My children, husband, mother, aunt, Eva, her husband, Mr. Nedvídek, and Magda, the diligent Czech researcher, made up the party. Magda and Mr. Nedvídek acted as translators as Jana and I pieced together our shared moment of history.
Jana and Eva were eager to share what they remembered and did their best to answer the dozens of questions we had for them. It struck us all at that moment that my children and I really owed our own lives to Mr. Novák’s extraordinary bravery, without which my father was unlikely to have survived. When I thanked them, Eva grabbed my hand, looked at me, her eyes brimming with humanity and grace, and uttered some words that Mr. Nedvídek translated, “Please stop. Your thanks are not due, because my father did not do anything extraordinary. He only did the correct thing. Simply, he did what everybody should have done. We should all, as a country, have behaved like Frank Novák. And it is us who apologize to you that we did not.”
We must have seemed an odd and disparate bunch to the workers repainting the building in Libeň. Eleven people of all ages and heights, some with walking sticks, a couple hunched in teenage awkwardness, all attempting to understand and be understood, pointing at and asking questions about an empty disco, while some hugged and a few wept in that industrial estate on a Tuesday morning.
As one walks to the right of the building, the low-lying window by which my father entered and left his secret room is visible. He sat inside for days on end in silence, reading his books, writing his letters. Míla brought him puzzles and stitched him a small doll for company and for luck.
My father kept the handmade good-luck doll in the box that he left me. Time has softened its colors and erased the inked features of its face. The details of the dress and the delicately knitted red and cream bonnet still evidence the care with which it was crafted.
In early April, when Zdeněk returned for a few days to Prague from his job in Berlin, Míla brought him to visit Hans late one evening at Montana. The three friends sat in the gloom of the nighttime factory, happy to be together again, their simple supper dimly visible in the candlelight. Zdeněk talked about his life in Berlin. He explained that he was working for a paint manufacturer called Warnecke & Böhm, making industrial lacquer for the Luftwaffe, the German air force. Most young and able German men had joined the army, and the factory was understaffed. Zdeněk was so busy with work that he had little time for anything else.
“We need good chemists. I wish you could come and help me, Handa. Life would be easier then!” he joked.
But Hans did not laugh. Absorbed by the candle’s flame, he simply murmured an old Czech saying:“Pod svícnem bývá největší tma.” The darkest shadow lies beneath the candle.
Míla did not understand, but Zdeněk, who knew Hans so well, grasped the meaning instantly. “Not in this case it isn’t! It is an insane idea, Hans!”
“That’s where you are wrong,” Hans replied evenly.
The Gestapo were looking for Hans Neumann in and around Prague. They would never think of looking in the German capital; no one on the run chose to go there to hide. The searchlight scorched Prague, and they would undoubtedly find him if he stayed there. If he traveled to the center of it all, to Berlin, to the heart of the Reich, just beneath the candle, where the darkness was greatest, the Gestapo might never find him.
There, he would hide in plain sight. He would give himself a new name—Jan Šebesta, like the fellow who got out of town in an old nursery rhyme from their childhood: “Jede, jede Šebesta, jede, jede do města…” Go, go Šebesta… He would become someone else entirely, so that in reality, he would not be hiding at all. He would go to Berlin. He would not have to remain invisible any longer.
“You have gone green, Zdeněk, don’t fret. It was all your idea, and it is a good one. It really is the ideal place. I will come and work with you at the factory in Berlin.”
Míla initially thought that Hans was joking. Zdenka, for whom daring was second nature, agreed that it was a perfect plan. Lotar fretted about every detail and was anguished at the thought of allowing his younger brother to travel on his own to Berlin. However, the simple fact remained that it was only a matter of time until the Gestapo came looking for Hans at Montana. Eventually, even Lotar reluctantly accepted that there was no alternative. They all agreed to the plan. No physical characteristic prevented Hans from living among the Germans. Otto, never a follower of religious dogma, had refused to have the boys circumcised; his fastidious obstinacy, as Ella always referred to it, had in this instance proved an unlikely blessing.
Together with Míla and Zdenka, Hans and Lotar went to work on constructing a cover for Hans. They needed to make another identity card, as the one in the name of Jan Rubeš was about to expire. Lotar thought it would be best to use an entirely different name anyway, in order not to expose his friend Ivan to further risk. The name of Jan Šebesta seemed unremarkable and gentile enough. In the weeks they had to prepare, Zdenka could not source another identity card, not at any price. Míla volunteered her own card. It had been issued by the Protectorate in 1940, so the text appeared in both Czech and German. As she was a gentile, it lacked the stamp with the J for Jew. She managed for weeks without it and then reported it lost. The report from 1943 can be seen today in the police archives in Prague.
Lotar and Hans armed themselves with magnifying glasses and solvents and carefully erased Míla’s name without damaging the paper fibers. Hans’s handwriting had always been illegible, so Zdenka, the better calligrapher, carefully penned in the name Jan Šebesta and his fictional details. They listed his place of birth as Stará Boleslav, a small town northeast of Prague, known as Alt Bunzlau in German. His birth date, which he would have to remember easily, became March 11, 1921, the year of Hans’s own birth and two days after he should have disappeared in the transport to Terezín. Perhaps March 11 was the precise day when Zdeněk and Hans had, in the dark confines of the cubicle, first devised Jan. Maybe the date was just chosen because it was the day after Lotar’s birthday. This remains a small mystery that I will probably never solve. The other particulars—the height, face shape, and hair and eye color—were all Hans’s own: 182 cm, oval, chestnut, green. Finally, Míla’s photograph was removed, burned, replaced with a head shot of Hans, and Jan Šebesta’s identity was complete.
Forgery of the second key piece of identification needed for travel, a passport, was an altogether tougher proposition and beyond their resources. A passport was needed for the journey Hans was to make, as his card was from the Protectorate, so he would have to use Zdeněk’s. It was settled.
On his return to Berlin, Zdeněk asked his boss for a special permit to visit his “ill” mother in Prague in early May.
Hans remained in his hiding place, terrified that he would be found before he could enact his plan and only marginally less afraid of the plan itself. Eager and anxious, he endured a month of waiting for Zdeněk’s return so that he could escape and leave his identity as Hans behind. As the hours crawled by, he continued to be careful and silent in his dark and damp cell.
One day, when I was still a schoolgirl in Caracas and my father sat transfixed by mechanisms in the long, narrow room, I worked up the courage to interrupt him. I asked him when it was that he had first looked inside a watch. He swung the light aside, turned to me, and raised his magnifying visor so that I could see his eyes. They were mazes of moss and still gently round despite the wrinkles. He called me toward him and put his arm around my back protectively as he spoke.