But then, as summer ended, we found all our efforts and letters to the Elders had failed. My father had been included in one of the dreaded journeys to the East. Always cautious, he had brushed his hair with the polish and placed the tin in the inner pocket that my mother had sewn near the seam of his shirt. In a world where little made sense, his shoe polish had become the most precious commodity. As important as food to guarantee life.
The transports were always 1,000 people. It was a perfect round number that allowed for 20 wagons of 50 people, each with their permitted 40 kg of belongings, though whatever they had left after all the confiscations and the desperate barter of the ghetto never amounted to that. The healthy stood, the others, treated like numbed animals, lay one on top of the other. As soon as the train was ready, the doors were sealed. There was no ventilation, no fresh air inside. It took twenty-four hours to reach the destination. Then the doors opened again.
Exhausted and dizzy from the long journey and the stale air, the people struggled to form queues. The shouts of the officers and the black of their guns would have been enough to jolt them. Links! Rechts! Left for older people. Right for the young.
The wait for the selection seemed interminable despite the elite SS soldiers’ renowned efficiency. As they all stood there, ghosts of the people that they had once been, waiting to be examined and classified, the icy November fog slowly turned to rain. Heavier and more frequent drops came down until the rain became unrelenting.
The shoe polish started to wash down my father’s back and face, traveling in streamlets of black that stained his face and clothes. A guard saw this and hauled him out of the queue. He called another guard. They knocked him across his face with a gun and made him go to the left, with the old and weak ones, first in line to the gas.
I could picture it all.
My father, with his patrician profile and dignified bearing, bent in two, hit by a German brute. I imagined him walking into the concrete room, naked, the black staining his face, contrasting with the limpid blue of his eyes. His lips contorted into a grimace of death as he tried to not breathe the poison.
I remembered his words to me as a young boy.
“You have to fight. Not with violence but with your mind, not for people but for ideas. Fight and work for what you believe in, Handa. That struggle is all that matters.”
I could see his face in front of me, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, slicked-back hair that always made me think of freshly fallen snow. His thoughtful pauses that punctuated each conversation laden with advice. His struggle had not mattered to them. Neither had his sense of justice.
“If you want to be truly just in this life, when you see people who are weak, you must stand with them. Because you are strong, and it is the weak who need you more, not the strong.”
My strong father had stood with the weak. I wasn’t strong. I imagined or remembered, I am not sure which now, that as a boy I was sitting on his knees. He caressed my face affectionately but was still distant, inaccessible. His hand was very soft and enormous, and it made me feel entirely secure. He wiped my tears with his thumb and said, “Now, now, Handa. Strong men never let anyone see them cry. Never.”
And now my father was gone. They had murdered him.
I wanted to scream but my jaw was locked. I had no air left inside, my lungs were made of stone. I sat on the step of the building hallway, leaned my head against the yellowing wall, and cried.
My father made a mistake in his retrospective diary. Otto’s transport did not consist of 1,000 people but of 1,500. Of those, 750 were grouped to the right and selected for labor, of whom 157 survived. One of them found the Neumann brothers in Prague and told them how their father had been killed in the camp. He recounted the story of how the rain had revealed Otto’s distinguished silver hair and washed away his luck.
I have visited every place where my grandparents lived and worked. Their apartment in Prague, the Montana factory, their beloved house in Libčice, the many buildings that housed them as they were moved around in Terezín. And now I realize that without having meant to search for them in particular, I finally have found my family. In attempting to piece together the puzzle, in my search for my father’s past, I found his life in Europe. Amid the details of that life, I have discovered the family who was never spoken about, the one who was not so much forgotten as veiled in the silence. And I finally have the grandparents I secretly longed to meet. I now know Otto and Ella Neumann. I have found them in the photographs, through the words of their letters and anecdotes that have emerged from the boxes and the research. I have retrieved an intimate sense of who they were, and I carry them in my heart. They are no longer distant figures in a picture of faded grays.
Maybe one day I will decide to go, but for the time being, I cannot muster the courage to visit Auschwitz. I simply cannot go to the place where they died.
Now that, after all these years, they are finally with me, I refuse to say goodbye.
There are two photographs of my grandparents in Lotar’s album that I particularly love. In one, taken in the mid-1930s, Ella is skiing. She is happy, carefree, and perhaps a little coquettish. In the other, Otto is relaxed, smiling with his darling Zdenka, in the garden at Libčice.
In my memory, this is how they remain.
CHAPTER 17 Where Time Does Not Matter So Much
Hans and Míla’s wedding, June 2, 1945. In the photo taken by Zdeněk are Lotar, Zdenka, and Zdenka’s sister Marie, among others.
My father did not wait for the official end of the war in September to become Hans Neumann once more. Eager to restart his life and deeply grateful to her, he married Míla as soon as he could. The wedding took place on June 2, 1945. Records show that they had announced their intended marriage to the Prague Registry Office only a couple of days earlier, just a few weeks after his return from Berlin. At the time, it was obligatory to wait a minimum of six weeks, but the registrar dispensed with the rules, and they were allowed to skip all three rounds of the reading of the banns of marriage.
A wedding photograph shows that Míla beamed as she held on to Hans, who wore a suit that was too big for his gaunt frame. The witnesses were his brother, Lotar, and his best friend, Zdeněk. There were few other guests, just Míla’s parents, Zdenka and her mother, and a few friends. Otto and Ella and almost everyone else in the family were still unaccounted for. A small celebratory lunch was held in Prague, although the city was still reeling and food was scarce.
Shortly afterward, Hans and Zdeněk went back to work at Montana, but it was not until March 1946 that Hans and Lotar managed to restore the family’s factory to a semblance of its previous productivity. Lotar had also taken on another job. From May 1945, he was part of the National Committee for the Liquidation of the Jewish Council of Elders in Prague. In this capacity, he took care of distributing to survivors any assets that could be recovered from the Germans. The committee was also in charge of using funds collected during the war by the Jewish Council of Elders to help repatriated survivors start again. In June 1945, together with his friends Erik Kolár and Viktor Knapp, Lotar also joined the National Fund for Recovery, a government organization set up to help reconstruct Czech institutions and provide aid to the repatriated. In January 1946, he decided to go back to university to finish his engineering degree, while Zdenka continued to work for the fund. Lotar decided to leave the fund permanently on April 1, 1946, in order to conclude his studies and focus on business at Montana.