Hana Polláková, who had lost her husband in the camps, married a survivor of Buchenwald in 1945. They had two children. She lived the rest of her years in Teplice and died in 1973.
Zita Polláková was one of the fifty-one survivors from her and my grandmother’s transport of fifteen hundred to Auschwitz. She escaped from a death march and, after hiding in a barn in Poland, was rescued by Russian soldiers who eventually took her to Prague. Zita married a Czechoslovak army veteran and moved back to Teplice. There, they raised their daughter, Daniela. In 1968 Zita moved to Switzerland, where she lived until 2002. She committed some of her memories to paper later in life, but otherwise, the Pollak survivors seldom spoke of the war.
Stella Kronberger, my grandfather’s protégée in the camp, was liberated from Terezín in 1945. After finding Hans and Lotar in Prague, sharing her stories of Otto, and waiting in vain for his return, she moved to the U.S. in 1946 to be with her daughter. A few months afterward, she traveled to California to meet Otto’s brothers, Victor Neuman and Richard, who had changed his last name to Barton. Stella shared with them how their brother had lived the last few years of his life. Eventually, Stella married Victor and became Stella Neuman. The two lived quietly in San Diego, where Stella wrote a weekly cooking column for the Times of San Diego. She never spoke of the war to Victor’s children or grandchildren. When I connected with two of the grandchildren, my cousins Greg and Victor, they had no idea that they had any Jewish heritage or that their step-grandmother had ever been in a camp. But Stella did confide some of her experiences to her own daughter and her granddaughters, who have generously shared their memories.
Richard Neumann (later Barton) stayed in Caracas for a few years to ensure that his nephews had settled well. He then moved back to the U.S., where he married a Czech woman named Edith. They had no children. They lived in La Jolla and kept in touch with Lotar and Hans until Richard’s death in 1980. Edith lived until 2003. I met her a few times but she never mentioned the war or the existence of any other family members.
Having built up a conglomerate of companies with his brother, Lotar left Venezuela for Switzerland in 1964, fifteen years after he had arrived. There, with Věra, he lived a quiet life in the small village of Gingins, raising their two daughters, Susana and Madeleine (Madla), collecting paintings by socially committed artists like Daumier and Kollwitz, as well as pieces of art nouveau. Throughout his life, Lotar privately supported Czech refugees and Holocaust survivors.
Zdenka had her only child, a daughter, Lucia, with Viktor Knapp in 1949. Zdenka’s relationship with Viktor ended in 1955 when he left her for another woman. Lucia told me that no one who came after ever matched Lotar’s love for Zdenka. She explained that Zdenka had confessed toward the end of her life that she bitterly regretted having left Lotar but that by the time she realized this, it was too late.
Zdenka never lost her independence of mind. She worked at the literary publication Literární noviny, where she wrote many articles. She also acted as a lay judge. In 1968 Zdenka and Lucia escaped from Czechoslovakia, fearing the aftermath of the Prague Spring. They showed up unannounced at the door of Lotar’s home in Switzerland. Lotar and Věra took them in for some days and then helped them resettle in Switzerland.
Lotar and Zdenka tried to remain friends. However, in the early 1970s, they decided it would be best if they continued their lives separately and consigned their shared experiences to silence. During the last days of his life, when his mind and body were weakened by Parkinson’s disease, Lotar cried out for Zdenka. A few months before, she had suffered an accident that meant she could not walk or travel to visit him. They never saw each other again. Lotar died in 1992. Zdenka herself died eleven years later. Unlike all the other women I traced and despite two subsequent marriages, Zdenka never changed her name. She kept the name Neumannová, the Czech feminine adjective of Neumann, throughout her life.
Lotar and Věra donated pieces from their art collection, as well as photographs taken by Lotar, to museums in Prague. Věra sent me Lotar’s boxes of letters, documents, and his photograph album, through their daughter Madla, in 2012. Věra died in 2013.
Zdeněk Tůma worked at Montana in Prague after the war and in 1947 moved to the town of Staré Město with his wife; there, they raised two boys. He worked with paints all his life. Unlike Hans, he shared some stories of his time in Berlin with his family. He continued to read and write poetry for pleasure and translated Rilke’s lyrical poem “A Song of Love and Death” from German to Czech. Despite the very different worlds that they inhabited, Zdeněk and Hans stayed in touch. Their secret partnership and lifelong friendship brought them both great joy until Zdeněk died, surrounded by family, in 1991.
Míla and Hans’s marriage was fraught with difficulties from the start, but they built a life in Caracas and raised their son, Michal, who became Miguel, my half brother. They separated much earlier but divorced in 1969. Despite having risked her life many times to bring Hans food and solace, Míla also never spoke about the past. As a child, I visited her a few times with my father. Each time she made his favorite, rohlíčky sugar cookies. Míla and Hans were friends until her death in New York in 1990. After she died, my father began keeping the good-luck doll that she had made him in a drawer by his bedside, beneath the photograph of his parents. I do not know exactly when he placed it in my box.
Hans went on to accomplish so much after the war that I would probably need another book to tell you about it all. He was a businessman and philanthropist whose seemingly boundless energy and drive spanned countries and industries—manufacturing, newspapers, agriculture, tourism. His passion for the arts and education drove him to establish programs that benefited thousands. Still today there are two streets in Venezuela named after him, one in Caracas and one in Valencia. The fire never left him, and as he wrote to his uncle Richard in 1945, during the whole of his life he continued to “work, work, work.” He had recently founded the principal opposition newspaper to the Chávez regime, whose catastrophic legacy he had foreseen, when he died after a series of strokes on September 9, 2001.
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In my early memories of my father, he was always sitting, fixing the mechanism of a watch in the long room at the back of the house that nestled in its vibrant garden. But now I can picture him, young and chaotic, in Prague. I cherish the mental images that the photographs, letters, writings, and anecdotes have helped me create. I see my father lying in the middle of a cobblestone sidewalk in Prague, with Zdeněk giggling around a corner, waiting to scare an unsuspecting passerby. I picture him on a bench by the banks of the river writing poetry, wildly pedaling and falling off his bicycle, arriving late, always disheveled, for meals. I imagine him with Otto, Ella, and Lotar, joyously playing with the dogs in the honeyed light of their garden in Libčice. The sounds of laughter, the rush of the Vltava, and the wind in the trees are so loud that one can no longer hear the ticking of time.
I spent my childhood willing a mystery to come my way. When it finally did, it took decades to solve. As an adult with children of my own, I found the reason for the question mark on the wall of the memorial at the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. I learned why my father awoke screaming in the night. I solved the puzzle of the identification card and everything else that had baffled me about my father when I was young.