you of the horrendously upsetting news that we received by telegraph yesterday. Our son Ota has died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
A few days before the family received the news that Ota had died, his brother, Erich, was forced to abandon his job at Montana and was placed on the first transport to the camp of Terezín.
* * *
As I compile the time line of my father’s life during the war and juxtapose it with the events unfolding around him, I find it hard to reconcile the deepening shadows with his pranks and poetry. Somehow this first suggested a man to a degree insensitive to the world in which he found himself, inconsistent with the measured and judicious man I knew as a child.
I reread his teenage poems. Amid the lovelorn lines, I encounter some that had escaped me on first reading, ominous and foreboding:
When you learn it is possible to die, for the sound of a word uttered a century ago.
This takes me deeper into the verse and leads me to another poem, which concludes:
It is not the sound of the Angelus Bell,
It is only tears ringing an alarm.
Voices stammered, fitful crying
And the night smells of chamomile.
Good-bye.
During my later reading, I realized that the translator of my father’s poems had not dealt with the title page. I wrote asking her for it, and the response, by email, arrived almost immediately.
My father’s collection had a two-word title.
Drowned Lights.
CHAPTER 6 A Violent Yellow
It was a morning like many others, except that the elusive spring sun shone in abundance on London. I have lived in Britain for the best part of two decades. That day I had followed my usual routine: taken out our lazy basset hound and feisty terrier, overseen my children’s breakfast, battled to ensure that teeth were brushed and school uniforms donned, homework packed into the unicorn-adorned backpacks.
I walked my children to their school down the sycamore- and cherry-tree-lined lanes of our neighborhood. I chatted about exams and play dates with other parents at the school gates, picked up a black coffee at the Italian café by the underground station, and wandered into the park, tugged along by our eager dogs, both straining to chase squirrels and sniff out evidence of nocturnal happenings.
On my return, I found the postman approaching our house. He greeted me and handed over a small bundle of letters. I enjoy getting old-fashioned paper letters. There is a moment of connection in receiving an object, a physical link, that is lacking in the virtual instantaneity of email. I like to hold something that someone else has touched, unsealing the envelope that they have sealed, feeling the paper, reading the words they have formed in haste or with care. There is a ritual moment of anticipation and relish, an appreciation of the tiny decisions that led to the words reaching their destination in their own way. The color of the ink, the choice of stationery. I always look for the handwritten envelopes first and leave the tedious bills and notices until the end.
There was only one handwritten envelope that day among a sheaf of everyday commercial correspondence and I recognized my cousin Madla’s even and rounded script.
At that time, I had already been researching my family history for a few years, with a view to collating an account of some sort. My early inquiries had naturally included a request of my cousin Madla for any relevant stories or papers to add to the materials I was assembling from other sources. She had already sent me the box with the letters and Lotar’s album, which her mother had kept after he had died, but she seemed to have found some more loose bits and pieces here and there in unopened desk drawers and forgotten boxes in the attic; she had mentioned in an email that she was sending them to me. Madla and her husband, a retired immunologist, are keen sailors, and she had said she would post them before embarking on one of their expeditions. I had assumed she meant more photographs or papers, but the envelope felt oddly bulky.