When Time Stopped Read online

  MORE PRAISE FOR

  WHEN TIME STOPPED

  “An astonishing family memoir that will imprint itself on your psyche… Ariana Neumann has breached the hidden surface of her family’s tumultuous past and brought not only their tragedies and sorrows but also their joys and loves to indelible light.”

  —JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ, author of The Red Daughter, The Commoner, and Reservation Road

  “A love letter to a father who, out of sheer will and determination, did not allow the Nazis to destroy him—and who rose to become one of Venezuela’s most successful industrialists. Part literary memoir, part mystery tale, Ariana Neumann’s tribute to her father is a classic story of redemption and love.”

  —JANINE DI GIOVANNI, author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

  “A fascinating and beautifully constructed memoir, and more than that, a testimonial to the power of meticulous research and family love.”

  —CAROLINE MOOREHEAD, author of A Train in Winter and Village of Secrets

  “Remarkable… Through painstaking, meticulous research Neumann tells the true story—part memoir, part history—of her heart-wrenching and ultimately life-affirming journey in uncovering her family’s long hidden past.”

  —GEORGIA HUNTER, author of We Were the Lucky Ones

  “Beautifully written… One of the most powerful and profoundly moving family stories of the Holocaust to have been published in many years and a must-read.”

  —DAN STONE, director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London

  “Ariana Neumann has given us a gripping true story—the account of her father’s determination to survive the Holocaust and the clues he left behind.… This is nonfiction that reads like a detective thriller.”

  —TILAR J. MAZZEO, author of Irena’s Children

  “When Time Stopped is more than just history. It’s a warning.”

  —MICHAEL PALIN

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  For Sebastian

  For Eloise

  For María-Teresa

  This book is dedicated to the memory of those who could not tell their stories.

  Si cada día

  cae dentro de cada noche,

  hay un pozo donde la claridad

  está encerrada.

  Hay que sentarse a la orilla

  del pozo de la sombra

  y pescar luz caída,

  con paciencia.

  If each day falls inside each night,

  There exists a well

  where clarity

  is imprisoned.

  We need to sit on the rim

  of the well of darkness

  and fish for fallen light,

  with patience.

  “Si cada día cae,”

  EL MAR Y LAS CAMPANAS, 1973

  “If each day falls…,”

  THE SEA AND THE BELLS

  Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke,

  Letters to a Young Poet, 1903

  Prologue

  1.

  There is a question mark, almost lost in a sea of names on the walls of an old synagogue in Prague. Visitors hush children as they pass through each chamber of the Pinkas memorial. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the dizzying display of black and red letters. They memorialize 77,297 individuals. Each was a resident of the Czech districts of Bohemia and Moravia during the war. All were victims of the Nazis.

  Next to every name is stenciled the date of birth, and next to each date of birth neatly sits the date of death.

  One entry bears the name of my father, Hanus Stanislav Neumann, born on February 9, 1921. It is different. Unlike the others on that wall, it has no date of death.

  Instead, carefully calligraphed, there is an incongruous and bold black question mark.

  I visited the memorial in 1997 as a tourist, unaware of any link with the synagogue. Scanning across the top wall to my right as I descended the steps into the first chamber, I was astounded to see my father’s name. He was then very much alive, settled and working in Caracas. And yet the bold question mark was there, both jarring and oddly apposite.

  This was the first time I had seen the query inked on the wall, but questions about my father had emerged long before. My quest for answers started when I was just a little girl, living across an ocean and a sea in a very different world.

  My father’s name with the question mark, tenth line from the top, in the Pinkas Synagogue, Prague

  The questions began with a photograph. They started with a picture that was kept hidden but was then found. A memento left behind by accident or on purpose, perhaps subconsciously, that engendered doubt. An image that was out of sorts with reality, as I saw it, forcing the present into an unfamiliar focus. It prompted questions. It demanded answers of the past.

  My childhood memories hum with the songs of troupials, crickets, and frogs. My recollections are cradled by tranquil breezes; they sway to the rhythm of tall palm trees and are lit by the reds and oranges of bird-of-paradise. Yet in all their warmth, color, and chaos, they are punctuated by the crisp metal rotors, wheels, pivots, and mainsprings of mechanical watches, of beautifully intricate movements with complications. Among enormous sculptures, my mother recites verses from Rubén Darío and Andrés Eloy Blanco, and my father dances as he sings “Yellow Submarine.” In most of my early memories, there are people moving around the open rooms, terraces, and gardens—politicians, diplomats, industrialists, writers, filmmakers, ballet dancers—gesticulating, chatting, laughing, sitting, or standing, invariably surrounding my parents. There is the noise of success, the prattle of happiness, but in some of the memories, the hubbub fades and there is just enough silence to hear the watches tick, click, whir, and chime.

  Embedded in my memory is the image of a particular watch. It is a round silver pocket watch, perfectly polished, lying facedown, with its cover off and the gold insides visible.

  It is an odd piece—different from the others in my father’s collection. The watch has four cases. It is rendered in an easily tarnished silver. Most of the others are gold and ornately decorated with precious stones. It is large and heavy, and the first case is indelicate, with a braided burgundy cord attaching a key. It has a thick relief motif that would perhaps be more familiar if it were carved in wood.

  Press a button on the side, and the first case pops open to reveal a much finer silver face, surrounded by tortoiseshell and silver screws. You can then see the dial, the curved gold hands, and the face of light and darkened silver ringed with symbols for numbers; the letters in the center spell the maker’s name.

  Inside this second cover is an aged piece of paper trimmed to fit roundly inside the back of the case. In beautiful black script, it reads: Thomas Stivers, London, England. Made in 1732 at the Old Watch Street Shop for Export Trade India.

  Inside this is a smaller plain polished silver case.

  Within this third unremarkable metal shell sits another polished silver case that houses the device itself. Eyes are drawn to the beauty of the hands and face, and without the outer cases, the watch now seems rather small and delicate, fragile, even. As you lift th
e glass and inspect the piece closely, additional hinges are revealed within, and if you examine the face, at the six o’clock mark there is a tiny, almost invisible lever. If you move the lever lightly—being careful not to damage the enamel—toward the center, the back of this case clicks open, disclosing a magnificent movement with ornate wheels of interwoven filigree that resemble flowers and feathers of silver and gold.

  Most people never look at the movement. They rarely open the mechanism to understand what is behind the meticulous timekeeping. For the majority, observing the dial and knowing that the watch functions within a beautiful case is marvel enough. Yet when you examine this beguiling mechanism, you find it is not functioning—the thin silver thread that forms the spring is torn, and the watch cannot keep time.

  When my memories pan back from the watch, my father is hunched over, his back cocooned by a white chair. He is wearing a black plastic visor with two rectangular magnifying lenses in front of his eyes. His thick white hair is tousled around the adjustable band. He is unaware of the world outside, oblivious to me, as I tilt my head through the crack of the door and stare at him. He sits at a purpose-built wooden table, his slim fingers grasping pointed tweezers. He is trying to tease out a thin silver thread from a part of the watch that looks to me like a spool made of gold. He is moving very gently, with absolute precision and fathomless patience. If his fingers were not playing over the watch, just a millimeter here and there, his stillness would suggest that time had stopped.

  He is trying to repair the mechanism. He needs his watches to be accurate to the second. It seems a necessity rather than a want. He keeps most of them in his bedroom: some on stands in a Louis XV vitrine, some carefully laid in the drawers of a nineteenth-century tulipwood chest that have been specially lined with thick burgundy velvet. He opens and checks a few at least once a week, the winding mechanisms, the springs, the levers, the chimes. If they need to be regulated, he will take them to his workshop, the long windowless room in my memory, the one off a long corridor by the kitchen. The room that is narrow and resembles the carriage of a train. The room that unfailingly remains locked, its key kept in my father’s pocket, attached to a gold chain clipped to a belt loop in his trousers. There, he will sit at the table upon which his minuscule tools are arrayed. He will don one of the black magnifying visors that hang on hooks aligned on the wall. Depending on the watch, he will push the lever or pry the case open and examine the movement. The first thing he will do is ascertain that the escapement and the train are functioning. The train should be in constant motion; that is crucial to provide energy for the mechanism to run for many hours. Usually, trains are made up of four wheels, one each for hours, minutes, and seconds, and a fourth connected to the escapement. The latter consists of tiny pallets, a lever, and two further wheels, one for escape and another for balance. It allows just the right amount of power from the train to escape at precise intervals, sufficient to allow the correct movement of the hands. It makes the ticking sound and ensures exactness. Both train and escapement are critical components. They must work together faultlessly, or time will not be kept.

  The workshop drawers are filled with lights, magnifying glasses, and tools. He owns 297 pocket watches. Sometimes, if he spots me nearby, he calls me to his side and winds the one I love. Not the one he tries to fix but the one with complications, the one that works perfectly, which plays a song in chimes and has two cherubs with moving arms knocking little golden hammers against a bell.

  My father wakes every morning by six-thirty. Every morning, regardless of how much he has slept, he dons a navy cotton robe and walks to his study, where a tray is neatly laid out on a small table. Every weekday by six thirty-five a.m., with the dark thorny green leaves from the bromeliads coming through the cast-iron bars of the window, he is sitting on the edge of the daybed to eat half a grapefruit and read a newspaper. He pours a third of a sachet of sweetener into a small cup of black coffee and drinks it in one gulp. He showers, opens his mirrored cupboard, picks one from his dozens of suits, straightens his tie, grabs a perfectly pressed handkerchief, chooses his wristwatch, and is headed to the office by seven a.m. sharp.

  At the end of the day, the drive home from the office takes him between nine and thirteen minutes, depending on the day of the week. He times his departure accordingly and arrives at the house promptly at six-thirty every night. If he is not going out, he leaves his briefcase in his study, mixes himself a Campari and soda stirred with a long, curled silver spoon, and sits in an armchair on the terrace. Every night that my father is home, the curled spoon leaves a pink mark on the crisp white linen napkin on the drinks cabinet. Dinner is at exactly seven-thirty p.m.

  If the Campari spoon is untouched when I walk past the library after my piano practice, I know that my parents are dressing to go out. Then I rush to my mother’s room and watch her put on her makeup in front of the illuminated swivel mirror. I sit on the floor and chat about my day as she carefully applies makeup, puts on a gown, and chooses her jewelry. My father usually walks in wearing immaculate black tie or a crisp dark suit and says impatiently that they are going to be late. They kiss me good night and head down the long corridor, my father straight and tall in his suit, my mother mesmerizing in her flowing gown, with her fiery-speckled brown hair dancing as they disappear from view.

  2.

  Unlike most houses in our neighborhood, ours did not have a name. There was, however, a sign on the green metal gates with two words printed in copperplate: Perros Furibundos. There is no precise English word for furibundo. Roughly translated, the sign meant frenziedly furious dogs. To our visitors, the house was known as the House of the Frenziedly Furious Dogs. The dogs spent more time lazing in the sunshine than they did in frenzied fury, but the name stuck. Perros Furibundos was an oasis protected from the bustle and chaos of 1970s Caracas by tall mango trees, high white walls, and two guards who, though placid, were methodical in their alternating patrol of the perimeter.

  The garden of my childhood had an imposing ceiba tree, dozens of different palms, mango, guava, acacia, and eucalyptus trees, and bushes covered in orchids, flores de mayo, frangipanis, all surrounding a sky-blue pool. My mother had played in the house as a small girl, when it had belonged to family friends. When my parents started their life together, my father bought it for them to live in.

  A bright and sprawling single-story house, it was full of high-ceilinged rooms and airy terraces. It had been designed in 1944 by Clifford Wendehack, an American architect who built grand houses and designed the colonial villa that forms the main building of the Caracas Country Club. Our single-story home stood amid the seemingly boundless sea of garden in the neighborhood of Los Chorros in the eastern part of Caracas. It was close to El Avila, the regal mountain that towers above the city and separates the capital from the coast.

  The country that I grew up in was filled with promise. There were serious problems—social disparity, corruption, and poverty—but there was also a sense that such issues were being addressed. Social and educational programs were being implemented; government housing, schools, and hospitals were being built. The Venezuela of the 1970s and ’80s was seen as a model for Latin America. It had a stable democracy, a rising literacy rate, a flourishing art scene, and thanks to oil, a well-funded government intent on developing further industries, infrastructure, and education. It was alive with potential. Businesses, both local and international, were keen to invest. Migrants were attracted by the quality of life, relative safety, climate, and opportunities. Most of the country benefited from clement weather and fertile land, and the nature that surrounded the cities, the beaches, the jungles, the biodiversity, was without equal in variety and beauty. As I was growing up, new buildings, museums, and theaters were being constructed all around the capital. It was a hustling, modern metropolis. There were daily flights from Caracas to New York, Miami, London, Frankfurt, Rome, and Madrid. Even the Concorde made regular flights from Paris to the Maiquetía airport.

  The
tremendous energy of the place was the harvest of a crop sown several decades before. In 1946 Venezuela decided to welcome and support displaced Europeans who could not return to their homes after the war. Tens of thousands of refugees, mostly from southern and central Europe, arrived in Venezuela, to be followed in later decades by many more escaping the political turmoil of countries on the continent.

  As a child, I was aware that my father, together with his older brother, Lotar, had migrated to Venezuela because their country had been broken by war. I am not sure how I knew this, as it was certainly not something my father discussed. His focus was always on life now, not that which had gone before. By the time I came along over two decades later, any vestige of refugee hardship had entirely vanished. On the surface, all that was incongruous about him was his pale skin, his heavy Eastern European accent, and his obsession with timekeeping and punctuality.

  On arrival in Venezuela, he had started a paint factory with Lotar. My father had prospered in Venezuela. His drive, knowledge of chemicals, and wide-spanning interests had led him to seize the opportunities that the country offered. By the time I was born, he was a leading industrialist and intellectual. Billboards around the city advertised his businesses: paints, building supplies, juices, yogurts. People read his newspapers. Every hardware shop bore the logo of his paint factory, Montana. He also headed charitable institutions, spearheaded educational programs and was a patron of the arts. My mother came from a European family who had migrated to Venezuela in 1611, and their marriage firmly ensconced my father in Venezuelan society. In 1965 a writer named Bernard Taper wrote a lengthy article entitled “Dispatches from Caracas” in The New Yorker:

  The Neumanns are considered prime examples of a breed of industrialist new to the Venezuelan scene for they simultaneously exhibit technical competence, entrepreneurial drive and a sense of social responsibility—an almost unknown combination here.