When Time Stopped

by Ariana Neumann

  “And you didn’t focus on those moments?” I asked my mother.

  “No, I didn’t. I wanted to be in the present with him and focus on what we had. I wanted him to be happy and to bring him joy.”

  As I delved deeper into my research, it became clear to me that Zdenka was also a bringer of joy. She was a key part of the family history, a central figure in the mosaic I was putting together. I could not understand how it was that no one had ever talked about her, this fundamental piece of the puzzle. I was determined to learn more about this intrepid woman.

  Once more, I enlisted the resourceful researcher who had traced my lost Czech family, but all inquiries of the recent registers in the Czech Republic came up blank. We could trace Zdenka Neumann until 1968, at which point she had been living in central Prague. We knew that she worked as a journalist and a writer. An article she wrote in 1967 dealt with sexism and the social inequality of women, characteristically forthright for the time. We also found that Zdenka, who had trained as a lawyer before the war, had worked as a lay magistrate. Another writer, Jaroslav Putík, mentioned Zdenka as one of the people involved in the demand for reforms in 1968, during what became known as the Prague Spring. Her independence, political engagement, and courage had clearly outlived the war.

  But it seemed that perhaps her and Lotar’s love had not. We knew from the Registry Office in Prague that in December 1949, she had a daughter named Lucia with a man named Viktor Knapp. For a long time, this single fact was all we knew about her personal life. As she would have been close to a hundred years old today, I knew that I would not find Zdenka herself, but I wondered whether her daughter or maybe a grandchild could help me piece her story together. Tracing women who have changed their name upon marrying is remarkably difficult. If the marriage certificate is missing from the archives, the trail fades away. For this and myriad other societal reasons, unearthing the lost stories of women is markedly more challenging. The doughty researcher scoured archive after archive but could find no trace of Zdenka or Lucia after 1968.

  However, my cousin Madla did remember meeting Zdenka briefly in Switzerland in the late 1960s or ’70s. Zdenka had visited Lotar for a few days at their family home. Madla had it in mind that Zdenka herself had lived in Switzerland with her daughter at some point, but she recalled no more. I asked Madla about Zdenka during each conversation we had about the family in the hope that more fragments of memory would emerge. Occasionally, she called to mind a further detail, but it was never significant enough to help us trace her.

  “You have to understand that her name was not mentioned in the house, she was not someone whom my parents talked about. Any mention of her made my mother uncomfortable. The last time I heard Zdenka discussed was probably in the 1970s, and I was very young.”

  Then, one day as we sat over lunch discussing an upcoming exhibit of Madla’s paintings, my cousin recalled something new. I had told her at the start of our meal that every attempt to find Zdenka’s daughter, Lucia, had been fruitless. Madla commiserated, but the conversation naturally moved on. Then, all of a sudden, as we sipped our coffee and complained about our stress levels, some apparently unrelated note in our exchange dislodged a fragment of recollection.

  Memories, like misfiled documents, are not always where you expect to find them. My direct questions as to Zdenka’s story had produced no helpful answers. As I interviewed people about my family’s history, I learned that detailed questions often did little to trigger specific memories. People returned to distant facts in roundabout ways, along their own winding paths, which seemed more mapped by emotion than by logic.

  As we sat together that afternoon, Madla mused on the pressure of having to finish her paintings on a deadline. Then, undisturbed by my barrage of previous questions, a memory struck her. Even Madla, always eager to help me, seemed startled as she announced: “Zdenka’s daughter had a boyfriend called Jiří, and he had a gallery in Switzerland. I remember! He offered to exhibit some of my oils when I first started, a very long time ago.”

  Madla had been extremely touched by this offer, coming as it had at the start of her career. And then she remembered that Jiří ’s gallery was called 9. We had to find Jiří at Gallery 9 in Switzerland.

  And so that afternoon, having found a website for Gallery 9 in the town of Solothurn, I found myself talking on the telephone to a charming Czech/Swiss man named Jiří Havrda. Jiří is also a writer and documentary film director. Upon hearing my name and learning that I was Lotar Neumann’s niece, he announced that he knew exactly who Lotar was.

  I did not have to elaborate much beyond telling him that I was trying to learn more about Zdenka. Jiří, who had loved her daughter, seemed to know precisely who my family members were. I liked him immediately. He was forthcoming, passionate, and generous. Perhaps my call provided that sense of ease that we sometimes feel with complete strangers and, unrestrained by established patterns and expectations, lets us discuss personal feelings with abandon. Within a few minutes, Jiří was sharing stories of his adventures with the wonderful Lucia, whom he declared to be his first true love.

  Jiří described the Prague of the summer of 1968 and life with his beloved Lucia and her bold and beautiful mother, Zdenka. They had all been active politically, meeting and agitating for a freer society and contributing to the growing criticism of the repressive Communist regime. Then in late August, the Soviets and their allies invaded with overwhelming strength, and the moment of potential change was gone. Jiří, Lucia, and Zdenka had fled west and ended up in Switzerland.

  Jiří was happy to tell me his story, and yet he was reticent to tell me what he felt were other people’s stories. He stressed that he believed it was important for me to find Lucia and hear Zdenka’s stories from her. This was not going to be easy, he explained, as he regretted that he was no longer in touch with Lucia. They had spoken for the last time by telephone decades before, and he had understood that she was married and raising two boys. He vaguely remembered the name of her husband but not the spelling. Swiss telephone numbers had changed since he had jotted down her number, and we were now a digit short. To complicate matters Lucia had moved too. Jiří thought she might be somewhere near Bern, but he did not know precisely where. He was not sure what had become of Zdenka either. Nonetheless, Jiří, an unlikely knight in shining armor, promised to help me find Lucia.

  True to his word, Jiří rang my cell phone a few days later and announced that he had plowed through the phone books and telephoned everyone with a name similar to Lucia’s husband in the entire canton of Bern. Not all his calls had been well received.

  “For a nation of polite people, the Swiss can be so rude,” he said, chuckling, “but I have been victorious!”

  Jiří had found Lucia.

  When they finally spoke, he explained my quest, and she had agreed to talk to me about her mother. Buoyed by Jiří ’s enthusiasm, I emailed Lucia that evening and received a long, open, and friendly reply in return. I understood with that first exchange that Lucia had been told so much more about my own grandmother and my family than I ever had.

  Zdenka had indeed died some years ago. However, while she herself was gone, it transpired that many of her memories were intact, as she had set down, in writing, episodes of her life during the war. These memoirs were written in Zdenka’s native Czech, and over the following weeks, Lucia patiently translated them all into English for me. As email after email arrived, my inbox filled with stories and pictures of my grandparents and Lotar, Hans, and Zdenka. Zdeněk, Pišta, and other names that I had encountered during my own research reappeared in Zdenka’s account. Lucia also remembered meeting some of my family and their friends in the years after the war. Her mother had stayed in contact with them despite her departure from Czechoslovakia in 1968. Connecting with Lucia and hearing her mother’s voice, directly in her writings and channeled through her daughter, filled me with joy. And all of a sudden, thanks to the kindness of this stranger, I had a clearer vision of my family during
the war as missing pieces of the picture were revealed and slotted into place. Details that had initially seemed disjointed or inconsistent all started to make sense.

  In 1942, after they had remarried, Zdenka and Lotar lived together again in the apartment that her grandmother had reconfigured for them on the fourth floor of Trojanova 16 in Prague. It was a corner apartment in a tall, ornate building in pink stone built by her family in the nineteenth century in the New Town area of Prague. At that point, the entire property belonged to Zdenka. It was only a block from the banks of the Vltava River and similarly close to the imposing eighteenth-century Orthodox cathedral of Ss. Cyril and Methodius. The building stood, as it does today, in a quiet residential area. Filled with western light, it was large enough to allow residents a degree of seclusion. Next to the living room, Zdenka’s grandmother had set up a darkroom especially for Lotar to pursue his passion for photography. Trojanova 16 provided Lotar and Zdenka with a comfortable, and comforting, refuge during the first years following the Nazi invasion. Within its walls, they were able to exist in relative peace.

  However, the war found them eventually. In late May 1942, a few weeks after Ella had been deported, Czech commandos assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the highest-ranking Nazi in the Protectorate, who was the Reich Main Security Officer and Deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia. He bore various soubriquets, including the man with the iron heart, the hangman, and the butcher of Prague, and had been chosen by Hitler and Himmler to control the Czechs through fear. He had three public aims: to “Germanize” the Czechs, to wipe out any resistance, and to implement the “Final Solution,” settled in December 1941.

  Heydrich had shown every sign of delivering his objectives. Five days after his arrival in the autumn of the previous year, he had ordered the closing of all synagogues in the Protectorate. Two weeks later he had started the deportations, personally ordering the first “evacuation” of five thousand Czech Jews to a camp in Lody. By November 1941, he had coerced the Jewish leaders in the Council to begin the deportations to Terezín. The onset of Heydrich’s regime marked the beginning of a markedly brutal campaign against not only the Jews but anyone who refused to cooperate. Thousands of dissidents were arrested, put to death, or sent to the camps.

  The Nazis were particularly effective in their campaign to dehumanize Jews, fragment society, and crush resistance in Czechoslovakia, more so than in other occupied regions. Yet a small team of Czechoslovak army parachutists, marshaled by the resistance in exile in London, had set out to assassinate Heydrich in an operation code-named Anthropoid. Their effort to ambush his open-top car as it was driven from his home in the suburbs to his office at Prague Castle was not instantly successful due to a faulty machine gun. However, showing remarkable bravery, they managed to injure Heydrich with a hand grenade. Heydrich was taken to a hospital and eventually died from infection to his wounds on June 4, 1942.

  The viciousness of the Nazi response was staggering. They were determined to find the perpetrators, to punish anyone who had helped them, and to terrify the rest of the Czechs into complete submission. Five days after Heydrich’s death, the village of Lidice, the occupants of which had been falsely accused of harboring the parachutists, was entirely destroyed. Every man over fifteen was shot, and women and children were sent to the camps. To emphasize the finality of these actions, the buildings were razed to the ground.

  Two weeks later, a radio transmitter was found in another village, Ležáky. The entire adult population was shot, the children deported, and the village destroyed. According to official numbers, 1,331 people were executed in the Protectorate between late May and early July. At that point, General Daluege, who had assumed Heydrich’s post, issued an order stating that anyone found promulgating, or even failing to report, hostility to the Reich would face the death penalty. Helping Jews in any way was deemed worthy of similar treatment.

  Posters to this effect were plastered all over Prague. Daily announcements blared out of radios and public loudspeakers. A reward of ten million crowns was offered for information leading to the arrest of the assassins. This inducement was accompanied by stark warnings that execution awaited not only those who withheld such information but also their families.

  The Nazi reaction to the assassination decimated any effective underground resistance movement in the Protectorate. This frightful period was termed by the Czechs Heydrichiáda. The Gestapo and the SS literally tore the capital apart in search of the perpetrators and those who had helped them. It was the largest manhunt of the war, with 36,000 homes raided and more than 13,000 civilians arrested. By mid-June, the pursuit was concentrated in the New Town area of Prague, as it was suspected that the parachutists were being hidden in the neighborhood. Trojanova 16 sat at the heart of the search zone.

  The streets swarmed with troops. Search parties erupted into hundreds of homes around Lotar and Zdenka. The suffocating atmosphere left an already anxious Lotar paralyzed with fear. Ella had been deported only a few weeks before, and they had still received no news of her. While his marriage to Zdenka provided some theoretical legal protection from being transported, Lotar, just like Hans, lived in constant and legitimate fear. The Nazis were outraged by the insubordination of the Czechs, and they needed no legal excuse to shoot or imprison a Jew. Lotar was also acutely conscious that he was still using his fake identification in the name of his friend Ivan Rubeš. If his apartment was searched and he was found to be holding false papers, he would certainly be killed.

  Zdenka recalled that one night Lotar and she awoke to the din of shouts from the Gestapo in the streets. The stomping in hallways, banging of doors, and barked orders seemed closer than ever. The police had entered their building.

  Terrified, Lotar dragged Zdenka into the bathroom, where he kept a small leather case holding his glass vials of cyanide. They sat in darkness, trying to remain absolutely silent, but Zdenka could tell Lotar was crying. She comforted him quietly and murmured over and over that they should not give up. They were on the fourth floor, and the noises were rattling up from the floors below. It was impossible to tell from which floor precisely, but they sounded close.

  “I am not giving up yet. I am not biting one of these. If you want to do it, go ahead, but you are on your own,” she said defiantly.

  Zdenka managed to prise the case away from Lotar and convinced him to wait a moment more, until the soldiers were at their own door. The shouting and crashing reverberated around them, echoing through the old building as the two of them huddled alone in the lightless bathroom. Then, as suddenly as it had burst upon them, the storm moved on. The Gestapo had obtained information that the perpetrators were being hidden in the Ss. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral, just yards away, and redirected their forces accordingly.

  On June 18, seven hundred Waffen-SS troops bore down on the handful of parachutists who had been hidden in the church. Any hope of escape disappeared when the Nazis resorted to flooding the crypt where they had been driven to make their last stand. As ammunition supplies dwindled and the water rose around them, the parachutists determined never to surrender. Some shot themselves; others bit into their cyanide vials. The tragedy drew to a close and, once more saved by Zdenka’s fortitude, Lotar carefully stowed his own poison.

  As daily life became ever more difficult, Lotar, Hans, and Otto continued trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. And yet the boys still took some calculated risks. Despite Otto’s ire toward him, and many promises to the contrary, Hans continued to be late for curfews and spend time behaving foolishly with Míla and Zdeněk. Lotar was much more cautious than Hans, but he too was inclined to push his luck. He accepted an invitation from a theatrical friend, Erik Kolár, to help teach in a clandestine school. He revealed these visits only to Zdenka, not wishing to worry his father. The school was on the second floor of a building on Spálená Street, a few minutes’ walk from where they lived.

  Erik and Lotar taught theater and poetry to a handful of Jewish children who had yet to be
deported. They worked hard to provide their charges with a semblance of normal life and moments of escape from the increasingly grim reality outside the walls of their little makeshift classroom. They even staged a performance of Karel Jaromír Erben’s fairy tale The Three Golden Hairs of the Wise Old Man, complete with costumes, an act of quiet rebellion that must have provided a momentary distraction.

  August finally brought some better news. Ella managed to get a letter out of Terezín. This letter survived. The tone is cheerful and brimming with details. She had managed to gain weight and was adapting well to her new life. She was trying to secure a job that would protect her from being transported “East” to camps that were known, at the very least, to be far worse than Terezín. She asked for the family to send twenty bekannte, a code word for German marks, as well as more clothing, and whatever food they could muster. She offered reassurance that all was fine for her and that, above all, they must not worry. However, the impression of a mother offering her family comfort is underpinned by the clearest instruction: Otto, Lotar, and Hans must do everything in their power to avoid being sent to Terezín.

  Ella’s letter gave a much needed lift to the family’s mood, which had been brought close to hopelessness by the terror that followed the death of Heydrich. Together they formulated a plan to communicate secretly with Ella. It was difficult to find the right people, but some of the Czech gendarmes in the camp were open to persuasion or bribes in order to help the inmates, or at least turn a blind eye to what was happening behind the scenes.

  The family started to use all the resources at their disposal to send whatever they could to Terezín to supplement Ella’s food, keep her warm, and provide her with the currency needed to obtain favors and barter. The logistics took time to establish; every link in the chain had to be infallible. Contacts had to have the necessary access to the camp and be willing to take the risk. It took weeks for the family to arrange things.