To Jiří Havrda, for being a fabulous source of knowledge, for his documentary on Kolár, for being so forthcoming and so full of joy, and of course for helping me find Lucia. To Lucia Aeberhard, my new friend, for allowing me to write about her fabulous and valiant mother, Zdenka. For trusting me, for her generosity with her mother’s past, for her kindness and all her lovely letters and photos. To Božena Macková, for her time and recollections of the family and of her cousin Zdenka.
To Alena Borská, for the recollections of her best friend, and my cousin, Věra. For sharing the story of the clandestine school and allowing the use of her wonderful photographs.
To Beatrice Susil, another new friend, for her immense empathy, for trusting me with her father František Langer’s memories, photographs, stories, and for sharing her family’s painting by Kien. Her father and my grandparents were friends at a terrible time, we continue that friendship along the generations, in what, hopefully, is a gentler world.
To Evelyn Epstein and her sister Margaret Polikoff, for their candor and warmth and for sharing the story of their grandmother Stella Kronberger.
To Mafe Machado, Kevin Travis, and Elliott Bross for always being there and believing in me. There are many others whom I must acknowledge, who helped me directly with my research and the writing process and sometimes also helped unknowingly, recently or a long time ago, often by answering or asking questions, devoting their time or saying the right thing, among them Cesare Sacerdoti, Natalie Harris, Olina Pekna, Stanley Buchthal, Roger Moorhouse, Jessica and Adam Sweidan, Guy Walters, Barbara Schieb, Martina Voigt, Karolin Steinke, Ulrik Werner Grimm, Milada Cogginsová, Charlotte Cunningham, Mark Cunningham, Claudia Zea and Johannes Schmidt, Sophie Fauchier, Eloy Anzola E, Rodrigo Anzola, Patricia Anzola, Diego Anzola, Bob Jamieson, Peter Rosenberg, Joanna Ebner, Nick Clabburn, Meredith Caplan, Camilla Partridge, Roberto Chumaceiro, Eliza Arcaya, Jordana Friedman, Lisa Rosen, Alba de Aponte, Cecilia de Luis, Romulo Zerpa, Eric Shaw, Bryan Adams, Alicia Grimaldi, Ben Passikoff, Howard Fahlkson, Aaron Izes, Leonie Mellinger, Tom Gross, Keith Craig, Florian Luddecke, Martin Navratil, Luis E. Alcalá, Cosima Carter, Ricardo Neumann, my cousin Eloy Anzola for his eye for detail and his tech expertise, Vanessa Neumann for caring for the doll, Sam Endacott for his help with the initial organization and research, Daniel Recordon for his love of watches, Jessica Henley-Price for her beautiful map, Michael Haslau for his fabulous expertise on Weissensee and his photos, Alba Arikha for her comments and her encouragement, Menena Cottin for her art, Giles Nelson for taking care of Fluff, and to Pedro Meneses Imber (I pray that where you are there is no time) for, among many things, giving me my first book on Judaism. To Juan Alonso, a brilliant writer and my fabulous college literature professor, for the inspiration and encouragement. I promised him in 1993 that I would write a book and I apologize it’s taken me so long. To everyone else, who may have temporarily slipped my mind before this goes to press but remain always in my heart, thank you.
Lastly, I am hugely grateful to those who were directly involved in the creation of this book.
To my two superb editors, Suzanne Baboneau and Rick Horgan, a heartfelt thank-you for understanding the idea from the get-go, for making the book so much better, for helping me achieve what I set out to do. I am grateful to Suzanne for the careful polishing of the manuscript, the myriad lovely chats, the ducklings, the hugs. Thank you to Rick for the fab creative advice, our lunches, the enthusiasm, and the laughter. A huge thank-you also to the brilliant teams at Simon & Schuster and Scribner, especially to Ian Chapman for his constant encouragement and his beautiful emails, to Nan Graham for my dahlias, and to her and Roz Lippel for all their support. To Emily Greenwald, thank you, for having all the answers. To Beckett Rueda, for his help and for hitting the ground running. To Kaiya Shang, for her thoroughness, the wheels, and the metaphorical hand-holding. To Brian Belfiglio, for his enthusiasm and kindness. To Dan Cuddy and Kate Barrett, for their vast patience and thoroughness, and to Erich Hobbing, for the beautiful design and help with the photographs. To Beth Thomas, for her careful copyediting and, particularly, for reaching out. To everyone at Aitken Alexander, especially Geffen for her generous support and her awesome ability to answer emails in record time. I could not have been better guided or cared for—it has been an absolute joy to work with you all.
I am grateful to Wendy and Bill Luers, who, with their usual brilliance and generosity of spirit and ideas, led me to the right people so that I could turn the research into a memoir.
To Maria Campbell, for being kind to a stranger and for her incredible foresight in introducing me to Clare Alexander, with whom I have much in common and who happens to be the best agent in the world.
Clare is the most brilliant woman I have encountered and without her belief in me and in the story, and her unwavering endorsement, this would have never been a book at all. In so many ways, this is her story too. I thank her for helping me capture the light, for her guidance in shaping it into a coherent whole, for her constant sage counsel, for being my champion and, above all, my friend. She also has sensational taste in earrings.
Thank you also to all those who helped me with their time and expertise at the following institutions and archives:
Archiv bezpečnostních složek, Praha (Archives of Security Services in Prague)
Archiv hlavního města Prahy (Municipal Archives of Prague)
Archiv města Brna (Municipal Archives of Brno)
Archiv města Košice (Municipal Archives of Košice)
Archiv Městské části Praha 8 (Archives of the Prague 8 Municipality)
Federace židovských obcí v ČR (The Archives of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic)
Národní archiv, Praha (National Archives in Prague)
Moravský zemský archiv, Brno (Moravian Land Archives in Brno)
Památník Terezín (Terezin Memorial)
The Pinkas Synagogue and The Jewish Museum of Prague
Státní oblastní archiv v Praze (State Regional Archives in Prague)
Státní okresní archiv v Hradci Králové (State District Archives in Hradec Králové)
Státní okresní archiv v Teplicích (State District Archives in Teplice)
Státní okresní archiv v Třebíč (State District Archives in Třebíč)
Vojenský ústredný archív, Bratislava (Central Military Archives in Bratislava)
Centrum Judaicum, Berlin
Gedenkstätte Stille Helden (The Silent Heroes Memorial, Berlin)
Landesarchiv (The Berlin Archive)
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Archives
Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
The Wiener Library, London
A Scribner Reading Group Guide
When Time Stopped
Ariana Neumann
This reading group guide for When Time Stopped includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
In 1941, the first member of the Neumann family was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later, his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.
Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened.
When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Ten years later, Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the
letters translated, and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined.
When Time Stopped is an unputdownable detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. In the prologue, Ariana introduces the mystery of her father’s life with a literal question mark in place of his death date in a Holocaust memorial in a Czech synagogue. Throughout her memoir, how does Ariana seek to answer the question of who her father was and the details of his life? What answers does she uncover?
2. Ariana describes having an idyllic childhood in Caracas as the daughter of an esteemed member of Venezuelan society. How does the Latin American setting help tell this story?
3. On page 12, Ariana reveals that, as a child, she wanted to be a detective. In what ways does Ariana play a detective in her memoir?
4. Ariana discovers a collection of her father’s poetry from when he was a teenager, and learns he titled it Drowned Lights. What do you think the meaning of this title is? How does it relate to his life, and perhaps more broadly, the Holocaust?
5. On page 123, a peer tells Ariana that she must have Jewish heritage because of her last name. Ariana, jarred by the suggestion, writes: “Was my family Jewish? Was my father a Jew? Was I? What did that even mean? Is one’s identity predetermined by inheritance? Or are you who you choose to be?” How do you think Ariana answers these questions throughout her memoir?
6. Throughout her memoir, Ariana introduces the items within the small box her father left her: letters, diaries, telegrams, identification cards. How do these objects inform the memoir? How do they help Ariana understand her father’s life and tell this story?
7. Ariana notes that, despite his decades in South America, her father never adapted to the relaxed Latin American timing and instead remained relentlessly punctual. Why do you think time and timepieces were significant to him?
8. During his time in Berlin, Ariana describes her father as “the boy from Prague [who] was defying the Nazi system by living in the middle of it” (page 237). How do you think this ability for secrecy benefited him and affected him throughout his life?
9. Ariana later describes her father, as she knew him, “an older man living in Caracas reviving memories that were then indistinguishable from the nightmares that woke him screaming in the night” (page 240). How is this older man connected to the boy from Prague in Berlin? Over the course of his life, how do you think Hans processed his trauma from the Nazi regime?
10. In the epilogue, Ariana reveals that her children share her father’s relationship with time and clocks, though they never met him. How do you think the question of time ripples through this story?
Enhance Your Book Club
1 Read other accounts of the Holocaust such as Elie Wiesel’s Night or Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.
2. Read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and compare his testimony and coping mechanisms to Hans’s.
More in Personal Memoirs
The Glass Castle
Shoe Dog
The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo
Year of Yes
An Invisible Thread
Primates of Park Avenue
About the Author
© BRYAN ADAMS
Ariana Neumann grew up in Venezuela. She graduated from Tufts University with a dual degree in history and French literature, and earned a master’s degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from New York University and a postgraduate degree in the Psychology of Religion from the University of London. She previously worked as a foreign correspondent for Venezuela’s The Daily Journal and her writing also appeared in The European. She currently lives in London with her family. When Time Stopped is her first book.
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Ariana-Neumann
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Sources
This is not a history book, but it narrates as accurately as possible the lives of my family and many of the people that they encountered. The personal stories described within it are drawn from the letters, official and personal documents, memoirs, and anecdotes, written and oral, of those who lived through those times. The recollections and anecdotes have inevitably been tinged by time and memory, but as much as such things can ever be, they are true.
Most of the objects, documents, and photographs belong to my own family. A handful have been loaned to me by archivists or the families of those involved.
Other specific and general background information, data, and inspiration for this memoir was gathered through many years of research and reading history and fiction relating to remembrance, identity, trauma, and the Holocaust. It has been drawn from a wide range of materials, including the following invaluable sources.
Articles and Books
H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War 1937–1948 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
Alba Arikha, Major/Minor: A Memoir (London: Quartet Books, 2011).
British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, G. Palmer, A. McMaster, H. Hughes, German Aircraft Paints, 18 October–10 November 1945, Final report 365, Item 22. London 1946.
Donald de Carle, Watch & Clock Encyclopedia (London: Robert Hale, 1999).
Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin (London: Penguin, 2010).
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust (London: Random House, 2004).
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
Jeremy Gavron, A Woman on the Edge of Time. A Son’s Search for His Mother (London: Scribe, 2015).
Nancy R. Goodman, Marilyn B. Meyers, The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind (London, Routledge, 2012). The quote from Norbert Fryd is from p. 191.
Ulrich Werner Grimm, Zwangsarbeit und “Arisierung”: Warnecke & Böhm-Ein Beispiel (Berlin: Metropol, 2004).
Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” University of Chicago Signs, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2013), 503–33.
Trudy Kanter, Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler: A True Story (London: Virago, 2012).
Sven Felix Kellerhof, Berlin Under the Swastika (Berlin: Bebraverlag, 2006).
Gerda Weissmann Klein, All But My Life. A Memoir (London: Indigo, 1995).
Ivan Klíma, My Crazy Century: A Memoir (New York: Grove Press, 2013).
Heda Margolius Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (London: Granta, 2012).
Zdenek Lederer, Ghetto Theresienstadt (New York: Howard Fertig, 1983).
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, The Truce (London: Abacus, 2
014).
Primo Levi with Leonardo de Benedetti, Auschwitz Report (London: Verso, 2006).
Steven A. Lloyd, Ivory Diptych Sundials 1570–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost. A Search for Six of Six Million (London: William Collins, 2013).
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury, 1997).
Patrick Modiano, La Place de L’Etoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
Patrick Modiano, Livret de Famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechoki, A Garden of Eden in Hell: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer (London: Pan Macmillan, 2008).
Gonda Redlich and Saul S. Friedman, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992).
Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005).
Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).
Simon Schama, Belonging: The History of the Jews (London: Random House, 2017).
Vera Schiff, Theresienstadt: The Town the Nazis Gave to the Jews (Michael Schiff Enterprises, 1996).
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London: Harvill Press, 1997).
Gita Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Pimlico, 1995).
Mary Jalowicz Simon, Gone to Ground (London: Profile Books, 2014).
Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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