“There is a question mark, almost lost in a sea of names on the walls of an old synagogue in Prague. Each was a resident of the Czech districts of Bohemia and Moravia during the war. All were victims of the Nazis. 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.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and those are some lines from the beginning of When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains by Ariana Neumann. Ariana grew up in Venezuela with her father and stepmother. It wasn’t until after her father’s death that Ariana knew anything about her father’s life during WWII, including that he was Jewish.
While going through his possessions she discovered a box that contained letters, identification papers and memorabilia that revealed clues to a very difficult past. That box started her on a decades long quest to discover just who her father was. Any genealogist will understand the years of persistence it took for Ariana to get a full picture of her father’s life and to find all her relatives.
Hanus grew up a Jew in Prague. Because of their ages, Hanus and his brother were allowed to continue working in his family’s paint factory after his parents were taken to first a work camp and then to Auschwitz. Hanus obtained a fake Gentile ID and moved to Berlin to hide in plain sight from the SS. When the war was over, Hanus and his brother started over in Venezuela.
If you’re looking for a biography of one man’s efforts to survive WWII, then you must read When Time Stopped by Ariana Newman.
