Zita Polláková was one of the fifty-one survivors from her and my grandmother’s transport of fifteen hundred to Auschwitz. She escaped from a death march and, after hiding in a barn in Poland, was rescued by Russian soldiers who eventually took her to Prague. Zita married a Czechoslovak army veteran and moved back to Teplice. There, they raised their daughter, Daniela. In 1968 Zita moved to Switzerland, where she lived until 2002. She committed some of her memories to paper later in life, but otherwise, the Pollak survivors seldom spoke of the war.
Stella Kronberger, my grandfather’s protégée in the camp, was liberated from Terezín in 1945. After finding Hans and Lotar in Prague, sharing her stories of Otto, and waiting in vain for his return, she moved to the U.S. in 1946 to be with her daughter. A few months afterward, she traveled to California to meet Otto’s brothers, Victor Neuman and Richard, who had changed his last name to Barton. Stella shared with them how their brother had lived the last few years of his life. Eventually, Stella married Victor and became Stella Neuman. The two lived quietly in San Diego, where Stella wrote a weekly cooking column for the Times of San Diego. She never spoke of the war to Victor’s children or grandchildren. When I connected with two of the grandchildren, my cousins Greg and Victor, they had no idea that they had any Jewish heritage or that their step-grandmother had ever been in a camp. But Stella did confide some of her experiences to her own daughter and her granddaughters, who have generously shared their memories.
Richard Neumann (later Barton) stayed in Caracas for a few years to ensure that his nephews had settled well. He then moved back to the U.S., where he married a Czech woman named Edith. They had no children. They lived in La Jolla and kept in touch with Lotar and Hans until Richard’s death in 1980. Edith lived until 2003. I met her a few times but she never mentioned the war or the existence of any other family members.
Having built up a conglomerate of companies with his brother, Lotar left Venezuela for Switzerland in 1964, fifteen years after he had arrived. There, with Věra, he lived a quiet life in the small village of Gingins, raising their two daughters, Susana and Madeleine (Madla), collecting paintings by socially committed artists like Daumier and Kollwitz, as well as pieces of art nouveau. Throughout his life, Lotar privately supported Czech refugees and Holocaust survivors.
Zdenka had her only child, a daughter, Lucia, with Viktor Knapp in 1949. Zdenka’s relationship with Viktor ended in 1955 when he left her for another woman. Lucia told me that no one who came after ever matched Lotar’s love for Zdenka. She explained that Zdenka had confessed toward the end of her life that she bitterly regretted having left Lotar but that by the time she realized this, it was too late.
Zdenka never lost her independence of mind. She worked at the literary publication Literární noviny, where she wrote many articles. She also acted as a lay judge. In 1968 Zdenka and Lucia escaped from Czechoslovakia, fearing the aftermath of the Prague Spring. They showed up unannounced at the door of Lotar’s home in Switzerland. Lotar and Věra took them in for some days and then helped them resettle in Switzerland.
Lotar and Zdenka tried to remain friends. However, in the early 1970s, they decided it would be best if they continued their lives separately and consigned their shared experiences to silence. During the last days of his life, when his mind and body were weakened by Parkinson’s disease, Lotar cried out for Zdenka. A few months before, she had suffered an accident that meant she could not walk or travel to visit him. They never saw each other again. Lotar died in 1992. Zdenka herself died eleven years later. Unlike all the other women I traced and despite two subsequent marriages, Zdenka never changed her name. She kept the name Neumannová, the Czech feminine adjective of Neumann, throughout her life.
Lotar and Věra donated pieces from their art collection, as well as photographs taken by Lotar, to museums in Prague. Věra sent me Lotar’s boxes of letters, documents, and his photograph album, through their daughter Madla, in 2012. Věra died in 2013.
Zdeněk Tůma worked at Montana in Prague after the war and in 1947 moved to the town of Staré Město with his wife; there, they raised two boys. He worked with paints all his life. Unlike Hans, he shared some stories of his time in Berlin with his family. He continued to read and write poetry for pleasure and translated Rilke’s lyrical poem “A Song of Love and Death” from German to Czech. Despite the very different worlds that they inhabited, Zdeněk and Hans stayed in touch. Their secret partnership and lifelong friendship brought them both great joy until Zdeněk died, surrounded by family, in 1991.
Míla and Hans’s marriage was fraught with difficulties from the start, but they built a life in Caracas and raised their son, Michal, who became Miguel, my half brother. They separated much earlier but divorced in 1969. Despite having risked her life many times to bring Hans food and solace, Míla also never spoke about the past. As a child, I visited her a few times with my father. Each time she made his favorite, rohlíčky sugar cookies. Míla and Hans were friends until her death in New York in 1990. After she died, my father began keeping the good-luck doll that she had made him in a drawer by his bedside, beneath the photograph of his parents. I do not know exactly when he placed it in my box.
Hans went on to accomplish so much after the war that I would probably need another book to tell you about it all. He was a businessman and philanthropist whose seemingly boundless energy and drive spanned countries and industries—manufacturing, newspapers, agriculture, tourism. His passion for the arts and education drove him to establish programs that benefited thousands. Still today there are two streets in Venezuela named after him, one in Caracas and one in Valencia. The fire never left him, and as he wrote to his uncle Richard in 1945, during the whole of his life he continued to “work, work, work.” He had recently founded the principal opposition newspaper to the Chávez regime, whose catastrophic legacy he had foreseen, when he died after a series of strokes on September 9, 2001.
* * *
In my early memories of my father, he was always sitting, fixing the mechanism of a watch in the long room at the back of the house that nestled in its vibrant garden. But now I can picture him, young and chaotic, in Prague. I cherish the mental images that the photographs, letters, writings, and anecdotes have helped me create. I see my father lying in the middle of a cobblestone sidewalk in Prague, with Zdeněk giggling around a corner, waiting to scare an unsuspecting passerby. I picture him on a bench by the banks of the river writing poetry, wildly pedaling and falling off his bicycle, arriving late, always disheveled, for meals. I imagine him with Otto, Ella, and Lotar, joyously playing with the dogs in the honeyed light of their garden in Libčice. The sounds of laughter, the rush of the Vltava, and the wind in the trees are so loud that one can no longer hear the ticking of time.
I spent my childhood willing a mystery to come my way. When it finally did, it took decades to solve. As an adult with children of my own, I found the reason for the question mark on the wall of the memorial at the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. I learned why my father awoke screaming in the night. I solved the puzzle of the identification card and everything else that had baffled me about my father when I was young.
I have kept my promise to him that I would help him write his story. I have searched through time and found him and, in the process, his family and mine. I can make connections between my children and those who came before. I can see traits of a generation that disappeared in a generation that will never forget. My children share Hans’s relationship with time.
“It is nine o’clock,” I once said to my youngest daughter, then five. “Time to go to bed.”
“It is nine-oh-four.” She frowned predictably, though it was not my sending her to sleep that irked her, it was my lack of precision. Still today she corrects me.
My middle daughter keeps a brass clock pendulum, as a memento, by her bedside. She steadfastly spins it eight times before falling asleep every night. I have repeatedly asked her why she does this. Once when she was much younger, she proferred: “It’s to
ward off the nightmares.” Now, if I insist, she replies: “Because I have to do it, maybe it’s for luck. I just have to, I don’t know why.”
My eldest must have a clock by his bedside or he simply will not sleep. He has always maintained that he needs to know the time. Even without an alarm and regardless of where he is, he wakes up every morning at six-thirty. Everyone assured me that this would change, that all teenagers sleep in. He never has, though he is almost an adult.
My children never met their grandfather, the watch repairer. They have heard me speak of him often. Yet, until recently, I had never told them of his watches or the obsessive timekeeping. Some say that trauma is, to some extent, inherited, no matter how distanced or sheltered the environment into which you are born. My children and I have heated debates on the issue. They firmly believe that we each decide and shape who we are, that we learn from our own experiences and from observing others, that unspoken traumas and lessons are not somehow imprinted in our cells. How we behave and who we become is up to us. I do not entirely agree with them. Of course we have control over our identity, but it is not absolute.
I like to believe that life lessons are etched into us and passed on. We choose who we are, but our choices are always molded by where we come from, even when we do not know where that is. The past is intrinsic to the present, despite any attempts to dismiss it. It is a part of the mechanism that pivots who we choose to be. I look at my three children as they chatter and laugh and I pray that, in addition to the timekeeping and tenacity, they also have my father’s boldness, his poetry, and his strength. And hopefully too a little of his luck.
My father’s collection of clocks and watches includes one of which I have no childhood memory. I checked with my mother, who confirmed that it held a special place for him. I still love all the others, with their complexities, ornamental engravings, and colors, and yet this timepiece has become my favorite. It resembles a book. It tells the time, but it makes no sound. It is actually not a watch at all.
It is an astronomical device called an ivory diptych that was manufactured in the German city of Nuremberg. Most similar pieces were produced by members of six families between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. This particular one was probably crafted by Paul Reinmann in the early 1600s.
It is minute, just a few centimeters across, and fits neatly in my palm. It is composed of two panels of ivory. On one side, it has a carved spine that is hinged and decorated with gilt brass. On the other, it has two tiny, elaborate brass latches that hold these panels closed.
The book opens to reveal two perfectly symmetrical circles, one on either leaf. Each is marked with numbers that are framed within patterns of finely engraved garlands and flowers, pigmented in burgundy and black. A tiny brass lever near the hinges can be adjusted to keep it open.
On the left panel is a sundial, to tell the time. On the other is a compass for direction. The sundial has a face on it that, depending on the angle at which you look at it, seems angry or content.
When I press it between my hands, when I open it, I feel a connection to my father. It is simple. There is no complex mechanism to wind, maintain, or repair. There is no case to prise, no moving wheels to ascertain if time is indeed going by.
For direction, you just need to hold it steady. To tell the time, you have to tilt it carefully. Time will be marked by the position of the shadow. All you need is patience to capture the fallen light.
Sometimes I lose my bearings. I forget that time has passed. And for that briefest moment, I want to rush again to my father. I want to tear along the checkered floor of the hall to the long windowless room and, as he raises his visor and looks up from his watches, explain that I finally solved the puzzle. I have to let him know that I found the boy he was, the unfortunate boy, and that I love him. I love that boy just as much as I respect the man he became. I long to tell my father that I strolled around the garden of his house in Libčice and wrote our book on a desk crafted by the person who now lives there. I need to reassure him that there are no more questions. I want to wrap my arms around him, place my head on his heart, and, as the sounds of the mechanisms fade, in the stillness, whisper that I understand.
Acknowledgments
I am hugely grateful to so many people who have helped in manifold ways with my research and the realization of this book.
To begin with, I thank those closest to me. My beloved, Andrew Rodger, for being my first editor, my biggest fan, my gentlest critic, for fueling my dreams, for keeping me grounded, and for using me as the main butt of his jokes. Mostly I thank him for being my best friend and the most fabulous husband, father, and shrink, and for always, unhesitatingly, being a source of love. I could never have done this if it were not for him and our three marvelous children, Sebastian, Eloise, and Maria Teresa. I thank each of them for their endless patience, the constant love, for their laughter, for engaging with it all and putting up with so many years of this quest and my many monothematic days. They have constantly made my present such a joyful and cossetting refuge from the past. The darkness would have been too daunting if it were not for their light.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my mother, Maria Cristina Anzola, for falling in love with my father, for teaching me so many things, for the hundreds of hours of conversation, her love, her wisdom, guidance, and friendship. I thank John Heimann for being her beloved companion for over thirty years and for his wise counsel and kindness to my family and to me.
An enormous thank-you is due to my aunt Mayalen Anzola, who plunged into the darkness with me. Her advice and love, her help with the letters, the Terezín history, and the writing have been invaluable. I am lucky to have her as both my real and my fairy godmother. To her husband, Enzo Viscusi, for always being my supporter, for the wonderful stories he tells, for the hundreds of poems that he has pulled out of his jacket pocket through the years.
To my brother Ignacio for throwing me into the pool, for our chats, his memories, and for his patience and love. To Kai and Grace, for keeping him whole.
To my cousin Madla for her trust, affection, and companionship on this wonderful adventure. To her husband, Stephan Strobel, for all his support of us both during it. To my cousins Susana and Philippe also for allowing me to tell Lotar’s story and for their encouragement.
To all my uncles, aunts, and cousins on the Anzola side of the family, for their support and for their recollections of my father. To Alfredo José, for watching over me. To Florinda Pena, for sharing her memories, and those of my brother Miguel, and for always being a sister to me.
I am grateful as well to all my new family, my wonderful Czech, British, French, and American cousins, who have put up with my endless questions, shared their memories, and searched their attics and boxes of mementos to help me. Thank you for all the positivity and support. My only regret is that I could not include every single beautiful story that you shared with me. I am especially thankful to Greg Neuman, for sending his father’s stamp collection; Victor Neuman, for all the information and chats; Jana Neumannová and her husband, Serge Wietratchny, for their stories, affection, and rohlíčky; to my cousin Daniela Schmidova, for the photos and her translating and sharing her mother’s words. All have been exceedingly warm and kind and so generous with their time and their recollections. Also, a special thank-you to the two Zuzana Panuskovas for the lovely day in Leeds, for the family tree, the photos, and the stories. Thank you to their families and also to Jan Sik and to Karolina Mrkvičková.
To Carolina Herrera, for always being there and for remaining still a fully committed and loyal member of the Mysterious Boot Club since those Saturday mornings in the Caracas garden. May we have another thousand adventures and mysteries to solve together. To Lisa Train, for being my reader, my sounding board, for listening to me prattling on for endless hours about my quest, and for checking the insanity levels. To Aurelie Berry, for reading, listening, commenting, for her constant supply of books and articles, and a particularly enormous thank-y
ou for her talent as a photographer of watches, diptychs, postcards, and dolls. Many of the images of objects in this book are hers. To Emma Bleasdale, for the numerous walks and the endless talks. To Caroline Schmidt Barnett for the friendship, the German cuddliness, and religion lessons.
To Tad Friend, for all his advice, mordant insight, patient guidance, Brooklyn teas, and his unusual ability to read and write while traveling by bus.
To Magda Veselská, for her tenacity in scouring every archive, for her detective skills, and for her patience with my hundreds of emails filled with questions.
To Anna Hájková, for her knowledge, guidance, tolerance, sense of humor, and friendship.
To Lukáš Přibyl, for deciphering so many letters and documents and helping me solve so many mysteries, for always thinking out of the box, for never being more than a call away, for his constant rallying, and above all, for his friendship. I hereby appoint you, Señor Přibyl, honorary chairman of the Mysterious Boot Club (even if you owe me some of your mother’s rohlíčky). To Gabriela Přibylová also for her help with the original translations of the Terezín letters.
To Ivan Nedvídek, Eva Nedvídek, and Jana Straková, thank you for your time, continuous smiles, and your immense kindness toward me and my family. I could never thank you enough for the enormous risks your mother and stepfather took in hiding and helping my father. My father survived and I am here, to tell the story of my family and yours, thanks to their courage.
To Zdeněk Tůma Jr. and his niece Barbora Tumová, for their time and sharing the wonderful stories, memories, and photos of my father’s supremely brave and loyal friend, Zdeněk.
To Michal Peřina, for the documents in the safe, for my beautiful desk, for the wonderful afternoon in Libčice, and his kindness in welcoming me to his family home.
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