Hans as a teenager, holding a cine camera
I cannot be sure who took the shot of Hans with the camera. In all likelihood, it was Lotar. Hans seems unaware of the photographer.
There is a stillness in this picture that comforts me. Hans is perfectly absorbed by the task, his right eye fixated on the view through the lens, his left eye closed. It brings me back to him as he repairs watches in that long room in the corner of my childhood memory. It is the same absorption with which he would sit, many decades later, seemingly for hours on end, gazing through the magnifying lenses and calibrating the tiny mechanisms in his watches. Unaware that he had any motor skill issues, he willed his fingers to pull the tiny pivots and chains to ensure the accuracy of timekeeping. He was also oblivious then to my questioning gaze as I peeked through the crack in the door to that windowless room at the back of our house. This very still and controlled Hans is the man whom I spied on. The Hans who has emerged from my research, this “unfortunate boy,” invariably late, carefree, chaotic, and whimsical, bears little resemblance to the father I knew.
There was more than letters and albums inside the boxes from my cousin’s house. Among the papers were poems written by my father and Lotar during the first years of the German occupation. Lotar’s were more in keeping with the times, full of darkness and dread. One of his verses depicts a family seated around a table, waiting for someone to walk through the door. It is ominously entitled “A Song of Death.”
My father’s verses, on the other hand, deal mostly with lost love, women, and heartache. They have titles like “Florist Girl,” “Evening Stanza,” “Hollow Embrace,” “Sonnet of Spring.” I read them in translation, and even then, despite my partiality, I am afraid that they are not very good. Some of the lines sound clichéd, evidently the work of a teenage boy. Since you left me, I am no more, I am no longer anything when you are not close by… I read them and cringe a little. I cannot help but find them endearing in their corniness. Despite all that was going on around him, Hans still found the time to write bad poetry and plan pranks with Zdeněk.
After many years of searching, I found Zdeněk’s son, who is also named Zdeněk Tůma. He wrote to me recounting some of the anecdotes that his father had told him of his youth. Once, on a summer afternoon in Libčice shortly after the German invasion, Hans and Zdeněk were tasked by Ella with buying a chicken for supper. Returning home late and empty-handed, Hans and Zdeněk had concocted a story and pretended to have lost the money. They had, instead, spent it on wine. I hope Otto was not at home that weekend. I have no doubt that he, unlike Ella, would have seen through their game and despaired.
But I also have evidence that Hans took some things seriously. His graduation report states that he finished his chemistry degree in June 1940. The regime was at that time forcing Jews to retrain and take menial jobs in factories or in agriculture. The Nazis had confiscated a two-hundred-hectare farm near the village of Lípa as part of the seizure of Jewish property. It had been owned by the Kraus family for over a hundred years. They were the only Jewish family in the area. Julius Kraus, the largest employer and the richest man in the town, had built a railway line and station to ease the movement of goods and people. It had been a commercial and social enterprise benefiting the entire region. Precisely because of this railway, the Nazis chose the Kraus farm to set up a “retraining center.” It began functioning as such in July 1940. It became known simply as Lípa and was what we would call today a labor camp.
The Nazis’ declared intention was to teach four hundred young Jews discipline and agriculture. Initially, the Jewish Council and its branches in the Protectorate were charged with finding healthy unmarried and unemployed men between eighteen and forty-five to send to Lípa. They were to work long hours in the fields every day for months with little nourishment or reward. The camp was guarded by two Germans and a number of Czech gendarmes. From mid-1941, most inmates there were confined indefinitely. Some young Jewish men who were unemployed and destitute went voluntarily, propelled by the prospect of work and some, if nominal, remuneration and shelter. But for most, the prospect of long hours of physical work and enforced separation from their families was daunting. The Councils struggled to meet the numbers demanded by the Nazis, and soon the criteria were expanded to include men who were employed but had no dependents. After being called by the Council, the chosen men had to be examined by their family physician to ensure fitness. They were then to be checked by a second doctor, who worked for the state and to whom the selected men would have no connection.
On August 26, 1940, less than two months after his graduation, Hans received a registered letter in Libčice from the Jewish Council. It contained the following instruction: We call on you to come on Wednesday, August 28, 1940, to the apartment of Mr. Viktor Sommer in Kralupy, for a medical examination, at 9 o’clock in the morning.
Hans was to be examined there, with four other men from the area, by a Dr. Mandelik, who would attest to his fitness for the camp.
Councils were coerced to fill the places in Lípa. The surviving records show that on August 30, 1940, a representative of the Jewish Council in the town of Kladno in central Bohemia urgently telephoned the Council in the city of Slaný, which had authority in Libčice. They requested the names of five men who were needed immediately for work in Lípa. These five men were to report to the Lípa labor camp the following day, Sunday, September 1, 1940. The conditions of the selection process were unchanged.
Hans met all the criteria. He was the correct age, without employment or dependents. A mere 412 Jews of both sexes and all ages lived in the area of Slaný. Only a few dozen were men of the right age. To complicate matters further, there were only six Jews in Libčice, a married couple with a young daughter, and Otto, Ella, and Hans.
Hans was the only eligible one. There was an obvious onus on the authorities in Slaný and the doctors to deem him fit for work and send him to Lípa. And yet Hans seems to have obtained a medical deferral from this roundup of the very few local young men. The papers indicate that he would have had to attend a further examination in November 1940, but somehow, he does not appear on the list of those obliged to report to Lípa on September 1.
Perhaps the family took the huge risk of bribing the doctor, or Hans feigned a mental illness, or there was indeed some physical disability that he played up and subsequently outgrew. I have photographs of him playing volleyball and skiing as a teenager, so the medical issue that proved his salvation on this occasion was clearly not terribly marked. Possibly his double-jointedness, his then unnamed dyspraxia, played a part and helped him escape the forced labor. The records of his medical examination did not survive to tell us how he evaded Lípa.
Meanwhile, in early June 1940, the Slaný Council asked Otto to represent them as a trustee and take charge of the Jews in the town of Libčice. A trustee was the most junior position in the hierarchy of the Council. The role of the trustee was to distribute information and orders from the superior Jewish Community Council at a local level and to ensure that these orders were carried out. While they had no actual power or authority to make decisions, trustees were engaged with maintaining order and reporting those who were not obeying the decrees to the Central Jewish Council.
Otto resisted this appointment.
A letter to the Council from Otto has survived in the archives of the Jewish Community in Prague all these years. In it, Otto politely but firmly refused to take on the role:
Even though there is no abjuration to this appointment and I willingly acknowledge the utility of appointments of trustees, I would nonetheless like to express a differing opinion as toward the competency of my person for the contemplated position.
He went on to explain that he was too busy to take on the role. He also pointed out that he did not know many people in Libčice, as he had lived and worked in Prague for many years. These were just excuses. The family had spent most of every summer in Libčice for years and knew most of the families in the town of three tho
usand people. I know that they were friendly with the other Jewish family in the town, as it is mentioned in his letters.
However, Otto, who had always disliked clubs and considered himself something of an outsider, did not want to be part of the system. I do not know to what extent it was a moral stance, but he clearly did not want to comply. He may well have sensed that to be cast in even this limited role in the new hierarchy of power would serve no purpose other than to make him an unwilling accessory in the deepening persecution.
His letter to the Council was answered immediately with a note that summarily dismissed the points that he had raised. Otto thus found himself appointed as the trustee in charge of his own family and the other three Jews in Libčice. He was consequently to be held responsible for ensuring that each carried out the required tasks, obeyed rules, and promptly filled out forms correctly. However, despite this official role, Otto’s name, along with Hans’s, appears on a Council document dated July 1940 listing people who had not filled out their obligatory migration papers on time. This did not signify any desire to stay. It seems instead part of a considered strategy to delay the grinding bureaucracy and, above all, to disclose as little information as possible. By mid-1940, it was obvious that the migration maps and forms were simply a ploy to induce families to declare all their assets and economic interests. Nonetheless, to drag heels remained a risky approach; however, experts assure me that it offered the best chance of evading the teeth of the system. And so the Neumanns played for time.
At the same time Hans was being called up to Lípa, there was a further letter from the Council in Slaný requesting that the Council in Prague do something about this Otto Neumann of Libčice who is not performing his duties and is exasperating everyone.
They requested that the authorities in Prague deal with him directly to ensure compliance. Otto was too disciplined a man to have taken the stance for any reason other than as part of a broader effort to distract and resist the real issue, the Council’s instruction that his son report to Lípa.
Hans’s first cousin Ota, who in 1936 had written to his family in America expressing his concern about rising anti-Semitism, was a single young man of twenty-nine, also without useful employment or dependents. He lived in Třebíč and, like many other Jews, had been fired from his job months before. His brother, Eric, on the other hand, could prove that he was needed at the Montana factory in Prague. No such reason for delay could be found for Ota. He was duly summoned for labor at Lípa on December 14, 1940.
One of the letters mentions that my grandfather Otto arranged to have food parcels sent to his nephew in Lípa. Ota’s parents had named him after his uncle, and Otto had always felt a close bond with the young, thoughtful Ota. In February 1941, my grandfather neatly listed in his notebook the items that he had sent to Ota: salami, cinnamon biscuits, and oranges. It is unclear if Ota ever received them.
Otto’s 1940 letters to his brothers Victor and Richard in America catalog the tightening restrictions in the Protectorate. But they are also filled with assurances that the family was well and healthy despite the difficulties that they faced.
Otto had written in October 1940 to thank the American family for their letters and good wishes and to summarize the general situation: Erich was still working in Montana. On Ella’s side, the Pollak and Haas families were managing fine. All were separated and unable to travel, which made life difficult. Luckily, Zdenka could move around freely, visit the elderly relatives, and relay messages, money, and supplies to those in the family who needed it. All the employees at the factory were taking the changes in stride and showing the Neumanns nothing but kindness, except the eldest worker, who refused to greet Otto on account of the new laws.
Otto expressed his frustration at the lack of opportunities to learn anything. But his letter retains an upbeat tone. He asked that his brothers not worry too much about the family: the men were working, the women helping and the children still playing Ella, he said, was a veritable fireball taking impeccable care of the stomachs and the hearts and minds of all in Libčice.
From the papers that have emerged from the archives, it is clear that by 1940, nineteen-year-old Hans was becoming more responsible, more organized. With the guidance of his brother and his father, he was tentatively navigating the system. He signed up and took a course to retrain as a mechanic. He managed to remain in Libčice despite being included in four separate call-up lists for Lípa. He assembled the necessary paperwork to secure a job at a factory called František Čermák, which was involved in the war effort and was conveniently around the corner from the Montana factory where Lotar and Otto spent their days.
And yet he still clung to his desire to be a poet. In December 1940, as his cousin Ota began his forced labor at Lípa, Hans self-published a pamphlet containing six of his poems. There was a copy of this booklet in Lotar’s box. Hans had either lost his copy or had decided it was unimportant; there was no poetry book among his files.
Ota was interned in Lípa for six months, until June 13, 1941, when he was allowed home to Třebíč for a short break. During that interlude, on a hot summer afternoon, he decided to make the most of the sunshine and freedom by taking his ten-year-old cousin Adolf for a bicycle ride and a swim. That day, July 8, 1941, a Czech gendarme named Pelikán followed Ota and Adolf as they rambled. He later reported to his superiors that he had seen Ota, a Jew, cycling carelessly and bathing in a part of the river that was forbidden to Jews.
Nine days later, Ota was taken from his home and interrogated at the Gestapo police station in Brno, the Moravian capital. Every detail of this encounter is available today in the local archives. Thorough witness statements were written up and indeed later formed the basis of the prosecution case against Pelikán when he was tried for treason after the war in 1946.
Ota was a popular figure in Třebíč. He was a kind, polite, and rather shy young man. His long weeks at Lípa had not changed him. He had always been careful and conscientious. During the interrogations, Ota protested his innocence. He stated that upon his return to Třebíč, he had explicitly inquired of the district office as to where he, as a Jew, might bathe in light of the new rules. They had specifically advised him to bathe outside the town’s boundary. He had followed these instructions, he believed, to the letter. He had even checked a map. Ota argued that the authorities themselves had provided incorrect information.
Ota was initially released, but this was to be a short-lived liberty. He was re-arrested by the Gestapo a week later and taken for interrogation. His was a minor offense for which most people were not even reported. However, the law encouraged and compelled people to notify the authorities of all offenses committed by Jews, no matter how trivial. Ota was, therefore, at the mercy of the Czech gendarme, who, eager to advance himself, had filled out the forms detailing the offense of swimming in an area not designated for Jews.
Ota was now helpless within the system, trapped in the Gestapo machinery. After his interrogation, he was not allowed to return home. In his file, the Gestapo officials called this three-month incarceration “Protective Custody.” On November 21, 1941, Ota was deported directly to the camp at Auschwitz. The camp then had only one functioning section, as further ones, including Birkenau, where the mass gassings using Zyklon B took place, were just being built. On arrival, Ota was assigned the number 23155 and placed in Block 11 with all those who had been accused of crimes.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau archives hold the only other remaining picture of cousin Ota.
The mortality rate in Block 11 was very high. It was the penal unit, and prisoners were horrifically tortured. Even among the litany of atrocities that took place in Auschwitz, Block 11 stood apart. Holocaust historians have written numerous accounts of the conditions. While the Neumanns were aware that Ota had been sent from the prison in Brno to Auschwitz, I do not think they knew that he was in that particular block. I do not know precisely to which horrors my cousin Ota was subjected.
All I know is this.
On December 8, 1941, Ota’s number, 23155, was entered in immaculate copperplate in the register of the Auschwitz morgue. They had killed quiet cousin Ota, a young and fit man. They had murdered him in a mere seventeen days.
Among my letters of Otto and Ella is a very short one, just two lines written in uneven lettering. Signed by Ota’s parents, Rudolf and Jenny, it reads: With indescribable heartache we have to inform you of the horrendously upsetting news that we received by telegraph yesterday. Our son Ota has died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
A few days before the family received the news that Ota had died, his brother, Erich, was forced to abandon his job at Montana and was placed on the first transport to the camp of Terezín.
* * *
As I compile the time line of my father’s life during the war and juxtapose it with the events unfolding around him, I find it hard to reconcile the deepening shadows with his pranks and poetry. Somehow this first suggested a man to a degree insensitive to the world in which he found himself, inconsistent with the measured and judicious man I knew as a child.
I reread his teenage poems. Amid the lovelorn lines, I encounter some that had escaped me on first reading, ominous and foreboding:
When Time Stopped Page 9