Lotar and Hans with their parents and uncle Richard, c. 1928
I have read, researched, asked, and asked again so many questions of so many people who knew of them that I can almost hear their breaths, their laughs, their sobs.
I can picture the family in 1936, moving about their lives. When it is quiet enough, I can hear their voices.
They are in a large, airy living room with a beamed high ceiling and a chimney at one end. From the windows, you can see the wind create waves of needles on the pines in the garden. It is a weekend in late September, and the chill of the winter’s evening has already impregnated the air. Otto leans against the back of an armchair next to the crackling fire, absorbed in a book about Mahatma Gandhi. He is forty-six, but his white hair and downturned lips make him seem older. Ella is almost forty, looks closer to thirty as she floats about the rooms humming a melody. They have two teenage boys, Lotar, who is eighteen, and Hans, who is fifteen. That evening Lotar is at home with his parents. He has just brought more firewood from the supply outside. Again, they are in their country house in Libčice, about twenty-five kilometers north of Prague, on the banks of the Vltava River.
Ella had received a gift of money from her parents and bought the farmhouse in Libčice, ignoring Otto’s protests about the extravagance of owning a second home. In the city, they had a comfortable apartment in a nineteenth-century building chosen specifically for its location: a two-minute walk from the main building of the family’s paint factory. “It is most practical to live nearby,” Otto would say over and over, as Ella complained that being so close just meant that home and work fused into one. “It is so much better to have to travel a little,” she protested, “to have a journey that allows you to separate and disconnect.” She would say to Otto, who was no longer listening: “You have to have a different place to rest, a place that is just for family and that allows you the space to think of other things. In Prague, the factory just there means that someone is always knocking on the door whenever there is a problem at work.” Even though he never admitted it, Ella knew that her husband also came to treasure their weekends away.
Ella had spent her childhood in a rambling house in Chlumec nad Cidlinou, a small medieval town in northeastern Bohemia. She had met Otto there, when he had been employed as an accountant at the local sugar refinery. He had conducted a determined courtship of Ella that had been as respectful as it was resolute. Ella’s father, a successful stockbroker, had immediately approved of his serious prospective son-in-law. Ella had found Otto’s gravitas and candor endearing. She and her three siblings had grown up with the easy nonchalance that comes from a childhood unclouded by financial worries. Her family baffled Otto. He considered them too preoccupied with trivia. They certainly did not spend their time studying politics and philosophy, as he did. They seemed to devote most of their attention to parties and music.
Everyone in her family played either the piano or the violin, and as a young girl, Ella had loved to sing. She had wanted Hans and Lotar to learn an instrument, but Otto had not allowed it. It was not that Otto did not enjoy music, it was just that he considered playing an instrument inconsequential. He did relish listening to the composers from the last century, Smetana and Dvořák, though Otto maintained this was mostly from a sense of national pride. Ella, on the other hand, liked the more modern composer Martinů, and shared her boys’ love of jazz, swing, and political cabaret. She missed the constant music and the happy chaos of her childhood. Her older sister, Martha, who had married Zdeněk Pollak and had three children, had died of pneumonia in 1923. The remaining family and Martha’s brood regularly gathered in Roudnice, where one of her brothers and her parents still lived. Every moment there was a hubbub of discussion, music, and laughter.
When she first moved to Prague with Otto, Ella had been exhilarated by the bustle of the capital. Yet, with the years, she would come to take pleasure in it only sporadically. She longed to live outside of it, where time passed more slowly. This was why she loved the house in the sleepy town of Libčice. They spent most weekends and school holidays there. Otto would join them only when circumstances at the factory allowed. Hans and Lotar had grown up cycling on the paths and rowing their boat on the Vltava. They had caught butterflies, built huts in the woods, swum in a calm part of the river—in Libčice, they had found the space and freedom to be boys. Ella especially enjoyed the people and the natural life that bustled and thrummed around the river. She would walk its banks every morning after breakfast and watch the colors and shadows thrown by the rising light change with the seasons.
A portrait of Ella from the early 1930s
Otto was the seventh of eight siblings. He had grown up in the area of České Budějovice in southern Bohemia. His parents had struggled to keep some order in a household with seven boys by imposing strict rules. His father had died when Otto was twelve, and he had found comfort in discipline and order. He had embraced the role of the sensible and cautious one in the family, and took pride in having all rely on him for advice. All the Neumann children were earnest and hardworking. They had, by turns, taken care of their mother until her death in 1910. When one of the brothers faced difficulty, the others rallied around to help. Otto had studied business because he enjoyed the predictability of numbers. He remained close to all his brothers, and especially to the youngest, Richard, with whom he had started the Montana paint factory in 1921. Letters show that he also often spent time with his elder brother Rudolf and with Oskar, who was only two years younger and ran one of the factory branches. His older brother Victor, an engineer who had helped the Austro-Hungarian army build bridges, had migrated to America after World War I to try his luck there. Despite the distance, they were in constant contact.
A portrait of Otto from the 1920s
Otto and Ella had worked on the house for years, modernizing it, decorating it, planting the garden. It had been three years since they had begun using it regularly, and it was just coming into its own, shaped to the contours of the family. The rooms were by now cozy and familiar, the walls filled with prints, every nook explored and cherished. The trees and shrubs in the garden surrounding the house had rooted deeply, filled out, and blossomed. The path to the riverbank had been repaved and weeded, and, in spring and summer, was traced with wildflowers. In autumn and winter, the damp fallen leaves plastered the stones.
Early that evening, as his father worked at his desk, Lotar sat in an armchair and gazed out the window, warmed by a fire that crackled and danced in the hearth. He sat upright, supported by a needlepoint pillow, with a half-read book facedown on his knee. Ella bustled about him, going in and out of the kitchen as she checked on the stew. She chattered and pestered Lotar for more information about his sweetheart. Lotar tried to concentrate enough to tune out his mother’s nonsense and focus on his book.
That August, the rest of the family had vacationed in Cannes while Hans was away at a YMCA summer camp near the town of Sázava, southeast of Prague. Otto and Ella had gone to collect Lotar, who had spent his second summer learning French at a language school in Cannes. There, the previous summer, he had met a fellow Czech from Prague, Zdenka Jedličková. The beautiful Zdenka with the confident cascading laughter and the dreamy blue eyes had transformed his life.