It told the story of a train journey to Berlin.
He said he had not finished it. I read rapidly down the page and noticed immediately a reference to his friend Zdeněk, the man he had met up with on our trip to Prague. My father had written many articles on social issues, government, and economics for Venezuelan newspapers but never anything like this, never anything that was remotely personal.
He explained that he was thinking of writing his own story of the war and rather solemnly asked me to help him. I asked if I could keep the document to edit it, but, taking the page back, he said that he would give me the whole manuscript once he had finished it. At that point, all I really knew about his experience of the war came from my glimpses of Lotar’s letter and that typed page. A train journey to Berlin, the loss of many lives in his family, and, above all, a sense of abject despair.
He showed me only that first page and never again raised the subject of the others. Whenever I asked him about this memoir, he always replied that he was working on it and would let me read it one day. Time passed, and the pages never appeared. He had a first stroke some years later that paralyzed his legs and an arm, and I assumed he had not written any more.
A decade later, after his death, I found a clipped bundle of papers at the bottom of the box he left for me. It was a retrospective diary of his escape to Berlin, written in 1991 and 1992. The first page was the one that he had shown me. This was the story he had asked me to help him write.
These reminiscences must have been wrested from wherever they had been buried by the man I thought I knew so well. They represented my father’s first and last articulation to me of what had happened to him. They gave a voice to the “unfortunate boy” whose carefree youthfulness had been sacrificed so that this new and tirelessly disciplined man, Jan Šebesta, might survive.
I now know that my father took the night train to Berlin on May 3, 1943, the “Elite 147” train that departed Hybernské Station in Prague at 1:44 a.m. and arrived in Berlin nearly eight hours later, at 9:23 a.m. In the spring of 2018, I traveled alone along the same route. It takes four and a half hours today, and there is no longer a night train. Even if there had been, I would not have been brave enough to take it. I bought a ticket for the noon train on a May morning.
The tracks trace the same path out of Prague as they did in 1943. To my surprise, as the train finally left the suburbs behind and curled along the wooded banks of the Vltava River to my right, I passed through the town of Libčice. From the large carriage windows, I could clearly see the roof, balcony, and casements of my grandparents’ country house. The train then headed north, weaving along the course of the river, and came within a kilometer of Terezín itself before crossing the former Czech border and pushing on to Dresden. Then, finally, it reached Berlin. Just as my father had done, I followed my father’s route, seventy-five years after his journey, almost to the day, clutching copies of the papers that he had left me.
As I made that pilgrimage, I hoped that the night on which my father traveled was moonless and that, in his fear, he did not notice his parents’ house, unlit, as the train rolled onward. That he did not know how very close he was to them in the blackness, just south of Terezín. I hoped that he felt me cradling him, holding his hand, across the worlds of time and experience that then and now lay between us.
This is what my father wrote about that journey:
The train did not illuminate the tracks. The carriages were dark. The dim light of the aisles only allowed you to see the coming shadows, the delineations of figures moving, the shells of bodies slumped. I could hear the sound of the train incessantly rumbling and churning. There were five others in my compartment, their faces hidden, like mine. The darkness is why I chose this train, this hour. It must have been close to dawn, four hours since we had left Prague. Passengers sitting and swaying with the movement of the train, our faces shrouded by our coats that hung from bronze hooks. The others might have slept, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid.
We were close to the German border now. I checked my documents again: the ticket, identity card, and the passport. I had destroyed my old false identity card under the name Jan Rubeš. I kept the picture but ripped it up in the smallest shreds and burned every one. I still could not believe I was here, outside that room at Montana, on this train. I touched the passport in my left pocket, the one with the permit to cross the border that Zdenka sourced. In my other, I had the identity card that Míla gave me. We had used a chemical to carefully erase the names and mixed the inks to match the color of the rest of the text. It now read “Jan Šebesta, Chemist, born in Alt Bunzlau on March 11, 1921.” Only the passport had the name Zdeněk Tůma.
I could still see Míla, her intensely gray eyes that looked at me without tears. I felt her brush her lips against my chin as she hugged me awkwardly and turned away to look at me no more. I knew she had not wanted me to see her anguish.
I sat in a first-class carriage. In front of me a sign read “Official Personnel Only.” There was nothing official about me, but people see what they expect, and seated here I hoped they would think me trustworthy. I tried to look important, unfazed, as I boarded the train.
I prayed the identity check would be quick in this compartment—a swift formality. I owed Míla the passport also. She was the one who finally convinced Zdeněk. Things were awful enough, no one wanted to take unnecessary risks, so to have this passport was a miracle. On arrival, I was to post the passport back to Prague so that Zdeněk could use it to travel back to Berlin in three days. Helping me meant that they were both risking their lives. Zdeněk had not wanted to let me down but he was terrified for his sake and mine. He was scared that I couldn’t pull it off. My main worry was the photo in Zdeněk’s passport.
Zdeněk’s face was much thinner and more angular than mine. His eyes, like clever piercing darts, were unlike my large green ones. “You have the dreamy eyes of an artist,” my mother had always said.
The train stopped.
I heard voices that I assumed to be the conductor and the border police. I took the thin glass vial covered in brown rubber from my pocket and placed it at the back of my mouth. I held it between the lower back left molars and the side of my mouth. I was told it would take only a few seconds, a minute at most. Cyanide poisons your nerves so the brain dies first, then the heart. Would death be easy, or would I feel unspeakable pain? “Passports,” a German voice said. They were not asking for other papers, just passports. Not the papers with the other name. I took a breath. In the darkened carriage, the handheld beam lit up each passport held by every extended hand. Three men had the light flash in their faces, two remained obscured under their hanging coats. I pretended to be asleep. The guard shook me. I kept my face hidden beneath the coat, my eyes half-closed. My hand moved the coat a few centimeters to show deference and offered him the passport. He looked at it for a few seconds. I was certain that he must be able to see my heart pounding in my chest.
“Danke schoen, mein herr,” he muttered as he closed it and handed it back. I waited a few minutes to make sure they were gone. The train heaved forward and I was able to breathe again. I coughed and spat the ampoule into my hand. I placed it carefully back in my pocket. I could need it again.
I slept until we pulled into the station in Berlin. It was midmorning. I placed the passport in an envelope which I addressed to Zdeněk at the Central Post Office in Prague and sent it through the Reichpost. If I was caught now there would be no more danger to Zdeněk. The warming sunlight shone in between the buildings as I stepped outside. Suddenly my briefcase felt very light. It was a beautiful spring day in Berlin in May 1943, the fourth year of the Second World War.
Berlin. There I was, now Jan Šebesta, a Czech chemist looking for a job and a room to rent.
Jan Šebesta never would have existed without his friend Zdeněk. As the name Zdeněk Tůma is not uncommon, it was difficult for me to find his family. There are thousands of Tůmas in the Czech phone books. On Facebook alone, there ar
e more than ninety Zdeněk Tůmas. When I started my research, I was not even sure of what he looked like. There were a few photographs in the box that I felt might be of him, but they are old and tiny, and the faces are hard to make out clearly. Luckily, one had his first name scribbled in pencil on the back and looked nothing like my father’s first cousin also called Zdeněk. I knew from the Czech archives that my father’s friend had moved to the region of Opava after the war. Eventually, I found online a hip young woman with blue hair who worked for an NGO in Indonesia, who had the traditional Czech feminine version of Tůma’s last name and hailed from Opava. In Barbora Tůmova’s picture on LinkedIn, her eyes and smile bore a remarkable resemblance to Zdeněk’s.
I emailed her. She wrote that she was traveling in Asia and confirmed that her grandfather was named Zdeněk and had indeed been friends with a man in Venezuela called Hans Neumann. By chance, she was stopping by London on her way to Prague. We met at a coffee shop and chatted for hours. Her uncle, also named Zdeněk, had shared stories about her grandfather and Hans. He too had written down his memories and saved pictures spanning over fifty years of friendship.
I discovered that Zdeněk had made the journey to visit my father in Venezuela three times in the 1960s. My father, who by then had a pilot’s license, had flown Zdeněk to the archipelago of Los Roques and let him take the controls. They had also ventured together out to a Yanomami Indian reserve in the Amazon jungle and slept in hammocks in the communal huts known as shabanos. The Bohemian pranksters had reunited briefly in a Latin America that must have seemed a lifetime away from the European past that they shared.
Once again, I realized that my father had revealed very little of this relationship to anyone. My mother, who came into my father’s life after these trips, was never told about Zdeněk. She had never met him or even heard of him. When my father had mentioned him to me in Prague, he had disclosed only the briefest details and no sense of the depth of their friendship. It saddened me that he could not tell me about it, that he had kept this lifelong kinship secret for all those years. He could have introduced me to Zdeněk when we visited Prague. I felt that this was a part of his past he could have shared because it was also his present, and joyful. But he could not. He was unable to have the past and the present connect in any way.
Zdeněk’s son had accompanied him to that reunion in 1990. He recalled that when they dropped my father off at the hotel, the two men had locked each other in a long embrace. That moment of affection had been their last goodbye. Zdeněk had told my father that night that he had terminal cancer. He died in July 1991, the year before Lotar and Miguel.
Zdeněk’s death must have generated the tectonic emotional pressure that was needed for my father to suddenly want to record his past, even if it was a matter of just a few private pages. I understand now that the deaths of Lotar and Miguel, and his return to Prague with me, all played their part, but they were not the catalyst. My father had started to write his Berlin memoir after losing Zdeněk.
On a hunch, after meeting Zdeněk’s granddaughter, I called my father’s assistant in Venezuela, now long retired, and asked her if the name Zdeněk Tůma rang a bell. She replied immediately, “Mr. Tůma, of course! Your father’s school friend in Czechoslovakia. Your father was so fond of him and always made sure we sent him a Christmas card.”
She told me that my father also sent regular parcels from Caracas filled with T-shirts bearing the logo of one of his companies, games, baseball caps, hammocks, roller skates, and chewing gum, gifts of one kind or another.
She said, “Oh, I almost forgot, he often sent presents that were practical jokes. Once it was a chewing gum pack that would snap if you pulled it and some candy that would color your mouth.”
“Were there other friends he kept in touch with in Czechoslovakia?” I asked her tentatively.
“Oh, no. It was just Mr. Tůma. He was the only one.”
CHAPTER 12 Choices
Almost every time I told this story to researchers or curators in London, Prague, or Berlin, the initial reaction was disbelief. When I first opened my father’s box of papers, I was unsure of what precisely I would find. I attempted to authenticate every detail it contained. I pored over maps, combed archives, and checked names and addresses against old phone and address books. Once I knew the narrative was accurate, producing the dozens of documents and written accounts became a familiar part of the story that I told. I explained the facts again and would describe in detail how I had come to learn them. Each new puzzled witness needed to be persuaded, as I had been.
Hans Neumann from Prague had absconded rather than submitting to transportation. He had hidden and assumed a false identity. This was not unusual; thousands of those persecuted had survived by doing the same. It was the rest of the story that, at first, raised the bemused smiles. As his daughter, I was just another unreliable witness telling a story as I wanted to hear it. Their expressions changed as I produced Jan Šebesta’s identity documents, permits, and letters from Berlin. As they absorbed the dozens of papers, their friendly skepticism became genuine interest and then astonishment.
Perhaps what is so hard to believe is that my father chose to hide in Berlin. He was not sent there as a forced laborer; he chose to go and find work there at a key supplier of the German military. Most of the others who hid had found refuge where they could, in basements, outhouses, convents, anywhere they deemed safe. If they traveled, it was driven by desperation and often toward less populated areas, toward the farthest edge of the Reich with the hope of reaching beyond it. My father struck out in the opposite direction entirely, determined to go to the center of it all. It was a completely illogical choice for either the happy-go-lucky prankster of his youth or the robustly disciplined man he was becoming. It must have militated against every instinct of self-preservation. It was not just unsafe and unusual; even seventy years on, it seems like absolute recklessness.
In 1943 Warnecke & Böhm was the principal manufacturer of protective polymer coatings for the German war machine. The paint technology that they were working on was critical in reducing drag, vital for effective aircraft and missile development. The company was eminent in the field. In 1939 it had been given priority status by the government because it delivered paint and varnish for U-boats and the newly developed fast bomber, the Junkers Ju 88. Their scientists provided the camouflage skin of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190. Their activities were important enough that there is a now declassified British intelligence report from 1945 that studied paints for the Luftwaffe and cites the company in Weissensee as the most successful in supplying formulas for special paint ingredients throughout the Reich.
It was exceptionally lucky for Hans that Zdeněk had been sent by the Germans to work in a paint factory and knew that they were chronically short of skilled people. It was a stroke of good fortune that, because of the family business, Hans could field some knowledge about the paint and lacquer industry. These two pieces of happenstance gave him a window of opportunity to implement his crazy plan.
My father describes his first moments after stepping off the train in Berlin on May 3, 1943, in the memoir he left me.
The city did not seem to be in the middle of a war. Well-dressed people busily went about their chores, many of them in official uniform. The only obvious sign that something was different was the number of women on the streets. Many had pins and insignia identifying them as members of the NSDAP, the Nazi Party. It was thanks to Zdeněk that I was there although it had been my idea and he, at first, had thought it mad. And yet it was he who planted the seed. He was the one who mentioned in passing that there weren’t enough trained scientists in the factory in Berlin.
I followed precisely the instructions that he gave me when he visited me in Montana. I took the overground train, the S-Bahn. Zdeněk’s scribble on the piece of paper reminded me that I had 1 stop to the first change, then 4 stops east until the next change and then 2 stops to arrive to the northeast corner of the city. From there it was a 5-m
inute walk. I left the overground station and headed north until I was in front of the imposing gray building.
I was aware that this was it. I tried to marshal my thoughts. I hesitated for a second, took a breath, and, before doubt could cloud my resolution, I walked straight in.
This was the place Zdeněk had described in whispered detail, a factory called Warnecke & Böhm. At the door I asked a young man wearing filthy glasses to direct me to the person in charge of employment. I was pointed to the personnel office. The door was ajar, I knocked and greeted a middle-aged woman behind the desk. She seemed pleasant enough and I volunteered a smile and began to talk nervously.
“Good morning. I have a chemistry degree from the technical college in Prague, experience in paints and want to offer my services to your company. Perhaps Dr. Högn can see me?”
She seemed a bit surprised and hushed me with the wave of a hand.
“You don’t need to tell me all this. I will check if Dr. Högn can see you.” She looked me up and down and told me to wait. As she walked away I noticed that her shoes were freshly polished and her graying bun was immaculately pinned to the middle of her head. Not a strand of hair was out of place. She stepped into an office down the hallway. I looked around and rubbed my drenched palms down the front of my trousers. A few minutes later she returned and asked for my name.
When Time Stopped Page 18