Nonetheless, over and over, she expressed a deep appreciation of Langer for taking care of her in what she described as a movingly fatherly fashion when she was alone and in the direst misery. She felt indebted to him for the housing, the employment, the possibility of storing belongings, the chance to connect with the outside. She also observed, perhaps a little wryly, that Otto was behaving ungratefully, as Engineer Langer had provided him with protection from the moment he arrived.
Eventually, thanks to files in the Jewish Museum and the archives in Brno, I was able to trace the youngest daughter of Ella’s benefactor. Having grown up in Czechoslovakia, Beatrice is a retired pathologist, now living in Australia. We corresponded by email for a few months before finally meeting for an afternoon in London. Through Beatrice, my letters, and the archives in the Czech Republic, I pieced together a picture of František Langer. Born in 1902 in Bohušovice, he had studied engineering at the University of Brno. He was a tall, lean, studious man, fond of reading, forest walks, and open fires. He had married a Franco-Czech Protestant in 1932, and they had their first daughter, Beatrice’s older sister, four years later. Ultimately, fearful of Nazi policies, František and his wife divorced to protect the family and their belongings. František had arrived at Terezín alone a month before Ella. He was soon put in charge of the Bauhof, the workshop in the camp. This was a position of considerable status, although, unlike the Elders, he held no decision-making power over administrative issues or lists for transports. Nonetheless, his position meant that his opinion carried weight in such matters. It also meant that he had access to rooms, storage, and a measure of privacy that was unusual in Terezín. My grandmother acted as his cleaner and cook, and in the surreal conditions of their imprisonment, they became friends.
By all accounts, my grandmother had always been charming and flirtatious. It is clear from the letters that she retained a sense of joy and fun even in Terezín. Regardless of the reason, Langer did whatever he could to help both Ella and Otto.
Ella may have flirted or done what she could to stay alive, to be reunited with her golden boys. All I know is that in that world of absurd choices, Ella chose to survive. Her letters were filled with hope but also pragmatism and a determination to maximize her and Otto’s chances of survival. Ella consistently denied anything more than a friendship with František Langer, who was, after all, not only younger than she was but also loves his wife and daughter. She accused Otto of being irrationally jealous of everything, even his shadow. I will never know if Otto’s suspicions were well-founded or not. Either account could have been correct, or the truth could rest, as it often does, balanced somewhere between.
The fact remains that František Langer played an important role in my grandparents’ lives in the camp. Despite my grandfather’s reaction to it, he clearly afforded them both protection and was a source of comfort and kindness for Ella.
Beatrice and I had many conversations about Terezín, our families, and the letters. I had been apprehensive about disclosing Otto’s suspicions, but I should not have been. Joined by the invisible and improbable bond of being children of people who survived against the odds, we chatted openly and freely, on Skype, by email, in person. We agreed that we will never know the exact details of this relationship but that to us, so close but so far removed from the madness of the war, much can be beautiful and profound without being fully understood.
Engineer František Langer, having been liberated from Terezín in 1945, never mentioned either Otto or Ella Neumann to his daughter. Like so many survivors, he never spoke about the camps as he remade his life in Czechoslovakia and then Australia. His family keeps a portrait of him painted in Terezín by the renowned artist and painter Petr Kien. Kien died in Auschwitz in October 1944, but many of his drawings and paintings survive and are on display in Terezín. This oil, dedicated to František Langer, is simply inscribed gratefully.
Petr Kien’s portrait of Engineer Langer
* * *
By September 1943, most of Prague’s Jews had been deported. Of the 118,000 who had been in the city in 1939, about 36,000 had fled, and almost 70,000 had been deported. Only those of mixed heritage or those protected by intermarriages remained. This meant that the duties of the Council of Elders in Prague had diminished greatly. Yet the offices were filled with files of identification documents, declarations, paperwork concerning bans from public work, seizures, confiscations, deportations. An average transport generated five hundred files of paperwork. Around a hundred transports departed Bubny between 1941 and September 1943.
At that time, the Prague Elders were in charge of all those Jews in the Protectorate who were not already interned in camps but to whom the Nuremberg Laws still applied. The Prague Elders operated under a complicated organizational structure with several hundred participants. Since most of the “full” Protectorate Jews, including most of their own staff, had been deported by the summer of 1943, the organization was in need of resources. Against this background, Lotar was recruited to work for the Council as a junior filing clerk in the transport office.
Among the other new recruits were two friends of Lotar’s, a lawyer named Viktor Knapp, whom Zdenka knew from the law faculty at university, and Erik Kolár, Lotar’s dear friend from the theater and the clandestine school. They too were protected by mixed marriages and started to work there in September. And though many Elders themselves had been deported, Pišta, the family friend, had held on to his post as an assistant. Being among friends may have marginally eased the burden of working within an administrative machine devised by the Nazis. Any perceived protection was illusory, as being part of the Council did not afford anyone real security. All the original members of the Council in Prague and their families had been transported to Terezín in 1941. By September 1943, many had been tortured and killed.
To say that Lotar was asked to work in the Council implies there was a choice, that he could have refused. Two years before, Otto had tried to recuse himself from being a trustee, a request that had been denied. Lotar could have taken a similar stance and declined, but to do so would have had consequences not only for him but for his parents in Terezín. All his family had been deported, and some had already been killed. The only one not to have been deported was Hans, but he was on the Gestapo list and in constant danger by hiding in plain sight.
Even though I knew him many years later, I can imagine Lotar’s anguish. When faced with death, he had no real choice, merely the crushing sense of responsibility and torment that arises from the illusion of choice. Duress, as international law recognizes, amounts to the removal of free will. Lotar acted under duress. Yet the conscience of a survivor is never so black and white. Many who were involved in the Councils across occupied Europe never admitted to it after the war. A number who became important in their communities and later assumed public roles erased this period from their biographies.
But my uncle Lotar did not erase it from his mind. Lotar’s daughter Madla told me that he agonized about his involvement with the Council for the rest of his life. Unlike my father, who brutally severed himself from his past life, Lotar dealt with his traumas differently. In his fifties, he retired from the life that he had built and struggled in silence under the weight of a depression that never left him. He spent the last two decades of his life helping Holocaust survivors and refugees rebuild theirs.