They never heard whether it found Karel or received any further news of him.
The consensus at the Council was that the only possible strategy was to delay departure and stay in Prague as long as possible. The Neumanns now faced an appalling challenge. They had five days to get Ella and Hans off the list.
Hans pleaded with his boss at the Čermák factory to help him out. By then he had proved to be a hard worker, and after a few months, his boss had decided to appoint him as deputy. Otto wielded what little influence he had left and spoke to and telephoned and wrote to anyone he knew who might potentially help. Lotar drew on every contact he had.
Their efforts were not fruitless. Hans secured a letter from František Čermák stating that his work was crucial to the factory. A few days before the transport date, Hans was taken off the list. This small victory spurred them on. More calls were made to Pišta, the family friend at the Council in Prague. This was followed by more pleading with anyone who might be able to tilt the scales in their favor.
But try as they may, no one could get Ella off the list.
Ella was to be deported alone.
Zdenka drove to Libčice with Lotar and helped her pack for her departure that Monday in May.
Otto, Ella, Lotar, Zdenka, and Hans. The five of them spent that last weekend together. The Sunday night before she left, they sat down for dinner together at their home in Libčice, as they had so many times before, but now with Ella’s bag packed and waiting. I have nothing to reveal about how the hours passed beyond my own horror in contemplating them. No one spoke or wrote of it afterward. I can only imagine the relentlesss and mounting trepidation that must have filled the house in Libčice that night. Ella’s, Otto’s, and the boys’ dread would have been palpable. Zdenka, who had come to love Ella as a mother, must have been devastated. Ella would have had to wrestle with the desperate fear of being separated from her family as the hours crawled by. Otto, his need to control abjectly frustrated, would have despaired. His beloved wife of twenty-five years, the one who drove him mad and kept him sane, the mother to his children, the ever-cheerful Ella, with her smiles and music, warmth and silliness, was simply being removed from their lives, excised, taken away. And he could not stop it. He could not protect her. Hans and Lotar must have felt equally powerless, guilty, and afraid.
There is one single relic of that period between the summons of April 27 and Ella’s departure. It is a photograph of my grandparents at home in Libčice. Ella is absorbed in her knitting. Otto is dressed in a jacket, looking down, a cigarette in one hand and a pen in the other. There is a piece of paper in front of him; he could be writing a letter or completing one of the endless official Protectorate forms—it is unclear. On the table is a bottle of wine, glasses, matches, an ashtray, and newspapers.
Everything around them is darkness.
At first glance, it is just an unremarkable photo of a couple sitting, perhaps after dinner, at their home. It does not appear to record any moment of importance. The sitters seem preoccupied and are looking elsewhere. It is an odd picture to keep unless the scene holds some other meaning.
This is the washed-out photograph that always stood on my father’s bedside table, the one I had wondered about as a child, the one of my grandparents seated around a table looking old and sad. It was taken that very last week. This graying image that baffled me then is the last picture taken of Ella and Otto, relatively free and together in the Libčice house. Of all the photos in the album, casual playful shots or carefully posed and smiling portraits, this is the only one that my father kept.
Ella had to report on the Monday morning, May 4, for the same transport as her brother Julius, his wife, and their two young children. Otto’s brother Oskar, his wife, and their eight-year-old son, were on it too.
Zdenka drove with Otto, and Ella into Prague that morning before sunrise. It was decided that it was best if Hans and Lotar said their goodbyes at home and made their way to work as usual. Only Otto and Zdenka went with Ella all the way to Veletržní Palác.
They were detained before the entrance by the SS guards and ordered to leave Ella to carry her two suitcases and enter the holding area alone with the other deportees. Most Jews had to walk to the assembly point from their homes, hauling their allotted fifty kilograms of belongings, as they were no longer allowed to drive. Ella had been forewarned that often the suitcases never made it to the destination, so it was important that she carry essentials in her handbag. I cannot imagine how they felt, but I presume Otto continued to be stoic and Ella tried to stay positive, as she always seemed to be in the anecdotes and letters. I am sure they found comfort in thinking and saying that this would be temporary and that they would find a way to all be together again soon.
My grandmother spent three days in that transit center by the station, on her patch of floor with a straw-filled sack for a mattress, with her two suitcases and her carefully packed shoulder bag, filling out forms, handing in belongings, and answering endless questions under the watchful eyes of the SS guards. Wearing nothing of value other than her wedding ring, Ella must have watched as those around her were dispossessed of their jewelry and valuables. I pray that her allotted patch was close to her brother Julius and her brother-in-law Oskar and their families. I hope that the children distracted them and made them smile. It comforts me to think that at least during those terrible days of waiting, having left behind her husband and her two boys, Ella was with people whom she knew and loved. They will have cared for her. She will not have been entirely alone.
After the long days in the assembly point came the journey by train to Bohušovice, the station nearest Terezín. One thousand men, women, and children were transferred with Ella in the windowless wagons that left Bubny on May 7.
Otto, Lotar, Zdenka, and Hans heard nothing for three months.
In August, Pišta, the family friend who worked at the Council of Elders in Prague, brought news. Ella was alive in Terezín. She had fallen ill and fainted in the train, but she was alive. She had been one of some forty people carried off the transport in the station nearest to Terezín because they were ill. It saved her life.
Julius Haas and Oskar Neumann and their young families were ordered to stay on board while others filed into the already crammed carriages. They traveled on to Sobibor, in occupied Poland. The family never heard from them again.
Not a single one survived of the one thousand souls on that particular transport. There is a record of the departure from Terezín but no record of their arrival at the camp in Sobibor. Virtually all at Sobibor were murdered immediately. It remains unclear whether they were shot on arrival or marched into the gas chambers. A letter from Prague sent to Victor and Richard in America in June 1945 says that the family had found comfort in learning that those few, at least, had been spared further suffering.
As I now reflect on my grandmother’s fate, sitting with my own family in my own home, my thoughts inevitably pass to my father sobbing at the station in Bubny on a beautiful spring day in Prague, a day that should have been filled with hope. Exactly forty-eight years before, his mother had left that same station and had been so overwhelmed, so terrified, that she had lost consciousness. And yet I have the letters to show me that she still trusted the time would arrive when she would be reunited with her family once again.
Despite the departure from Bubny, the wrenching separation from her boys, amid the dread and grief, that May in 1942, Ella still retained hope.