Míla Svatonová in Prague, 1939
He would have been wearing a star when he walked into Míla’s office and wearing one when he met her after work. They took strolls around the streets of the industrial area, the park, cinemas, and restaurants being out of bounds to Jews. Míla loved to cycle, but Hans had been ordered to surrender his bicycle in October. A romantic atmosphere must have been elusive for the gentile girl and the Jewish young man with a yellow star on his jacket as they meandered between apartment buildings and factories. Yet Hans persevered and found flowers to bring along as frequently as he could. He spent his lunchtime breaks from work with Míla. They approached each other cautiously, and their connection germinated gradually. Many years later, Hans said to a friend that his relationship with Míla had started “at a time when anyone who indulged in the luxury of feeling emotion was a dead man.”
Amid it all, Hans also found time to spend with Zdeněk and his friends from college. Nevertheless, the constant pressure of battling with the daily commute to Libčice, holding down his crucial position at the factory, and scrabbling together the black-market supplies to support his family always took priority. There no longer was room in his life for Prankster Club meetings or writing poetry. Altering his behavior was not enough; Hans was also forced to suppress emotions. Even feeling those had become perilous.
Although Lotar continued to work in Montana legally, he availed himself of a false identity card without the bold J that was a required stamp for all Jews. With the help of Zdenka, Hans, Zdeněk, and their underground contacts, they had secured a “lost” identity card. This allowed him to spend time and live with Zdenka in Prague, unhindered by the prohibitions and anti-Semitism. In the black market that rose out of the occupation, one could source foods that were scarce to all or forbidden to Jews, items that could be used as bribes or things that could just lessen the strain: sugar, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, foreign currency, medicine, even poisons, or official documents. False documents were costly and difficult to come by, and anyone caught with them could be shot on the spot. Yet they managed.
Hans and Zdeněk and a few students from their class in technical school had obtained the necessary chemicals to erase the original details on the lost card. They met Lotar in Zdenka’s apartment and spent days testing the solvents and carefully altering the document. They inserted a picture of Lotar and used an official stamp lent by some friends with a contact in the civil service.
Experts have remarked that this forgery was superbly well executed. Now, over seventy years later, the chemical treatment is fading, and the original owner’s details seem to be reemerging. But, then, it served its purpose perfectly for the time that it was needed. Lotar’s fake identity card bore the name of Ivan Rubeš, a suitably non-Jewish friend from university who bravely gave his blessing to the scheme. Lotar knew Ivan Rubeš well. If needed he could easily recall his birthday, his hometown, and details about his family. He could pass himself off easily as his friend. It was imperative that Lotar not be seen on the street together with his friend Ivan as gendarmes or Germans could ask for identification papers at any time.
Whenever the neighbors started to ask too many questions, Zdenka and Lotar moved from one apartment to another in Zdenka’s buildings. They moved at least six times between 1940 and the beginning of 1942.
In March 1942, Governmental Decree 85 was issued to complement the Reich legal code. The second paragraph forbade any citizen of the Protectorate to enter a marriage with a person of Jewish origin. The fifth paragraph went as far as to criminalize sexual relations between Jews and citizens of non-Jewish or mixed origins. Contravention of any of these rules was deemed a crime.
Fortunately, rumors of these prohibitions reached the Neumanns a few weeks in advance. In the early part of the year, Lotar was advised by many including Pišta, his friend at the Council, that he should remarry Zdenka while there was still time. The marriage might offer a chance to avoid, or at least delay, deportation.
The fear of jeopardizing Zdenka’s property persisted, especially as access to her assets provided a much-needed lifeline for the entire family. The deadline loomed. Lotar, Zdenka, and Otto were reassured by those in the know that the risk to property owned by gentiles in mixed marriages had lessened. It appeared that the Nazi administration’s focus had shifted from expropriations to segregation and transportation. The advantages of being married seemed to outweigh the threat to their finances. Above all, Lotar and Zdenka wanted to be with each other.
So it was that on February 25, 1942, just a few weeks before mixed marriages were banned altogether, Lotar and Zdenka quietly remarried. They were now legally allowed to live together once more. However, despite the technical legality of the union, the pressure on mixed couples to separate continued to mount. There was no celebration of the marriage this time. There are no photographs of that day. Public discrimination and everyday hostility also made life difficult. Lotar often resorted to using his fake papers to avoid the abuse and to lessen the impact of prohibitions in his daily life. By then so many laws had been issued against Jews that he was not allowed to go to a tailor or a barber, drive a car or ride a bicycle, use most trams, enter Wenceslas Square, visit libraries, walk in parks, sit on benches, or go to museums, theaters, or town squares. Whenever he was with Zdenka, he avoided wearing the star if he could.
Lotar did not have a permit to leave the city limits. Nonetheless, I know from the recollections that he and Zdenka on occasion illicitly traveled to the country house to see Ella, who was, of course, confined to Libčice. On November 11, 1941, Ella, still hoping that the U.S. visas for the family would come through, wrote to the family:
I live here completely secluded from the world, like a nun. For months now I have not gone outside the front door. I am not proud of the badge, I am too modest. But what hurts me the most is the separation. You know me, my life belongs entirely to Otto and my boys.
Lotar would not have worn the star on those trips to visit his mother, as it would have attracted attention to his illegal movement. Instead, he used the card in the name of Ivan Rubeš. His safety, even his life, depended on evading detection. Lotar’s anxiety about the perils of arrest for breach of the increasingly nightmarish mesh of laws became such that by 1941, he had secured on the black market several small vials of cyanide that could be easily broken with the teeth. A single dose could kill in seconds. To Zdenka’s dismay, Lotar began carrying two vials, one for each of them, in his jacket pocket at all times.
People in the small provincial town of Libčice knew the Neumann family. Otto and Ella had first come to Libčice in the early 1920s as a newlywed couple to work there for a few years. They had then gone to Prague to start the Montana factory but had returned some years later to buy their beloved country house. The townspeople had watched Lotar and Hans grow up. Like everyone in the Protectorate, they would have known about the directive and about the stars. The Nazis constantly reminded citizens that Jews who had left their designated residential area would be punished with death; the same penalty applied to anyone who came to their aid. This included providing them shelter or food, giving them money, or transporting them in vehicles of any sort; it was the duty of all Protectorate residents to report Jews who were committing crimes and any non-Jews who helped them. On February 28, 1941, German Radio in Prague warned that anyone seen as friendly toward a Jew would be considered an enemy of the state and punished accordingly.