There were still some German soldiers on the streets, but very few. The city seemed surprisingly calm and whole. We walked along the river. The cool breeze erased the acrid smell from the train. To one side of us were the remnants of shattered buildings, mistakenly bombed by the Allies in February. Next to us, the Vltava flowed, indifferent and calm.
My only identity card bore the name Jan Šebesta. I would have to wait until the city was liberated to become Hans Neumann again.
Hans was reunited with Lotar and Zdenka in their apartment at Trojanova 16. From Zdenka’s writings, I know that the city now concealed many others alongside him, and so did the apartment. Conditions in Prague were typical of the chaos that reigned across Europe. Though Terezín itself was not liberated until May 8, some of the concentration camps had been liberated as early as the autumn of 1944. This continued through to the spring of 1945, as the Allied armies advanced deeper into Europe.
Several survivors of the camps, whom Lotar and Zdenka had helped during the war, showed up on their doorstep, homeless and destitute. A German cousin of Zdenka’s, who had deserted from the army, also appeared, asking for shelter. The apartment was filled with people of all creeds and political factions, united by hunger, exhaustion, and desperation, all scared of every doorbell ring and of every noise. They passed the days just trying to stay alive and to get along in this makeshift refuge. Zdenka and Lotar distributed their clothes and shared the contents of their pantry. Through friends, they sought extra blankets and a little more food. Zdenka wrote that for weeks, they were like sardines sleeping on the floor or the sofa or wherever they could and that, for her new guests, anything was better than the camps or the fronts.
The resistance in Bohemia and Moravia had regrouped after the Heydrichiáda in 1942 and grown to a few thousand after years of war. In early May, its members organized an uprising against the remaining German forces in Prague. Emboldened Czechs took to the streets, vandalized German property, tore down Nazi flags, painted over German signs. Fighting ensued between the residual SS forces and the Czechs who had been joined by the so-called Russian Liberation Army, a faction of Russians who had been fighting with the Nazis but had switched sides. Prague was bombed by the Luftwaffe while the German troops on the ground massacred, tortured, and injured thousands. The Czechs, in turn, after years of oppression, exacted retribution from the Germans and their collaborators. The brutal fighting in the streets, train stations, and within key buildings in the city lasted for four days. Eventually, on May 9, 1945, a day after the liberation of Terezín and a day after the official Victory in Europe Day, Prague was liberated by the Red Army. After more than six years, the occupation was finally over. On May 23, 1945, Zdenka wrote to Otto’s brother, Uncle Richard, in America. I have the letter:
Dear Uncle Richard,
We are using the first opportunity that we have had to report to you what remains of us. We are devastated to tell you that only three of us are left from the entire Neumann family, Lotar, Handa, and I. From the Haas side, only our cousins Zdeněk Pollak and Hana Polláková survived. We do not know about the others. There is very little chance that any will come back. The three of us only survived because we lived underground, Lotar and me in Prague and Handa in Berlin. All three of us are completely healthy and we are trying to earn our keep somehow. We need you and your advice, as we will have to take care of various family matters and issues relating to Montana, which withstood the war reasonably well. We are living in an unimaginable chaos and we really could use your opinion on all matters. As you can see, the family suffered terribly.
What a price we paid for not listening to your advice in 1939.
Please, please send us your reply by return.
Gradually, weakened survivors began to trickle into Prague with news of the concentration camps in the east. That summer, Zita Polláková and Erich Neumann returned home. I do not know precisely when Lotar and Hans discovered that their mother had traveled from Terezín on transport ES with her niece Zita Polláková, but it was in those days of appalling reckoning immediately after the war that they learned their mother’s story.
On arrival at Auschwitz, there had been a selection process: 250 men were selected for work in the coal mines, and a few dozen women, among them Zita, were chosen to be transported farther east to work in the camps. Zita was one of 51 people on a transport of 1,500 who survived the war. Ella, along with the rest of the sick, had been sent directly to the gas chambers. I cannot imagine the grief that Hans, Lotar, and Zdenka must have felt on hearing the news.
Lotar wrote the American family a five-page letter dated June 29, 1945, informing them that Ella had been gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. This was the document my father had shown me on the dawn that followed my brother Miguel’s funeral. After sending the letter, none of the three, Hans, Lotar, or Zdenka, wrote or spoke about Ella’s death for the rest of their lives.
Stella Kronberger, Otto’s protégée from the camp, returned to Prague and told the family about his last months in Terezín. He had kept up his good spirits and stayed healthy and strong. Stella told Otto’s anxious sons that he had been sent away on a labor transport, so they also clung to the hope that he could have worked his way out of the camps and might make it home.
Records show that Otto had been sent on labor transport EI on September 29, 1944, with the number 164. On arrival at Auschwitz, he too faced the selection process. SS doctors and guards designated some for labor in various camps. Those deemed old or weak were put aside and sent to the gas chambers.
My father recorded in his memoir the account that he had pieced together:
Like everyone there, my father knew that the trick to maximizing your chances of surviving was to appear young. You had to look healthy, strong. Able to work. The Germans needed evidence of your potential as a laborer.
In our family, our hair turns gray early, salt and pepper by thirty, alabaster by middle age. I had always been told that this made us look distinguished. I suppose in more normal times that might have been true. Yet our hair, to Nazi eyes, would make us look older than our years. At a crucial moment, that could make us seem useless, expendable.
We were acutely aware of this. We had been warned.
For my father, with his distinguished hair, it was just a matter of time until they deemed him too old. Too old and worthless, simply because he had white hair at the age of fifty-three. Between Zdenka, Lotar, and friendly contacts, we’d arranged for some gendarmes to allow into Terezín parcels of 20 kg containing currency, goods, and letters for our parents. The brave couriers would bring their letters and news back to us. At first, we had sent hair dye. And when it became impossible to source hair dye even on the black market, we had to find something else. Zdenka, Lotar, and I had tried everything and eventually decided that black shoe polish would have to do. We had tried it and it worked. It had a foul smell and it washed off, but it colored the hair well enough. Zdenka even sneaked it into Terezín herself when we could not get the gendarme to help us. And when she could not get into the ghetto, she bribed a guard there who agreed to take it to my father.
My father, who always appeared so distant, with a sternness that seemed rooted in the worries of all humanity. He was constantly trying to solve problems, always weighed down by the existence of evil and injustice. And yet he repeated that the war would soon be over and reminded us to hold on to hope, as peace, he said, was just around the corner. He always wrote in his letters that the family would survive and maintained that soon we would all be together again.