When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains

Ariana Neumann Age

Around age 8, in the family library, she discovered a box containing an ID card dated 1943. The picture was her father’s, but the name was not. Like Ariana Neumann, Anne Fadiman was the. “Ariana Neumann's beautiful, meticulously researched memoir is an extraordinarily moving story of a family’s lost history, a father’s well-kept secret, and a daughter who pieces it all together with courage, tenacity, and most of all, love.” — Dani Shapiro, best-selling author of Inheritance, Hourglass and Family History.

'Ariana Neumann's beautiful, meticulously researched memoir is an extraordinarily moving story of a family's lost history, a father's well-kept secret, and a daughter who pieces it all together with courage, tenacity, and most of all, love.' - Dani Shapiro. The average Ariana Neumann in the United States of America is 11 years old. 'Ariana Neumann's beautiful, meticulously researched memoir is an extraordinarily moving story of a family's lost history, a father's well-kept secret, and a daughter who pieces it all together with courage, tenacity, and most of all, love.' - Dani Shapiro.

Simon & Schuster, pp. 368, £16.99

When Time Stopped Book Review

Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is the image of the once dignified Otto Neumann, walking to his death in torrential rain, with black shoe polish running down his face and into his eyes. Thus was his fate sealed as the silver hair revealed beneath ensured he was deemed too old to be selected for work. He was despatched instead to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

But if this downpour, in a hideously crazy world, can be considered bad luck — after all, Otto and his wife Ella had by then managed against the odds to survive in the hell that was Terezin for two years — Hans, their young son then in hiding, was to have moments of astonishing good luck, which ensured his survival. After the war, perhaps his greatest luck was to have a daughter who has devoted years to unravelling and reconstructing the wartime experiences that he could never bring himself to talk about with anyone, least of all her. Yet he clearly wanted her to write this story, and on his death in 2001 left her a box of papers which, she believes, gave her permission to continue the search.

Actually the search began much earlier, when Ariana, brought up Catholic in Caracas, played a game with some school friends pretending to be part of a spy detective club which they called the Mysterious Boot Club. One of the first documents she discovered was an identity card from 1943 with the name Jan Sebesta and a Hitler stamp but a picture of her father as a young man. Yet when she ran screaming to her mother that her father must therefore be an imposter, nobody would tell her any more. Any discussion of what came before his successful life as a wealthy industrialist and art collector in Venezuela, where he moved with almost nothing in 1949, was not encouraged. And yet there were occasional and puzzling glimpses, such as when in 1990 he took his daughter back to Prague and, stopping at the wire mesh fence along the railway tracks of Bubny, broke down and sobbed uncontrollably. He could not bring himself to tell his only daughter about the devastating event that had taken place there in 1942. She had to find out for herself.

Over the years since her father’s death Neumann has located and pieced together hundreds of documents and clues to create this gripping account of her father’s wartime survival. At the core of the book is the account of how he first avoided deportation by hiding in a specially built narrow partition in his family’s Prague paint factory. When his existence there became too dangerous, he and his friend Zdenek, in a sense the true hero of this book, hatched a daring scheme for him to travel to Berlin with forged papers and work under an assumed name in a Berlin paint factory which was developing a new camouflage system for German rockets.

The story of how this Czech Jew, wanted by the Gestapo, hid in plain sight in Berlin, had a relationship with a German war widow, was praised for his innovative work by an openly Nazi boss and went about the German capital in 1943 is breathtaking. Towards the end of the war he even became a spy, passing on information to a Dutch fellow worker in the paint factory.

‘What Remains’ — part of this powerful book’s subtitle — is a modest phrase for what is a giant achievement. For what remains is so vast, so much more than one life brought out from the shadows: it is a daughter’s deep love and humanity towards a complex and occasionally difficult father who tried to shield her from the pain of knowing about his earlier life, but it is also the story of a whole family lovingly recreated. Especially revealing is the courageously tender way Neumann writes about the grandparents she never knew and has now shared with us, a middle-aged couple who approached the devastation of the camps with markedly different attitudes to life.

Ella, mildly flirtatious, would have done almost anything to survive (the almost is important), resulting in her husband Otto’s accusations that they had a ‘failed marriage’ and that his wife was having an affair with the man in the camp for whom she was acting as housekeeper. Neumann, far from being critical, simply shows how impossible life was, grateful that at last she has found the family that was veiled in silence. ‘I have retrieved an essence of them and I carry them in my heart; now that they are finally with me I refuse to say goodbye.’

One of the key strengths of Neumann’s memoir is her dogged research into astonishing details of daily life in the camps — thanks partly to letters her grandparents smuggled out but also from accounts written by those who knew them. The story of her grandfather, exhausted, condemned to death by the failed shoe-polish hair dye in the November rain, came from an eyewitness in the same transport. This book is chillingly sad, but overall optimistic, and by no means simply another Holocaust story. It’s a treasure to be savoured as testament of the human will to survive.

Julie Metz's mother Eve was the quintessential New Yorker–steely, savvy, thrifty, pragmatic, brusque. It was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but New York City was in fact her adopted home. She was born in Vienna to a comfortable, middle class Jewish family until Germany annexed Austria on March 12th, 1938.

In the two years following the Nazi takeover, her father Julius struggled to find a safe haven for his wife and children. Across the ocean, anti-immigration fervor prevailed as part of the initial America First movement. Miraculously, Julius got his family out of Vienna just in time, thanks to perseverance, a medicine package made of folded paper, a sympathetic American Vice Consul, and good luck.

Shortly after Eve’s death, Metz found a keepsake book her mother had kept hidden in a drawer for over half a century, filled with farewell notes from her childhood friends and relatives. In that secret keepsake book, her mother’s name was Eva. Inspired by this discovery, Metz set out in search of her mother’s lost childhood. The result is Eva and Eve, a real-life detective story that offers moments of grace, serendipity, and lessons for this polarized moment when once again Otherness is the enemy.

Please join us as Julie Metz engages in conversation with Ariana Neumann, who in similar fashion wrote about her family's past as Jews living in Prague at the time of the Nazi occupation. Both women in their work bring to light answers to questions that they had learned, growing up in their families, were not to be asked. Ariana Neumann's own work, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of my Father's War and What Remains, was published in 2020. It was a winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award for Best Memoir. Both women have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Speakers

Ariana Neumann Family Tree

Julie Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of Perfection. She has written for publications including The New York Times, Salon, Dame, Redbook, and Glamour. She has received fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. She lives with her family in the Hudson Valley. You can find out more about Julie’s writing life on Instagram: @JulieMetzWriter and her website.
Ariana Neumann was born and grew up in Venezuela. She has a BA in History and French Literature from Tufts University, an MA in Spanish and Latin American Literature from New York University and a PgDIP in Psychology of Religion from University of London. She previously was involved in publishing, 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. Listen to a podcast with Ariana Neumann here.

Order their Books

Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind.(scroll down)

When Time Stops

When Time Stopped: Memoirs of my Father's War and What Remains (scroll down)