However, this time it seemed that their efforts had been in vain, and they received no news from the Council. The weekend before they were set to depart, Lotar and Zdenka drove to Libčice to make plans. Hans’s girlfriend, Míla, and his friend Zdeněk also took the train to visit him in the country house. They buoyed him with poetry, jokes, and some plum brandy that Zdeněk’s mother had procured. As the friends left Libčice, they reminded Hans that there was still time to get off the list and they promised to visit him wherever he ended up, as if he were off on an army posting.
But Monday passed without any word from the authorities. The Neumanns had heard that the young and strong fared better within the Nazi system. The vulnerable were cast aside. It was important to appear hardy and capable of hard labor. That last evening, Mr. Novák, one of the managers at Montana, arranged for his cousin, a hairdresser, to visit Libčice. He was to dye Otto’s thick silver head of hair a dark brown in the hope of making him appear more youthful than his fifty-two years.
Otto and Hans bore in mind the instructions from Ella’s first letter from Terezín. They packed their bags with warm clothes and put the most useful things in their hand luggage, including, in Otto’s case, a small bottle of hair dye that the hairdresser had given him.
Otto and Hans headed to the assembly point first thing on the Tuesday morning of November 17, 1942. They carried their bags along the shortcut of empty paths between their house and Libčice’s station. They showed their Nazi-approved work travel permits and boarded the early train to Prague. Zdenka and Lotar met them in the city, and the solemn quartet made their way to the annex near the Trade Fair building at Bubny, where months before Ella had said her own farewells.
Otto forbade Lotar and Zdenka to even approach the entrance. They had heard stories of the SS guards at the doors bundling those who escorted the deportees along with them to the camps. I can imagine my uncle Lotar watching from a distance, supported by Zdenka but stricken with grief and guilt as the figures of his brother and father became submerged in the throng. Lotar would have been struck by the unnatural changes. Hans’s characteristically easy saunter would have been replaced by the deliberate step of a frightened man. Otto’s hair was now dark, and his commanding bearing was bowed under the weight of his bags and his trepidation.
Lotar was inconsolable, but the next day brought merciful news from Pišta, their friend at the Council. Miraculously, they had succeeded in taking Hans’s name off the list. He could be vyreklamován, “reclaimed,” from the transport. There was nothing, Pišta explained, that the Prague Elders could do for Otto. He was simply too old to be deemed sufficiently important to the war effort. Otto would have to make the journey that they had all worked so hard to avoid, but Pišta himself would collect Hans from Bubny.
The telegram that I had found had been sent from the Jewish Council to Libčice on November 18, 1942, the day after Otto and Hans had registered at the assembly camp near the Trade Fair building. It was stored in my father’s box along with an official document from the Reich Ministry of Armaments in Prague stating that the work at Čermak of the Jew Hans Neumann was deemed crucial to the war effort.
Armed with this official document to retrieve Hans and a handwritten note for Otto, Pišta went into the assembly area by Bubny Station. In his note, Pišta encouraged Otto to try to find strength in being reunited with Ella. He assured him of his friendship and wished him well in facing the road ahead. He concluded by writing that above all, Otto must keep his faith in him. He signed off Pištek, the affectionate moniker that Otto had always used for him. When I found this note in one of the boxes over seventy years later, it was clear, even out of context, that the writer was consumed with a desperate regret at his helplessness.
* * *
After I pieced together the episode at Bubny I told Ignacio, my older half brother from my mother’s first marriage, about it. It brought to the fore a childhood memory of his with my father. Ignacio recalled distinctly that, one day, when he was in his early teens, my father had taken him into his study and shown him a handgun. Venezuela at the time had seen a slew of kidnappings, and I remembered that in addition to stationing more guards around the house, my father had also taken to carrying a small gun in an ankle holster. Ignacio had been startled when Hans explained that the gun was not there just to fend off criminals. He had looked intently at his stepson and quietly explained that he was to tell no one, but that the gun held a special bullet for the guard who had separated him from his father at the station in Prague. The weapon and, even more so, this remark were entirely incongruous with my calm and measured father, a man who never raised his voice. Ignacio at the time had not understood what Hans meant and, scared of the gun and this strange disclosure, sensed that it was best not to pursue the matter. He obeyed his stepfather’s instruction to keep the secret and, over the decades, more or less forgot about it. When I mentioned this story to my mother, she remembered that my father had also told her something about being saved at the station. She thought it had been traumatic for him and she had not dwelled on it, as she felt it compounded his terrible feeling of guilt.
Hans and Otto had been ordered to turn up at the assembly point at eight a.m. on November 17. They had registered with the authorities at Bubny that morning, queued at the desks, and started to fill out the dozens of forms required for deportation. Hans had spent the day and night with Otto and the thousand others in the same transport in the grim conditions of the hall. At some point after the telegram from the Jewish Council was sent the following day, Pišta had traveled to Bubny with the official Reich Ministry of Armaments vyreklamován notice and the handwritten message for Otto. Pišta was not allowed to enter the area where Otto and Hans were seated with their belongings, so an SS guard had delivered the news. The guard did not allow time for embraces or lengthy goodbyes. He hurried Hans into gathering his bags and escorted him out. Hans would have had no choice but to comply, bundle up his things, and tear himself away from his father, who would be deported alone.
Hans was saved and Otto stayed behind at the station. That evening, the four of them, Hans, Pišta, Lotar, and Zdenka, sat down and took what little comfort was available in the discussion of practicalities. Lotar was protected for now by his marriage to Zdenka, but it was unclear how long this dispensation would last. He could continue to work at Montana. They reckoned that if Jews in mixed marriages were to be transported, the friendly treuhänder Francek might succeed in making a case that, because of his youth and expertise, Lotar was crucial at the factory. Hans would be sure to work the longest hours possible and maintain his position at Čermak. He too needed to make himself indispensable. They would all take care of one another. They would keep a low profile and behave sensibly in daily matters. They would live on their wits and trust only the very close chosen few. Together with Zdenka, they would arrange for parcels to be sent into Terezín, and they would use every contact to prevent Ella or Otto from being sent east.
The family now battled on two fronts, ensuring that the boys stayed in Prague and that Otto and Ella were kept safe and fed in Terezín. Lotar reminded Hans of Otto’s words of caution uttered a few weeks earlier. Any deviation from the rules could cost their lives and those of others. It was imperative that Hans particularly understood this, given his tendency to flightiness. Otto had always been the one to be stern with his younger son, but now it was Lotar’s turn to try to talk some sense into him. Hans was fortunate to still be in Prague. Despite the positive noises to date from Čermak, it was critical that he stop fooling around with his friend Zdeněk. He must resist the temptation to take any unnecessary risks.