In my memory, this is how they remain.
CHAPTER 17 Where Time Does Not Matter So Much
Hans and Míla’s wedding, June 2, 1945. In the photo taken by Zdeněk are Lotar, Zdenka, and Zdenka’s sister Marie, among others.
My father did not wait for the official end of the war in September to become Hans Neumann once more. Eager to restart his life and deeply grateful to her, he married Míla as soon as he could. The wedding took place on June 2, 1945. Records show that they had announced their intended marriage to the Prague Registry Office only a couple of days earlier, just a few weeks after his return from Berlin. At the time, it was obligatory to wait a minimum of six weeks, but the registrar dispensed with the rules, and they were allowed to skip all three rounds of the reading of the banns of marriage.
A wedding photograph shows that Míla beamed as she held on to Hans, who wore a suit that was too big for his gaunt frame. The witnesses were his brother, Lotar, and his best friend, Zdeněk. There were few other guests, just Míla’s parents, Zdenka and her mother, and a few friends. Otto and Ella and almost everyone else in the family were still unaccounted for. A small celebratory lunch was held in Prague, although the city was still reeling and food was scarce.
Shortly afterward, Hans and Zdeněk went back to work at Montana, but it was not until March 1946 that Hans and Lotar managed to restore the family’s factory to a semblance of its previous productivity. Lotar had also taken on another job. From May 1945, he was part of the National Committee for the Liquidation of the Jewish Council of Elders in Prague. In this capacity, he took care of distributing to survivors any assets that could be recovered from the Germans. The committee was also in charge of using funds collected during the war by the Jewish Council of Elders to help repatriated survivors start again. In June 1945, together with his friends Erik Kolár and Viktor Knapp, Lotar also joined the National Fund for Recovery, a government organization set up to help reconstruct Czech institutions and provide aid to the repatriated. In January 1946, he decided to go back to university to finish his engineering degree, while Zdenka continued to work for the fund. Lotar decided to leave the fund permanently on April 1, 1946, in order to conclude his studies and focus on business at Montana.
A grateful letter from his colleagues praising him for his hard work and sense of justice remains in the files today. By all accounts, Lotar, who had always tended to melancholy, was deeply debilitated by his experiences during the war. His sorrow and a misplaced sense of guilt at having survived were obvious to those who knew him then and later in his life.
Zdenka too had been acutely marked by the war. Five years of hiding and subterfuge, the sustained efforts to help her friends and the Neumanns to survive the war, and the loss of her beloved in-laws had all taken their toll. She was exhausted by the burden of being the constant source of strength and support. Lotar in 1945 was a very different man from the one she had fallen in love with in 1936. Perhaps a love as pure as theirs was incompatible with the people they had become.
As Zdenka recalled in her writings, everything came to a head in 1947. Lotar had traveled to Switzerland on business for a week and, upon returning to Prague, collected Zdenka from the fund’s office with an enormous bouquet of gorgeous green flowers. There, Lotar encountered and chatted with his old colleagues. With his characteristic eye for detail, he noticed that his friend the lawyer Viktor Knapp’s wristwatch was missing its protective glass. Later that day, when he and Zdenka arrived home and turned on the lights in their apartment on Trojanova Street, Lotar spotted two tiny shards glinting up at him from the living room floor. As he knelt to pick them up, he realized they were unmistakably fragments of glass from a broken watch face.
Incapable of lying to him, an agonized Zdenka collapsed on the floor next to him and explained that Viktor’s watch had accidentally smashed when they had been together. She confessed that, while working alongside each other, she had fallen in love with him and he with her. She explained to a dumbstruck Lotar that she wanted to be with Viktor, who in turn had promised to leave his wife. Lotar was crushed.
Viktor was true to his word. Zdenka promptly asked for a divorce.
The anxieties and grief of previous years had almost overwhelmed Lotar. This further blow of an unexpected betrayal by his wife and his friend plunged him into the most profound gloom. He moved out of their apartment immediately. Scant information remains about the period that followed, as no one in my family spoke about Lotar and Zdenka’s relationship again. All I know is that the official records show that Lotar enlisted in the army as a reserve, went away for months for military training, and, in a state of physical and emotional dislocation, moved residence five times between September 1947 and June 1948.
The family and friends who had all relied on and embraced Zdenka were equally distraught at the news. Hans, Míla, and the few remaining cousins gathered around Lotar. Despite wrestling with traumas of their own, they tried their best to support him and help him regain strength.
Zita had just opened a small boutique designing women’s clothing. Trying to cheer up Lotar when he returned from army training, she introduced him to a pretty and sparkly-eyed nineteen-year-old named Věra, who worked as a model and also helped at the shop. Much to everyone’s astonishment, the new relationship flourished. Věra admired Lotar and affectionately hung on his every word. With her soft-spoken manner, she managed to coax the broken young man back to happiness. He was besotted by her youth, beauty, and charm. More than anything, he desperately needed her nurturing and positive presence in his life.
The photograph from Věra’s identification card after her marriage to Lotar in 1948
On June 19, 1948, Zdenka and Lotar signed divorce papers once more, only this time the separation was real. A mere three weeks later, Lotar and Věra quietly married. It was a modest gathering, but the family was both thrilled and relieved that Lotar had managed to find a supportive and beautiful woman with whom to rebuild his life.
I do not know precisely when the Neumann brothers decided to leave Czechoslovakia, but little remained to hold them there. Their family had been torn apart by the war. Lotar’s marriage to Zdenka had disintegrated. Perhaps carrying on in the country where all those they had lost had lived just proved too difficult. Every step at Montana, in Libčice, on the cobbled streets of Prague would have elicited memories. There must have been ghosts everywhere.
It was not a swift decision. Everyone who knew them in Prague could see that they were bent on rebuilding their lives there after the war. Lotar was part of the official reconstruction programs. Together with Hans, they hired employees, restarted production, and completed the process of restitution for the Montana factory. They reclaimed the ownership of the apartment and the country house. Throughout the immediate postwar years, they remained in constant touch with their uncles Richard and Victor in California. They continued, as they had during the war, to research possible countries where the Czech family could start a new life as refugees.
Perhaps it seemed that there was more hopefulness and opportunity elsewhere. The Communist putsch must also have had an impact on their decision. The Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, buoyed by anti-fascist sentiment and the fact that the Soviets had liberated Prague. Perhaps politics proved to be the Neumann brothers’ accelerator. The decision clearly had been made by the autumn of 1948, when Hans and Lotar sold the house in Libčice, complete with the contents of the safe, to the Peřina family.
So, in late 1948, Hans and Míla, with their one-year-old son, Michal, and Lotar, accompanied by a very pregnant Věra, left Czechoslovakia behind. They departed separately to reconvene in Zurich, Switzerland, by January 1949. Of all the destinations considered, Venezuela seemed to be the best choice. While many Europeans migrated to the U.S., Venezuela lacked a developed paint industry and thus presented a real opportunity to the Neumanns for a new start. It also welcomed immigrants from war-torn Europe. A letter to Hans and Lotar from Uncle Richard in January 1
949 reads:
My dear ones,
Welcome to free Switzerland. As I am writing this, you are probably already there and have completed the first, most difficult, step on your way to a new life.
I have not yet received a single piece of news from Benes, who is organizing things for you in Caracas; he must have acclimatized himself so much that he has started to act like the locals who put everything off till “mañana.” Time there does not seem to matter so much. Nonetheless, a letter from him must be on the way and I will confirm once everything is set.
In any case it does seem that Venezuela is the best option among the countries that come into consideration. However, you must be prepared for a country without culture or the weight of history and with little by the way of civilization. But one can live there; it is relatively easy to make enough for daily needs. A satisfactory living can be quickly established, and it is a good environment to set up a new Montana. The only things you’ll need are to maintain your good health, learn a bit of Spanish, and a dose of optimism…
At the end of February 1949, Věra gave birth to their first daughter, Susana, in Zurich. Hans, Míla, and Michal crossed the Atlantic by boat and were the first to arrive in Caracas. Lotar and Věra waited a few weeks, until their newborn was strong enough to travel, and then flew. To help them settle, their uncle Richard moved to Venezuela as well. Many Europeans like them arrived as refugees in Venezuela after the war.
The brothers threw themselves into their new adventure. They took Spanish lessons. With the help of a loan from Richard, they bought a house in the Chapellín neighborhood, where both families lived together initially, near other newly arrived European immigrants. They made ends meet with odd jobs and set about getting back into business. To begin with, they used the garage to mix paints and lacquers to sell. Then, when their finances allowed, they managed to hire the premises for their first company, which they named Pinturas Montana in honor of the Prague factory that their father and Richard had started in 1923. It was a team effort. The brothers operated the business and hired a handful of fellow Czechs and Europeans who had also settled in Caracas. Věra took care of everyone, and Míla designed and hand-painted the labels.
My father had spent twenty-eight years of his life in Czechoslovakia, but he always maintained that he was Venezuelan because that country welcomed him as a refugee. Nonetheless, his fifty years in Caracas did little to disguise his heavy Czech accent or his passion for Bohemian artists or his love of rohlíčky sugar cookies.
He adopted many Venezuelan traditions but never their attitude toward keeping time.
* * *
In all the Czech letters that have emerged during my research, aside from a few notes written when he was a boy at camp, only one was written by my father.
It was sent to Uncle Richard when Hans was twenty-four years old, on June 28, 1945, after Germany had surrendered.
Today I attempt to write you a few lines that I hope will reach you.
We are so happy to know that you are well and that you were spared all this. It was not as terrible for me as it was for others. I spent the worst time under a false name in Berlin, where I was employed as a varnish chemist. It was really an adventure and maybe someday I will be able to tell you all about it. Lotík will probably talk to you about Montana, but I am only writing to tell you that we really need you. It might be a bit pointless to ask you to come, as I am sure you are doing your best to visit us as soon as possible. You have been in all our minds, throughout the war, the whole time.
We have not gone back to Libčice yet, it is too difficult. Much has changed. Only Gin, the fox terrier who was a puppy when you left, is still the same.
News? I have a thousand stories. But most of them are so terribly sad that there is no point in repeating them.
As you must know by now, I am married to a girl named Míla whom I have known for years and who helped us through it all.
I now work in the paint industry. I just work and work and work. So much. All the time.
It’s the only way I have of trying to forget how many did not come back, how few of us are left behind.
Give our love to Uncle Victor and to cousins Harry and Milton.
Handa
Or you might remember me best by my nickname, “the unfortunate boy.”
This letter was not in the box that my father left me. It was kept by Uncle Richard in America and eventually given by his widow to my cousin Madla. She had mislaid it among other papers and brought it to me later, when I had finished my research and was writing this book. I sent it to the Czech expert, as I had done with every other document.
She emailed me a translation of the letter. When I read it, my hands started to tremble uncontrollably, just as my father’s had all those years ago at Bubny and then again at his son’s funeral. I had encountered much sadder things during my investigations, and yet only these words provoked such a response. I recognized the voice in that document. The father I knew had worked indefatigably, obsessively. He repeated often that this was because he loved the challenge of building things, because he had to stretch time. But this was only a fragment of the whole truth. He was doing whatever he could to bury an unwavering pain under layer upon layer of work. He was simply attempting to escape his past. Reading his words, I was sad for the person who my father had been, the shambolic poet, the prankster, the unfortunate boy whose heart had been shattered. I cried on reading the gentle voice of that grieving young man, little more than a child. I now recognized that twenty-four-year-old in my father, still just discernible among the resolute pronouncements of the hardened man I had thought I knew.
I could not write for weeks afterward. My sleep was broken with nightmares. I woke in the small hours, sometimes shouting or in silent fear that my heart had stopped. Each time my husband ushered me back to the present. The dream was always the same. I was surrounded by crumbling walls and ceilings, in a space filled with unidentifiable crowds. The precise setting changed. Sometimes it was a subway station, or some type of hall, or a vast building. Invariably, there was a man whom I had to find among the people, the debris, and the clouds of dust. I had to explain something to him, to keep a promise of obscure but overwhelming importance that would, somehow, save his life. Every time, I raced toward him, yelling desperately. But each time, as I fought my way to him, he vanished into a fog of ash and anonymous faces.
Eventually, the dreams waned and I started again to write. And then I realized that the essence of that boy from Prague, who I had at first thought lost, had actually endured.
When I had traveled to the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague in 1997 and spotted his name inscribed next to the question mark on the memorial wall, my father was living in Caracas in the house he loved, surrounded by sunlit gardens, his art collection, and his frenziedly furious dogs. He had already suffered his first stroke and it had left him mostly paralyzed. Undaunted by this, and ignoring a bleak prognosis, he had continued to work, write, and be active in his philanthropic pursuits. I phoned him that night from the hotel and told him that I had visited the memorial and found the name of his parents on the wall. He was silent as I spoke, and afraid to upset him, I did not wait for his response. I moved swiftly on to explain my surprise at finding his name and the question mark on the wall.
“What does it mean, Papi?” I asked. “If your name is on the wall, they must think you are dead.”
He paused for the briefest moment.
“What does it mean?” he said, chuckling quietly. “It means that I tricked them. That is exactly what it means.
“I tricked them. I lived.”
Epilogue
In 1939 there were thirty-four members of the Neumann Haas family living in Czechoslovakia. Three were either gentile or “mixed” and too young to be deported. Only two, Lotar and Hans, escaped the transports altogether.
Everyone else, twenty-nine of them in all, ranging in age from eight to sixty, was deported to concentration camps in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Latvia,
and Poland.
Four came back.
Erich Neumann, my father’s first cousin, whose brother, Ota, was tortured and killed in Auschwitz in 1941 for swimming in the river, was liberated in Magdeburg. He was one of the few survivors of the camps of Riga. After the war, he married again and in 1946 had a daughter named Jana. Their family initially lived in the small Czech town of Třebíč but were forced to move to Prague in the late 1950s, when the local senior school refused to educate Jana because she was Jewish.
Erich was then imprisoned by the Communists both for being Jewish and for maintaining ties with his cousins and uncles in the West. Jana now lives in Paris with her husband and daughter. I met her for the first time a few years ago, and despite having never cast eyes on each other before, we recognized each other immediately among the hordes of people on the arrivals platform of the Parisian Gare du Nord. Her father never spoke about the war, but when Jana shares what she knows of his experiences, still today, her large blue eyes fill with tears.
Three of the four Pollak children, my father’s first cousins Zdeněk, Hana, and Zita, complete the quartet of survivors. They saw internment in a number of camps, including Terezín, Kurzbach, Dachau, and Auschwitz. I have met many of their children and grandchildren. The three Pollak siblings have twenty-nine great-grandchildren between them.
Zdeněk Pollak was liberated from Dachau. In June 1945, he returned to his family home in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, before moving to Israel in 1949, where he remarried and had a son. In 1956 he went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, and filled out testimony pages on behalf of every victim in his family. Two months later, he took his own life.
Hana Polláková, who had lost her husband in the camps, married a survivor of Buchenwald in 1945. They had two children. She lived the rest of her years in Teplice and died in 1973.
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