“We need good chemists. I wish you could come and help me, Handa. Life would be easier then!” he joked.
But Hans did not laugh. Absorbed by the candle’s flame, he simply murmured an old Czech saying:“Pod svícnem bývá největší tma.” The darkest shadow lies beneath the candle.
Míla did not understand, but Zdeněk, who knew Hans so well, grasped the meaning instantly. “Not in this case it isn’t! It is an insane idea, Hans!”
“That’s where you are wrong,” Hans replied evenly.
The Gestapo were looking for Hans Neumann in and around Prague. They would never think of looking in the German capital; no one on the run chose to go there to hide. The searchlight scorched Prague, and they would undoubtedly find him if he stayed there. If he traveled to the center of it all, to Berlin, to the heart of the Reich, just beneath the candle, where the darkness was greatest, the Gestapo might never find him.
There, he would hide in plain sight. He would give himself a new name—Jan Šebesta, like the fellow who got out of town in an old nursery rhyme from their childhood: “Jede, jede Šebesta, jede, jede do města…” Go, go Šebesta… He would become someone else entirely, so that in reality, he would not be hiding at all. He would go to Berlin. He would not have to remain invisible any longer.
“You have gone green, Zdeněk, don’t fret. It was all your idea, and it is a good one. It really is the ideal place. I will come and work with you at the factory in Berlin.”
Míla initially thought that Hans was joking. Zdenka, for whom daring was second nature, agreed that it was a perfect plan. Lotar fretted about every detail and was anguished at the thought of allowing his younger brother to travel on his own to Berlin. However, the simple fact remained that it was only a matter of time until the Gestapo came looking for Hans at Montana. Eventually, even Lotar reluctantly accepted that there was no alternative. They all agreed to the plan. No physical characteristic prevented Hans from living among the Germans. Otto, never a follower of religious dogma, had refused to have the boys circumcised; his fastidious obstinacy, as Ella always referred to it, had in this instance proved an unlikely blessing.
Together with Míla and Zdenka, Hans and Lotar went to work on constructing a cover for Hans. They needed to make another identity card, as the one in the name of Jan Rubeš was about to expire. Lotar thought it would be best to use an entirely different name anyway, in order not to expose his friend Ivan to further risk. The name of Jan Šebesta seemed unremarkable and gentile enough. In the weeks they had to prepare, Zdenka could not source another identity card, not at any price. Míla volunteered her own card. It had been issued by the Protectorate in 1940, so the text appeared in both Czech and German. As she was a gentile, it lacked the stamp with the J for Jew. She managed for weeks without it and then reported it lost. The report from 1943 can be seen today in the police archives in Prague.
Lotar and Hans armed themselves with magnifying glasses and solvents and carefully erased Míla’s name without damaging the paper fibers. Hans’s handwriting had always been illegible, so Zdenka, the better calligrapher, carefully penned in the name Jan Šebesta and his fictional details. They listed his place of birth as Stará Boleslav, a small town northeast of Prague, known as Alt Bunzlau in German. His birth date, which he would have to remember easily, became March 11, 1921, the year of Hans’s own birth and two days after he should have disappeared in the transport to Terezín. Perhaps March 11 was the precise day when Zdeněk and Hans had, in the dark confines of the cubicle, first devised Jan. Maybe the date was just chosen because it was the day after Lotar’s birthday. This remains a small mystery that I will probably never solve. The other particulars—the height, face shape, and hair and eye color—were all Hans’s own: 182 cm, oval, chestnut, green. Finally, Míla’s photograph was removed, burned, replaced with a head shot of Hans, and Jan Šebesta’s identity was complete.
Forgery of the second key piece of identification needed for travel, a passport, was an altogether tougher proposition and beyond their resources. A passport was needed for the journey Hans was to make, as his card was from the Protectorate, so he would have to use Zdeněk’s. It was settled.
On his return to Berlin, Zdeněk asked his boss for a special permit to visit his “ill” mother in Prague in early May.
Hans remained in his hiding place, terrified that he would be found before he could enact his plan and only marginally less afraid of the plan itself. Eager and anxious, he endured a month of waiting for Zdeněk’s return so that he could escape and leave his identity as Hans behind. As the hours crawled by, he continued to be careful and silent in his dark and damp cell.
One day, when I was still a schoolgirl in Caracas and my father sat transfixed by mechanisms in the long, narrow room, I worked up the courage to interrupt him. I asked him when it was that he had first looked inside a watch. He swung the light aside, turned to me, and raised his magnifying visor so that I could see his eyes. They were mazes of moss and still gently round despite the wrinkles. He called me toward him and put his arm around my back protectively as he spoke.
He explained to me that he had become enthralled by watch mechanisms in Prague when he was a young man. He said that it was during a period when he had so much time on his hands that he felt that time had stopped.
How could time have stopped?
“Because,” he said, “and you will understand this when you are older, sometimes you just feel that everything around you has come to an end. You feel that you are completely alone, that time is frozen, and that you are invisible. At first, you might feel exhilarated by the sense of freedom, but then you’ll be frightened that you are lost and you will never be able to go back.”
He explained that when he first felt this, he had been isolated and afraid and had pried open his watch case to verify that time was indeed passing. The rhythm of the watch might have been imagined. Sound was not enough, he needed to see and touch it. It was the first time that he had dismantled a mechanism. The turning wheels, ticking each second away, had reassured him.
It was then that he had comprehended the importance of time.
I realize now that this must have happened while he was hiding in that dark and narrow chamber at the factory. His days alone, caged in the cramped stillness, were a void of timelessness. The ticking on his wrist would have grown louder in the absolute silence of his confinement. This would not have been sufficient. In those endless hours, he momentarily feared that time had ceased.
My father took apart his watch because he needed to ascertain that the noise was not only inside his head, that it was not just his thumping heart; that there was order somewhere, and that time was real and going by. To examine the movement, he used the magnifying glasses that they had brought to alter his papers. He found comfort in the tiny universe of the mechanism, complex and yet perfectly orchestrated. He willed his hands to be steady, his fingers to be precise. He played with the crown and springs of the windup and studied the wheels and pivots as they moved. When everything around him seemed frozen and he was lost and invisible, my father oriented himself by learning how those minute spinning wheels worked with such perfect precision that they managed to keep time.
CHAPTER 11 Zdeněk’s Friends, Hans and Jan
Zdeněk Tůma, c. 1942
Zdeněk Tůma risked his life for my father. He returned to Prague in the first days of May 1943 and let Hans have his passport so he could travel to Berlin. It was impossible to predict which document a border guard might ask for on such journeys. Identity cards, passport, work or travel permit. The demands seemed to shift, perhaps to throw off forgers, and was as much dependent on the rules as it was on the whim of any particular official.
Hans had his false identity card, but the SS, the gendarmes, or the German police might just as easily want to see a passport. They might well demand to see both. Hans’s new card could not bear Zdeněk’s name, as he hoped to find a job with him at the same paint factory in Berlin. There was no alternative. He was
to travel with two sets of papers in different names, and he had to take the risk of both being seen together.
Czechs making the journey to Berlin during the war needed an additional travel permit. In Hans’s case, it must have been forged, but the document was not among his papers, so I do not know whether it carried Zdeněk’s name or that of Hans’s new identity. Either would have posed yet another risk.
A cursory review of the physical features listed in Zdeněk’s passport, let alone an inspection of the photograph, would have awoken even the sleepiest guard to the fraud. Zdeněk and Hans looked nothing like each other. The barber had been called in once more, this time to darken Hans’s hair slightly to match Zdeněk’s, but this had not been enough. Zdeněk was much shorter than Hans, with wiry hair swept up and back from a high forehead. His eyes were a light blue, sharp and narrow, while Hans’s were a deep green, gentle and wide.
The risks for Hans would be appalling and immediate, but the danger faced by Zdeněk was no less so. Even giving a cigarette to a Jew was forbidden, so lending a passport to assist a Jew in evading the Gestapo would likely result in imprisonment or death. Zdeněk would have to wait for days, wondering whether his passport would be returned safely or whether he would be asked to pay the greatest price for his dearest friend.
And yet my father had mentioned Zdeněk only once to me, in passing, at breakfast on the morning of his class reunion in Prague in 1990. Zdeněk was otherwise consigned to that silent space where my father kept his memories. In fact, I realize now that he made only two faltering attempts to tell me about his war at all. His bids happened within a few weeks of each other and raised more questions than they answered.
In the summer of 1992, I was living in Boston, having just finished my college degree. One evening I walked into my apartment and pressed the flickering button on my answering machine. The soft voice of Miguel, my older half brother on my father’s side, filled the room, urging me to return his call without delay.
Twenty-three years my senior, Miguel had actually been named Michal when he was born in Prague in 1947. His mother was my father’s first wife, Míla. The age disparity between us meant that we had grown closer as I approached adulthood. Miguel was earnest and kind but had always had a difficult relationship with our father.
Their increasingly sporadic conversations tended to end with Miguel losing his temper. They had resorted instead to writing each other letters to avoid the inevitable clash. At the time, Miguel craved approval and a verbalized kind of love, which our father was incapable of providing. Our father in return demanded perfection, precision, and a strength that Miguel lacked. As much as it aggrieved them, they simply could not understand each other. Their experiences, expectations, and languages were so wildly different that now, looking back, having hoped for anything else seems hopelessly naive.
Miguel’s message was followed by one from my father’s assistant in Caracas, which explained Miguel’s call. She apologized for having to tell me in this way but informed me that Lotar, my uncle and godfather, had died the previous day. She told me that my father was on a business trip in Europe and was headed directly to Lotar’s home in Switzerland for the funeral. She added that she was sure he would call me as soon as he had a moment.
Lotar was seventy-six and had been suffering with Parkinson’s disease for years. I was profoundly saddened but not surprised that my father’s beloved and tender older brother had died. We had lived on different continents for most of my life, but he had always been an affectionate, softly spoken presence, with a benevolence that was somehow enhanced by his great height.
I called Miguel immediately, and he explained that he had wanted to reach me personally to tell me about Lotar. He had assumed, correctly, that our father would not telephone with the news. We had a long chat that day. We reminisced about our uncle and cheered each other up by exchanging memories. Miguel regaled me with funny stories about the holiday he was having with his wife in Aruba. I told him that I was hoping to start a job in September at a publishing house in Italy. We had not spoken in a while, and it felt like an easy if overdue catch-up. We joked about how remarkably balanced we had both turned out considering our father’s inability, for all his brilliance, to deal with anything emotive.
My father had always been close to Lotar. Their personalities contrasted sharply, but the fondness between them was obvious. Throughout the war and afterward, they always depended on each other. They created a business and rebuilt their lives together. Hans was deeply upset by his older brother’s death, but Miguel and I knew that he was incapable of expressing emotions of sorrow or anger. He could be affectionate and loving, though sometimes a little mutedly. It was as if there were a concrete wall around his feelings, and he feared that even a trickle of emotion would be the prelude to the dam bursting.
Two days after my chat with my brother, I was awakened before dawn by the telephone. It was Miguel’s wife, Florinda. She was distraught. Miguel’s heart had stopped and he had died during the night. He was forty-four. On the day when our father was attending his own brother’s funeral, I had to call him in Switzerland to tell him that he must return to Caracas at once, because his only son was dead.
Still stunned, I arrived in Caracas and spent that afternoon and evening with my brother’s widow at the funeral home. Early the next morning, I crossed the awakening city to collect my father from the airport by the coast. Together we drove to Miguel’s funeral through a torrential rainstorm that bowed the strongest palms and roiled the mangoes, ceibas, and oaks. At the graveside, we leaned into each other under our umbrella and watched the handfuls of dirt being tossed down onto the glistening wood casket. I scarcely dared look at my father, and when I did glance up, I could see only his tearless profile deformed by grief. I clasped his hand and tried to steady it as it shook with the same force that had swayed the fence at Bubny. I have never witnessed a person in such torment. As we headed back home in the car, I told him I would pack my things in Boston, cancel my plans, and come back home to be with him. There was nothing more I could say.
After a fitful night, I found my father standing at the foot of my bed.
“You are always asking questions, so here you have some answers.”
I sat up startled but still half-asleep. He handed me a clutch of white pages and sat down on the edge of my bed. It was a typed translation of a letter addressed to My dear ones. It was signed by Lotar.
Bewildered, I read through it. There were references to Hans, Otto, and Ella, but the pages seemed filled with the names of countless other people and places, none of which I had heard before. I tried hopelessly to make sense of it. All I could discern was that most of the people mentioned had not survived the war. My father, ashen, looked at me expectantly.
“It’s a letter that I brought back from Lotar’s house. He wrote it after the war. Do you understand now?” he said almost defiantly. “Do you understand why I cannot talk about it?”
Before I had a chance to answer, as suddenly as he had appeared, he swept the pages from my hand and left the room. I scrambled into the first pair of jeans and T-shirt I could find and went out to look for him. I walked from room to room, calling out, past the huge jagged paintings in the hallway, onto the checkered terrace edged with sculpted nudes and abstracts in bronze and limestone. The garden door was still locked, so he had not gone farther. I headed to the kitchen to ask if they had seen him there and was told that he had taken his car and left for the office. It was seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.
My father never showed me that letter again. I looked for it that day, but he had not left it on his desk in the library or on the counter in his study. I wanted to ask questions about it, but it was clear to me that day that showing it had not been an opening. It was an attempt to close a door on my questions.
I lived in Caracas for the following months so that I could be with him. I worked as best I could but spent most of my free time at home with my father. Even when he was not at the office, he buri
ed himself in work. He was always busy with business issues or new projects or research for something he was writing. When he was not writing or on the phone, or being visited or interviewed, he was alone with his watches in the long, narrow room.
Although we lived together in the house, we each faced our sadness in quiet solitude. Occasionally, we would stir ourselves to respond to the invitations that arrived from well-wishers. I would accompany him to the opera or a concert or drinks party. The latter were a little embarrassing because, on my father’s insistence, we always arrived perfectly on time. Venezuelans always expect guests to show up about an hour after they are invited. It is an unspoken but unbreakable social rule. Despite his fifty years in Caracas, my father still refused to adapt to the more relaxed Latin American timings. He was relentlessly punctual. So we would arrive at our host’s house as the clock turned seven and would bide our time in an empty living room. My father and I would sit on our own with matching highballs, listening to the piercing songs of cicadas and frogs until our flustered hosts eventually appeared. My initial embarrassment gradually faded. I grew to enjoy these moments of quiet rebellion and complicity with my father, as we marked time together, alone in other people’s houses.
The evenings when we stayed at home and he did not have guests for dinner, we resorted to our usual habits while spending time with each other, solving word or number puzzles or discussing books, art, or the news. We never really spoke about personal matters. He seldom asked about my life outside our shared routine, and as a result, I never really asked about his. Perhaps this was his objective.
My father’s second effort to draw back the curtain on his past came a few months later. He had asked about my plans. I explained that a creative writing course that I had taken at university had led me to think that I wanted to be a writer. He reacted with his characteristically cool scrutiny, carefully testing my thinking rather than expressing a clear view. Then he did something different. Without a word, he disappeared into his office and returned with a single sheet of paper. For a moment, I thought it might be Lotar’s letter, but when he handed it to me, I saw that it was a typed page in Spanish, his fourth language.
When Time Stopped Page 17