February 13, 2020 • 32 mins
As a child, Ariana Neumann stumbled upon a strange photo of her father, tucked away in a secret box he kept in his workshop. It was undeniably him, and yet the name in the caption didn’t belong to the man she grew up with. Decades later, Ariana inherits this box and the documents it contains, using them to slowly chip away at the mystery of who her father really was and the lies he had to tell in order to survive.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. There
is a question mark almost lost in a sea of
names on the walls of an old synagogue in Prague.
Visitors hushed children as they passed through each chamber of
(00:21):
the Pincus Memorial. It is hard not to be overwhelmed
by the dizzying display of black and red letters. They
memorialize seventy seven thousand, two hundred and ninety seven individuals.
Each was a resident of the Czech districts of Bohemia
and Moravia during the war. All were victims of the Nazis.
(00:43):
Next to every name is stenciled the date of birth,
and next to each state of birth neatly sits the
date of death. One entry bears the name of my father,
Hannas Stanislav Norman, born on February nine one. It is different,
unlike the others on the wall, it has no date
(01:04):
of death. Instead, carefully calligraphed, there's an incongruous and bald
black question mark. I visited the memorial in nineteen ninety
seven as a tourist, unaware of any link with the synagogue.
Scanning across the top all to my right as I
descended the steps into the first chamber. I was astounded
(01:27):
to see my father's name. He was then very much alive,
settled and working in Cadakas, and yet the bold question
mark was there, both jarring an oddly opposite. This was
the first time and I had seen the query inked
on the wall. But questions about my father had emerged
(01:47):
long before my quest for answer started, when I was
just a little girl, living across an ocean and a
sea in a very different world. That's Ariana noym It,
a writer and mother of three who currently lives with
her family in London. Arianna's first book, When Time Stopped,
(02:09):
a memoir of my father's war and What Remains is
just out, and it centers on an extraordinary secret held
tightly at the very core of her father's life, one
he never spoke of while he was living. Ariana, as
the sole heir to a vanished world, painstakingly brings an
(02:31):
entire lost family to life. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. So I grew up in the Venezuela
(02:55):
of the seventies, and which is completely disintu course than
the Venezuelage day. It was then at place billed with
promise and with light. There were theaters being built, museums, schools, airports, roads.
It was really a place of potential. It was seen
as the capital of South America, really bustling and vibrates,
(03:19):
and of course the nature there is absolutely useful and
in this at least wonderful surroundings in this wonderful country.
Was my father, and she was involved in everything. He
had industries, he had newspapers, he was involved in museums,
he was setting up schools and had set up as
design institution at a university to study business. He was
(03:43):
involved in charity. So he was really vibrant, engaged person.
And I lived in this beautiful house in the center
of practice, with stunning gardens, and it was just a
plaise built with colors and joys, and you know, garms
were lush, and they were parents and slots, and it
(04:03):
was really a pretty magical place. Tell me more about
life with your parents, Maybe describe your mother a little
bit to me as well. She was quite an old father.
My mother was twenty years younger, and she was just
stunningly beautiful um and she was also involved in the arts,
(04:25):
and as I grew up, she was involved in anitary
of culture and started a ballet company. So, you know,
my house was filled with interesting people, bill with politicians,
with artists, with ballet dancers, and there was a constant
flock of you know, people of ideas. You just felt
(04:45):
that you were in the center of it all. And
my parents were very much in love with each other,
thanking people seemed to be just in love with them.
People were just flowing into this house and surrounding them
all the time. My parents were quite social. They weren't
super involved in my upbringing in the ways that we're
involved and children stop bringing now, so they want to
(05:08):
sort of checking on my homework and taking me to
school and things like that. But I was very much
part of their world and part of their you know,
I just milled about these gardens and sat around with
these people and attended the sort of brings parties that
they gave, and you know, whatever they were in meetings,
I just tapped there are my mother's lap and was
part of it. Really. Ariana was unfazed by her unusual
(05:34):
and in many ways magical childhood. What she really wanted,
what was most interesting to her, was to have a
mystery to solve. She sort of took over the family's kennel.
The Neuman's had really larger dogs, Great Danes and Rottweiler's,
so it was a big kennel and Arianna would sit
in it on a crate, and she turned it into
(05:55):
a library of sorts. A favorite, unsurprisingly was Nancy Drew.
Arianna was an only child, quite isolated in many ways.
I so relate to this, the dreamy only child who
spends a lot of time reading and solving mysteries. She
even starts a detective club with a cousin and some friends,
(06:17):
called the Mysterious Boot Club. Arianna, what do you think
that was about? I was so taken by that in
your book, the idea that you wanted to be a
detective as a child, and that you created this mysterious
boot club. And of course hindsight is twenty twenty, but
what was the sense you had that there were mysteries
(06:39):
to be solved? I just thought, why wouldn't everyone want
to solve mysteries? And what I realized now is that
I obviously spent that there was a mystery there that
there were things that we're obviously not being told to me,
and my father really was at the center of this mystery.
(06:59):
The Aldren Slash detectives, who were members of the Mysterious
Boot Club kept an eye on Ariana's father. He never
ever spoke about feelings. He was always talking about ideas
and concept and you know, sort of the puzzled or
he was repairing watches. He was absolutely obsessed by this
(07:20):
watch connection that he had. And it wasn't the normal
sort of obsession with some triality and time that you know,
a successful man would have because he wants to maximize
his time in order to be more efficient. It was
a real obsession and at the same time, I think
he found fullest there. I think there was a therapy
(07:40):
to it. But whenever he was with his watches, he
would lock himself in a room and a room that
no one else had keys to and that was completely
dark and windowless, and he would just spend hours there,
as far as I could tell, just observing mechanisms and
making sure that these watches worked. He was absolutely mystordical
(08:03):
and obsessed with orders. So if he looked at his
record collection, you know, it was all aligned by category
of music by composers. They all had different little colors,
and they all had to be absolutely perfect. He had
always quirks and all these obsessions. And then one of
these afternoons, one of my cousins reported that he had
(08:24):
seen my father moved a books, and that my father
had moved a book from that room at the back
of the house where he kept his watchers and when
he repaired his watches, and that he had moved the
box and then slightly all the manner. There was something
peculiar about the way he carried the books, and he
carried it into this room, which was sort of the
library in our house. And my cousin reported that, you know,
(08:47):
there was obviously something precious in the books, and must
be maybe it was the jeweled watches or something. I
waited for everyone to go, and I went and I
found this book, and when I opened it, I was
quite a delusion. There was actually no treature, no to
old watching, which is some old papers. And one of
the old papers I found was terrifying because it was
(09:09):
the photograph of my father as a young man, and
I recognized it had be very distinct. I um so
I knew it was him, But right underneath this picture
of my father was the stamp of HIT there. And
I was pretty young, but old enough to know that
he was obviously not a good guy. And then it
(09:32):
was stated ninety three, It said er Lynn, and that
made no sense because I knew my father actually was
a check immigrant and I knew that he had come
from Proud And then the name was someone else's name.
It wasn't Harns Moylan. That's obviously completely threw me. And
(09:52):
what I did that afternoon is I ran to my
mother and I said, he's an impostor. And I think
that is also a very telling because I don't think
that my children found an ID card. When my husband's
photograph that someone else's name, the reaction would not be
to say demands an impostor. So I think that speaks
to the fact that there was obviously some mystery there
and that I was aware of it, but there was
(10:14):
something that my father was not telling me, possibly not
telling others. That was probably the first two. And when
I saw that all these other moments, what the fund
became relevant to all these spilences or you know, there
were whenever he spoke to my father, Um, he was
incredibly engaged. But if you asked him about the past,
if you asked him about par because you asked him
(10:36):
about his family, there would be a time minute talk
with silence, and then he had moved the conversation swiss
ly on. He just absolutely was accused to speak about
the past or about his family. And then there were
the nightmare So when I was a child, just stept
down the corridor from my parents, and there were punch
(10:57):
of nights where I was just woken up by these
horrific screams, and it was my father and my father
screaming in a language that I didn't understand, and I
just remember sort of waking up terrified and finding my
father covered and sweat and my mother trying to sort
of call and dace. You know, that was obviously also unusual.
(11:19):
Why would a man who was so successful, so seemingly happy,
so carefree, wake up screaming in the night. What did
your mother say when you first found the contents of
the box and you found this strange document and said,
Dad's an impostor? What was her response to that? My mother,
(11:42):
she's very open and very soothing, and she's basically just said,
don't worry too much about this. I'm not worried about it.
You shouldn't worry about it. And that was sort of
general seeing whenever I asked. Having said that, I could
have never asked my father outright, because that's very cute
time that I did. The response was just so overwhelmingly
(12:04):
emotional and awful that I just couldn't. Ariana tuxs this
information or non information away in that hidden place where
we put things we don't yet comprehend. She heads to
the States for college, and at Tufts University, she has
approached on the first day of orientation for international students
(12:28):
by a freshman from Mexico, a guy who actually delivers
the line, hey, we should meet up because we're both
good looking, we're both Latin American, and we're both Jewish,
to which Ariana comes back with the perfect rejoinder, the
kind of thing you usually think of after the fact.
She says, listen, you're not good looking and I'm not Jewish,
(12:52):
but the comment stays with her. It's the first time
anyone has ever used the word Jewish in reference to Ariana.
Venezuela was such a melting pot culture back then, that
the Neumans were surrounded by people of every religion and background,
but no one was ever categorized in terms of their religion,
not until Ariana's new friend decided to point it out,
(13:13):
based simply on her surname, Neuman, a Jewish name. I
called my father a couple of days later, and I
called him up and I said that us Mexican kid
just came up to me and said I was Jewish
and he just on silent. Understand, man was constantly talking,
and you know, he was more than animated, and silence
(13:36):
was an unusual thing unless he was preparing his watches
of writing or reading. He said, what do you mean
and I said, well, he said, we have Jewish blood.
And his voice started to shake and he said, please
that you ever used that term with me. That is
what the Nazis said about us. And he just took
the framed up. In your book, you write, there were
(14:01):
hints before peppered across my memories, were moments that jarred,
instances of disquiet. The cracks had been there all along,
you know. I think with family secrets, when we discover
something is as important as what we discover when we're
ready or not ready to discover something can really alter
(14:24):
and effect the way that we then contend with or
metabolize it. I think that's absolutely right, and I realized,
I mean, you have to be ready to do these
things and to absorb. We'll be back in a moment
with more family secrets. Ariana's first child, a son, has
(14:50):
just been born when her father dies after an extended
illness in September of two. Never does Hans Neuman break
his silence about his past. There is no laden life
unburdening to his only daughter. But what does happen is
even more remarkable than a lifetime of silence. He leaves
(15:11):
Ariana the box. Yes, the box, the very one she
snooped through once as founding member of the mysterious Boot Club.
She hasn't seen it since, and now the box and
the history it will yield is hers. In death, Hans
is giving Ariana permission, no more than permission. This is
(15:35):
an exportation to piece together and investigate their lost family history.
But she isn't ready. How can she be. She's just
embarked on the most optimistic adventure of building her own family.
As you know, when you start a wonderful relationship with
someone and you decide to children into this world. You
(15:57):
have to be in a particular frame of mind. You're
happy with your present who are looking into the future
with excitement. So to turn around and and delve into
a path which I then thought was going to be
just filled with horror and darkness. I just thought I
couldn't handle. I just couldn't read the letters and then
go back and you know, read fairy tales for my
(16:19):
children at night, and do the voices for the very
hungry chime press. It wasn't compatible. So it wasn't until
they grew up a little bit more, you know, I
did little by little why it had the letters translated,
and every so often, you know, when sort of the
kids were at school and nursery and my husband was
at work, and I just felt brave, I would dip
(16:39):
into one of the letters. Arianna keeps the box in
an antique contraption that looks like three wooden steps, like
the beginning of a staircase to nowhere. The contraption is
in her office where she writes, but inside there's a
hidden compartment. The steps lift and the lid lifts up,
and no one would ever know. In fact, you yourself
(17:02):
could forget that anything was hidden away. There. Years go by,
during which Mariana has two more children. Eventually she feels
ready to tackle the contents of the box. Inside the steps,
she begins to research send material for transcription from Check
into English, and slowly, as she's able to gather more
(17:23):
and more information, she begins to piece together a portrait
of the lives of a large extended family in Czechoslovakia
in the late nineteen thirties. The family owned a paint
and lacquer business called Montana, with factories in Prague and
in southeastern Czechoslovakia. They were a middle class Jewish family, assimilated,
(17:45):
not particularly religious, so discovered to the letters was just huge, vibrant, happy,
well happy trying to survive in what was a world
that was becoming more anti Semitic. Baby, there were postcards
as my grandparents in the trance in nineteen thirty six
and my grandfather in a bathing so smiling. It's remarkable
(18:09):
to me that they could still find moments of drawings.
And it's because in nineteen thirty six, certainly in Prague
and most definitely in Germany, you know, Jews did not
feel sick, and a lot of them had already started permegrated.
They were very much part of the Jewish community, and
they also have funds who were in Jewish and you know,
they managed to solder on until It's remarkable to me
(18:32):
because someone said, why did they not rebel? Why did
your father not rebel? Why did they not rebel against it?
And because it's very difficult to rebel against these blue laws,
which are so minute. It's the aggregation of all of them,
and it's sort of how bullies and futilitarian regimes work.
It's just that gradual de humanization. So it's very interesting
(18:55):
for me to have these letters which span from actually
the twenties through the thirties up until nineteen two well
and then the once from the camps until nine, because
you really see how effectively my family was to humanized.
Well I say that, and at the same time, I
don't think that's really accurate, because they weren't humanized and
(19:18):
yet managed to find humanity in even in the concentration
camp and moments of joy and moments of happiness and
moments of just being human. But they were certainly humanized
in the eyes of the others. So it was basically
my father, his older brother. My grandfather, and my grandmother
(19:40):
and my father turned eighteen in nineteen nine, the year
that had Ger invaded Chechoslovakia, and his older brother was
three years older. His older brother was married to a
woman who was a gentile, so she was thought Jewish,
and that protected him from being transported. My grandparents and
(20:02):
my father were not protected by anything and um in
ninety two. In May nineteen forty two, transport letter arived
saying that they all had to report to put me
into the transtations and be transported to rising Stuff. My
grandfather started pulling every possible string that could and trying
to find every excuse like he could so that they
(20:23):
wouldn't be transported, and they were successful in as far
as they managed to stays my grandfather and my father
from the transport. From that transport, so my grandmother was
spent alone. She was sent alone with two of her brothers.
My grandfather is then deported in November forty two. They're
both spending letters out saying we're okay, don't worry about us,
(20:47):
but whatever you do, don't get spent here. You know,
do whatever you can, he says, but don't come here.
So my father gets a deportation that are in marsh
Warty three, and by then there's there's no way that
he's going to save from this. MHM justifies to hide.
(21:10):
With the help of the manager of the paint factory,
his brother, and his brother's wife, who is a non Jew,
Hans is hidden in the paint factory. They build a
fake wall and create a tiny little room. He's hidden
there during the day when the paint factory is in business,
and for two months, Ariana's father remains very still aware
(21:32):
always that he's in danger. He's on the Gestapo's wanted list,
and one of the places the Gestapo would undoubtedly come
looking for him is in his family's factory. Luckily, amazingly,
the Gestapo don't show up. Hans has just finished a
degree in chemistry school and he has a best friend
called Fene Fenek isn't Jewish and he works for the
(21:55):
Nazis in Berlin at a paint factory. So after has
been hiding for a couple of months, Fenic comes to
him one night and says, just in passing, oh, we
have so much work in Berlin, were so understaffed and
there's no one capable in Berlin. To do this job,
and Phoenix says, if only you could be there with me,
(22:17):
and you know, it's one of those sort of Drinka
moments where my father just says, that's it, that's what
I have to do. And I traced senex Son, who
told me this beautiful story about how they were sitting
there and you know, with one candle licked in this
little room because they didn't want to alert the neighbors
(22:38):
to their presence. And there's a check saying that says
the darkest shadow, it's just beneath the candle. So if
you want to hide, you don't hide around the candle
were the light well piece you off. You hide in
the center of it all, where no one is going
to look for you, and where the shadow is the darkness.
(23:00):
So the darkest shadow, if there's beneath the candles, the
center of it all, whether shadow is the darkness is Britain.
So it's completely crazy and probably quite brilliant, but completely insane.
And I think it's the kind of thing that that
you wouldn't do. I I certainly wouldn't do if you
wouldn't do if you had a family, because you know,
if you're twenty two and you know, the alternative is death,
(23:22):
and you just figure what do I have to lose?
They create the spake identity and they get him as
fake I d um, the doctor is a fake ID.
And then Extend, incredibly bravely manages and he goes back
to Berlin, gets permission to come back to Prague and
my father with Dennis passport and the full s I
(23:45):
d in then sebast thing, which is the saying that
they exchanged then Sibster didn't exist. Um it's as you
get on the midnight train from Pargue to Berlin in
May and manages two against all olds across the border
to get into Berlin, and without any proper termits managed
(24:06):
to find a job at the paint factory that Stenic
was working in and to live for two years pretending
to be John Sebastia, just a normal check guy, not Jewish,
who is a chemist and who's interested in paint, and
he works for the factory that is developing laquers and
he does that until That's how he survived the war,
(24:32):
within the horrors of the Holocaust, the perishing of almost
an entire family, the decimation of millions. Here is luck.
Hans is lucky, he cheats, capture and certain deaths. Not once,
not twice, but multiple times. I find myself thinking of Ariana,
(24:54):
who would never have been born if Hans's story hadn't
played out exactly as it did. Everything that never would
have happened, her father's extraordinary success, and her parents love story,
and her three children now growing up in London. Her
children never met her father, the watch repairer, until recently.
(25:16):
She had never told them of his watches or his
obsessive timekeeping. And yet what do we inherit? What has
passed down and how does it shape us? Hans tried
all his life to box up his traumatic experiences, and
in certain ways he succeeded, I suppose. But trauma will
(25:37):
have its way with us eventually. It's like an invisible,
multi headed mystical hydra, and those heads will appear, perhaps
not in the secret Keeper's life, but in the generations
to follow. Ariana's children don't believe this, by the way,
she and they have heated debates on the subject. They
(25:57):
believe that we each decide and shape who we are,
that unspoken trauma and lessons do not leave their trace.
Marianna does not entirely agree with them. As she writes
in her memoir, of course we have control over our identity,
but it is not absolute. What is it's sort is
(26:18):
remarkable to me. Pretty is that my son in particular,
reminds me a lot, a lot of my fathers. He
stands the same way. She's very black and white and
very absolute. And it might might be because teen and um,
and he's an opinionated teenager. But the other thing that
he charged that he's obsessed with time, which is interesting
(26:42):
to me because my father's obsession the plan was obviously
something that he wasn't born with. What my children have
inherited from them, in addition to many other things, is
this obsession with time with has to have this a
product to the trauma, so that I passed onto them,
whether that he has passed on through me to them.
(27:05):
Are our genes that are warphed or changed by the
trauma that he lived through, because he certainly wasn't like
that he was sixteen seventeen eighteen, and yet my son,
who is my father, was before the war. It is
very much how my father was afterwards. Ariana's meticulously researched
(27:28):
family history strikes me as the deepest kind of devotion,
not religious devotion, the devotion to all that was lost.
The father, she never knew, the grandparents, She never knew
the grandparents. Her children have never known the extended family
that perished in the Nazi death camps. She can't bring
them back, not exactly, but she can offer us an
(27:52):
enduring glimpse of their vanished world. As I started peeping
it together and doing family tree, letter had lot of
them doing, describing this man who cold hands, who I
couldn't recognize as my father, who the young man who
wanted to be a poet for a really bad poetry,
(28:12):
and he was a complete shambles. He arrived late for dinner,
he was always bowing off fins, He was not punctual,
he was chaostic, he didn't want to study. He was
doing stink bombs of native in nineteen nine. You know,
it was not at all that sort of very controlled
um that I had met. So it was wonderful really
(28:33):
that I got to meet my father as a young man,
and a young man that obviously has you know, pretty
much disappeared after the war and pretty much disappeared by
the time I came around. In a way, you really
end up with two different relationships with your father, you know,
over the course of your life. Thus far, you have
(28:54):
the relationship with your father when he was living in
which his secret was mostly held and not on the
table for any kind of conversation. And then you have
the relationship with your father and his history and your
whole family's history after he passes away. Because that is
(29:15):
possibly the biggest joy of having done this research. I
think when you lose a parent, you never really fully
lose a parent, because they're with you, the women in
your heart that remain genetically with you. But the search
has been a way of keeping him with me still,
and it's been marvels. Here's Ariana reading one last brief
(29:35):
passage from when time stopped. 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 hole to
the long windowless room. And as he raises his visor
(29:58):
and looks up from his watches, explained 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 longed
to tell my father that I strolled around the garden
(30:18):
of his house in Lepche and wrote our book on
a desk crafted by the person who now lived 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. I
(30:53):
want to thank Arianna Noyman for taking the time to
share her story with us. For more on Ariana's debut book,
When Time Stopped, A Memoir of My Father's War and
What Remains, visit Arianna Neuman dot com. That's a r
I A N A N e U M A n
(31:13):
N dot com. Family Secrets is an I heeart media production.
Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, and Julie Douglas and
beth Anne Macaluso are the executive producers. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, you can get
in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets
podcast dot com. You can also find us on Instagram
(31:35):
at Danny writer and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and
Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance,
visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts from My
(31:57):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. There
is a question mark almost lost in a sea of
names on the walls of an old synagogue in Prague.
Visitors hushed children as they passed through each chamber of
(00:21):
the Pincus Memorial. It is hard not to be overwhelmed
by the dizzying display of black and red letters. They
memorialize seventy seven thousand, two hundred and ninety seven individuals.
Each was a resident of the Czech districts of Bohemia
and Moravia during the war. All were victims of the Nazis.
(00:43):
Next to every name is stenciled the date of birth,
and next to each state of birth neatly sits the
date of death. One entry bears the name of my father,
Hannas Stanislav Norman, born on February nine one. It is different,
unlike the others on the wall, it has no date
(01:04):
of death. Instead, carefully calligraphed, there's an incongruous and bald
black question mark. I visited the memorial in nineteen ninety
seven as a tourist, unaware of any link with the synagogue.
Scanning across the top all to my right as I
descended the steps into the first chamber. I was astounded
(01:27):
to see my father's name. He was then very much alive,
settled and working in Cadakas, and yet the bold question
mark was there, both jarring an oddly opposite. This was
the first time and I had seen the query inked
on the wall. But questions about my father had emerged
(01:47):
long before my quest for answer started, when I was
just a little girl, living across an ocean and a
sea in a very different world. That's Ariana noym It,
a writer and mother of three who currently lives with
her family in London. Arianna's first book, When Time Stopped,
(02:09):
a memoir of my father's war and What Remains is
just out, and it centers on an extraordinary secret held
tightly at the very core of her father's life, one
he never spoke of while he was living. Ariana, as
the sole heir to a vanished world, painstakingly brings an
(02:31):
entire lost family to life. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. So I grew up in the Venezuela
(02:55):
of the seventies, and which is completely disintu course than
the Venezuelage day. It was then at place billed with
promise and with light. There were theaters being built, museums, schools, airports, roads.
It was really a place of potential. It was seen
as the capital of South America, really bustling and vibrates,
(03:19):
and of course the nature there is absolutely useful and
in this at least wonderful surroundings in this wonderful country.
Was my father, and she was involved in everything. He
had industries, he had newspapers, he was involved in museums,
he was setting up schools and had set up as
design institution at a university to study business. He was
(03:43):
involved in charity. So he was really vibrant, engaged person.
And I lived in this beautiful house in the center
of practice, with stunning gardens, and it was just a
plaise built with colors and joys, and you know, garms
were lush, and they were parents and slots, and it
(04:03):
was really a pretty magical place. Tell me more about
life with your parents, Maybe describe your mother a little
bit to me as well. She was quite an old father.
My mother was twenty years younger, and she was just
stunningly beautiful um and she was also involved in the arts,
(04:25):
and as I grew up, she was involved in anitary
of culture and started a ballet company. So, you know,
my house was filled with interesting people, bill with politicians,
with artists, with ballet dancers, and there was a constant
flock of you know, people of ideas. You just felt
(04:45):
that you were in the center of it all. And
my parents were very much in love with each other,
thanking people seemed to be just in love with them.
People were just flowing into this house and surrounding them
all the time. My parents were quite social. They weren't
super involved in my upbringing in the ways that we're
involved and children stop bringing now, so they want to
(05:08):
sort of checking on my homework and taking me to
school and things like that. But I was very much
part of their world and part of their you know,
I just milled about these gardens and sat around with
these people and attended the sort of brings parties that
they gave, and you know, whatever they were in meetings,
I just tapped there are my mother's lap and was
part of it. Really. Ariana was unfazed by her unusual
(05:34):
and in many ways magical childhood. What she really wanted,
what was most interesting to her, was to have a
mystery to solve. She sort of took over the family's kennel.
The Neuman's had really larger dogs, Great Danes and Rottweiler's,
so it was a big kennel and Arianna would sit
in it on a crate, and she turned it into
(05:55):
a library of sorts. A favorite, unsurprisingly was Nancy Drew.
Arianna was an only child, quite isolated in many ways.
I so relate to this, the dreamy only child who
spends a lot of time reading and solving mysteries. She
even starts a detective club with a cousin and some friends,
(06:17):
called the Mysterious Boot Club. Arianna, what do you think
that was about? I was so taken by that in
your book, the idea that you wanted to be a
detective as a child, and that you created this mysterious
boot club. And of course hindsight is twenty twenty, but
what was the sense you had that there were mysteries
(06:39):
to be solved? I just thought, why wouldn't everyone want
to solve mysteries? And what I realized now is that
I obviously spent that there was a mystery there that
there were things that we're obviously not being told to me,
and my father really was at the center of this mystery.
(06:59):
The Aldren Slash detectives, who were members of the Mysterious
Boot Club kept an eye on Ariana's father. He never
ever spoke about feelings. He was always talking about ideas
and concept and you know, sort of the puzzled or
he was repairing watches. He was absolutely obsessed by this
(07:20):
watch connection that he had. And it wasn't the normal
sort of obsession with some triality and time that you know,
a successful man would have because he wants to maximize
his time in order to be more efficient. It was
a real obsession and at the same time, I think
he found fullest there. I think there was a therapy
(07:40):
to it. But whenever he was with his watches, he
would lock himself in a room and a room that
no one else had keys to and that was completely
dark and windowless, and he would just spend hours there,
as far as I could tell, just observing mechanisms and
making sure that these watches worked. He was absolutely mystordical
(08:03):
and obsessed with orders. So if he looked at his
record collection, you know, it was all aligned by category
of music by composers. They all had different little colors,
and they all had to be absolutely perfect. He had
always quirks and all these obsessions. And then one of
these afternoons, one of my cousins reported that he had
(08:24):
seen my father moved a books, and that my father
had moved a book from that room at the back
of the house where he kept his watchers and when
he repaired his watches, and that he had moved the
box and then slightly all the manner. There was something
peculiar about the way he carried the books, and he
carried it into this room, which was sort of the
library in our house. And my cousin reported that, you know,
(08:47):
there was obviously something precious in the books, and must
be maybe it was the jeweled watches or something. I
waited for everyone to go, and I went and I
found this book, and when I opened it, I was
quite a delusion. There was actually no treature, no to
old watching, which is some old papers. And one of
the old papers I found was terrifying because it was
(09:09):
the photograph of my father as a young man, and
I recognized it had be very distinct. I um so
I knew it was him, But right underneath this picture
of my father was the stamp of HIT there. And
I was pretty young, but old enough to know that
he was obviously not a good guy. And then it
(09:32):
was stated ninety three, It said er Lynn, and that
made no sense because I knew my father actually was
a check immigrant and I knew that he had come
from Proud And then the name was someone else's name.
It wasn't Harns Moylan. That's obviously completely threw me. And
(09:52):
what I did that afternoon is I ran to my
mother and I said, he's an impostor. And I think
that is also a very telling because I don't think
that my children found an ID card. When my husband's
photograph that someone else's name, the reaction would not be
to say demands an impostor. So I think that speaks
to the fact that there was obviously some mystery there
and that I was aware of it, but there was
(10:14):
something that my father was not telling me, possibly not
telling others. That was probably the first two. And when
I saw that all these other moments, what the fund
became relevant to all these spilences or you know, there
were whenever he spoke to my father, Um, he was
incredibly engaged. But if you asked him about the past,
if you asked him about par because you asked him
(10:36):
about his family, there would be a time minute talk
with silence, and then he had moved the conversation swiss
ly on. He just absolutely was accused to speak about
the past or about his family. And then there were
the nightmare So when I was a child, just stept
down the corridor from my parents, and there were punch
(10:57):
of nights where I was just woken up by these
horrific screams, and it was my father and my father
screaming in a language that I didn't understand, and I
just remember sort of waking up terrified and finding my
father covered and sweat and my mother trying to sort
of call and dace. You know, that was obviously also unusual.
(11:19):
Why would a man who was so successful, so seemingly happy,
so carefree, wake up screaming in the night. What did
your mother say when you first found the contents of
the box and you found this strange document and said,
Dad's an impostor? What was her response to that? My mother,
(11:42):
she's very open and very soothing, and she's basically just said,
don't worry too much about this. I'm not worried about it.
You shouldn't worry about it. And that was sort of
general seeing whenever I asked. Having said that, I could
have never asked my father outright, because that's very cute
time that I did. The response was just so overwhelmingly
(12:04):
emotional and awful that I just couldn't. Ariana tuxs this
information or non information away in that hidden place where
we put things we don't yet comprehend. She heads to
the States for college, and at Tufts University, she has
approached on the first day of orientation for international students
(12:28):
by a freshman from Mexico, a guy who actually delivers
the line, hey, we should meet up because we're both
good looking, we're both Latin American, and we're both Jewish,
to which Ariana comes back with the perfect rejoinder, the
kind of thing you usually think of after the fact.
She says, listen, you're not good looking and I'm not Jewish,
(12:52):
but the comment stays with her. It's the first time
anyone has ever used the word Jewish in reference to Ariana.
Venezuela was such a melting pot culture back then, that
the Neumans were surrounded by people of every religion and background,
but no one was ever categorized in terms of their religion,
not until Ariana's new friend decided to point it out,
(13:13):
based simply on her surname, Neuman, a Jewish name. I
called my father a couple of days later, and I
called him up and I said that us Mexican kid
just came up to me and said I was Jewish
and he just on silent. Understand, man was constantly talking,
and you know, he was more than animated, and silence
(13:36):
was an unusual thing unless he was preparing his watches
of writing or reading. He said, what do you mean
and I said, well, he said, we have Jewish blood.
And his voice started to shake and he said, please
that you ever used that term with me. That is
what the Nazis said about us. And he just took
the framed up. In your book, you write, there were
(14:01):
hints before peppered across my memories, were moments that jarred,
instances of disquiet. The cracks had been there all along,
you know. I think with family secrets, when we discover
something is as important as what we discover when we're
ready or not ready to discover something can really alter
(14:24):
and effect the way that we then contend with or
metabolize it. I think that's absolutely right, and I realized,
I mean, you have to be ready to do these
things and to absorb. We'll be back in a moment
with more family secrets. Ariana's first child, a son, has
(14:50):
just been born when her father dies after an extended
illness in September of two. Never does Hans Neuman break
his silence about his past. There is no laden life
unburdening to his only daughter. But what does happen is
even more remarkable than a lifetime of silence. He leaves
(15:11):
Ariana the box. Yes, the box, the very one she
snooped through once as founding member of the mysterious Boot Club.
She hasn't seen it since, and now the box and
the history it will yield is hers. In death, Hans
is giving Ariana permission, no more than permission. This is
(15:35):
an exportation to piece together and investigate their lost family history.
But she isn't ready. How can she be. She's just
embarked on the most optimistic adventure of building her own family.
As you know, when you start a wonderful relationship with
someone and you decide to children into this world. You
(15:57):
have to be in a particular frame of mind. You're
happy with your present who are looking into the future
with excitement. So to turn around and and delve into
a path which I then thought was going to be
just filled with horror and darkness. I just thought I
couldn't handle. I just couldn't read the letters and then
go back and you know, read fairy tales for my
(16:19):
children at night, and do the voices for the very
hungry chime press. It wasn't compatible. So it wasn't until
they grew up a little bit more, you know, I
did little by little why it had the letters translated,
and every so often, you know, when sort of the
kids were at school and nursery and my husband was
at work, and I just felt brave, I would dip
(16:39):
into one of the letters. Arianna keeps the box in
an antique contraption that looks like three wooden steps, like
the beginning of a staircase to nowhere. The contraption is
in her office where she writes, but inside there's a
hidden compartment. The steps lift and the lid lifts up,
and no one would ever know. In fact, you yourself
(17:02):
could forget that anything was hidden away. There. Years go by,
during which Mariana has two more children. Eventually she feels
ready to tackle the contents of the box. Inside the steps,
she begins to research send material for transcription from Check
into English, and slowly, as she's able to gather more
(17:23):
and more information, she begins to piece together a portrait
of the lives of a large extended family in Czechoslovakia
in the late nineteen thirties. The family owned a paint
and lacquer business called Montana, with factories in Prague and
in southeastern Czechoslovakia. They were a middle class Jewish family, assimilated,
(17:45):
not particularly religious, so discovered to the letters was just huge, vibrant, happy,
well happy trying to survive in what was a world
that was becoming more anti Semitic. Baby, there were postcards
as my grandparents in the trance in nineteen thirty six
and my grandfather in a bathing so smiling. It's remarkable
(18:09):
to me that they could still find moments of drawings.
And it's because in nineteen thirty six, certainly in Prague
and most definitely in Germany, you know, Jews did not
feel sick, and a lot of them had already started permegrated.
They were very much part of the Jewish community, and
they also have funds who were in Jewish and you know,
they managed to solder on until It's remarkable to me
(18:32):
because someone said, why did they not rebel? Why did
your father not rebel? Why did they not rebel against it?
And because it's very difficult to rebel against these blue laws,
which are so minute. It's the aggregation of all of them,
and it's sort of how bullies and futilitarian regimes work.
It's just that gradual de humanization. So it's very interesting
(18:55):
for me to have these letters which span from actually
the twenties through the thirties up until nineteen two well
and then the once from the camps until nine, because
you really see how effectively my family was to humanized.
Well I say that, and at the same time, I
don't think that's really accurate, because they weren't humanized and
(19:18):
yet managed to find humanity in even in the concentration
camp and moments of joy and moments of happiness and
moments of just being human. But they were certainly humanized
in the eyes of the others. So it was basically
my father, his older brother. My grandfather, and my grandmother
(19:40):
and my father turned eighteen in nineteen nine, the year
that had Ger invaded Chechoslovakia, and his older brother was
three years older. His older brother was married to a
woman who was a gentile, so she was thought Jewish,
and that protected him from being transported. My grandparents and
(20:02):
my father were not protected by anything and um in
ninety two. In May nineteen forty two, transport letter arived
saying that they all had to report to put me
into the transtations and be transported to rising Stuff. My
grandfather started pulling every possible string that could and trying
to find every excuse like he could so that they
(20:23):
wouldn't be transported, and they were successful in as far
as they managed to stays my grandfather and my father
from the transport. From that transport, so my grandmother was
spent alone. She was sent alone with two of her brothers.
My grandfather is then deported in November forty two. They're
both spending letters out saying we're okay, don't worry about us,
(20:47):
but whatever you do, don't get spent here. You know,
do whatever you can, he says, but don't come here.
So my father gets a deportation that are in marsh
Warty three, and by then there's there's no way that
he's going to save from this. MHM justifies to hide.
(21:10):
With the help of the manager of the paint factory,
his brother, and his brother's wife, who is a non Jew,
Hans is hidden in the paint factory. They build a
fake wall and create a tiny little room. He's hidden
there during the day when the paint factory is in business,
and for two months, Ariana's father remains very still aware
(21:32):
always that he's in danger. He's on the Gestapo's wanted list,
and one of the places the Gestapo would undoubtedly come
looking for him is in his family's factory. Luckily, amazingly,
the Gestapo don't show up. Hans has just finished a
degree in chemistry school and he has a best friend
called Fene Fenek isn't Jewish and he works for the
(21:55):
Nazis in Berlin at a paint factory. So after has
been hiding for a couple of months, Fenic comes to
him one night and says, just in passing, oh, we
have so much work in Berlin, were so understaffed and
there's no one capable in Berlin. To do this job,
and Phoenix says, if only you could be there with me,
(22:17):
and you know, it's one of those sort of Drinka
moments where my father just says, that's it, that's what
I have to do. And I traced senex Son, who
told me this beautiful story about how they were sitting
there and you know, with one candle licked in this
little room because they didn't want to alert the neighbors
(22:38):
to their presence. And there's a check saying that says
the darkest shadow, it's just beneath the candle. So if
you want to hide, you don't hide around the candle
were the light well piece you off. You hide in
the center of it all, where no one is going
to look for you, and where the shadow is the darkness.
(23:00):
So the darkest shadow, if there's beneath the candles, the
center of it all, whether shadow is the darkness is Britain.
So it's completely crazy and probably quite brilliant, but completely insane.
And I think it's the kind of thing that that
you wouldn't do. I I certainly wouldn't do if you
wouldn't do if you had a family, because you know,
if you're twenty two and you know, the alternative is death,
(23:22):
and you just figure what do I have to lose?
They create the spake identity and they get him as
fake I d um, the doctor is a fake ID.
And then Extend, incredibly bravely manages and he goes back
to Berlin, gets permission to come back to Prague and
my father with Dennis passport and the full s I
(23:45):
d in then sebast thing, which is the saying that
they exchanged then Sibster didn't exist. Um it's as you
get on the midnight train from Pargue to Berlin in
May and manages two against all olds across the border
to get into Berlin, and without any proper termits managed
(24:06):
to find a job at the paint factory that Stenic
was working in and to live for two years pretending
to be John Sebastia, just a normal check guy, not Jewish,
who is a chemist and who's interested in paint, and
he works for the factory that is developing laquers and
he does that until That's how he survived the war,
(24:32):
within the horrors of the Holocaust, the perishing of almost
an entire family, the decimation of millions. Here is luck.
Hans is lucky, he cheats, capture and certain deaths. Not once,
not twice, but multiple times. I find myself thinking of Ariana,
(24:54):
who would never have been born if Hans's story hadn't
played out exactly as it did. Everything that never would
have happened, her father's extraordinary success, and her parents love story,
and her three children now growing up in London. Her
children never met her father, the watch repairer, until recently.
(25:16):
She had never told them of his watches or his
obsessive timekeeping. And yet what do we inherit? What has
passed down and how does it shape us? Hans tried
all his life to box up his traumatic experiences, and
in certain ways he succeeded, I suppose. But trauma will
(25:37):
have its way with us eventually. It's like an invisible,
multi headed mystical hydra, and those heads will appear, perhaps
not in the secret Keeper's life, but in the generations
to follow. Ariana's children don't believe this, by the way,
she and they have heated debates on the subject. They
(25:57):
believe that we each decide and shape who we are,
that unspoken trauma and lessons do not leave their trace.
Marianna does not entirely agree with them. As she writes
in her memoir, of course we have control over our identity,
but it is not absolute. What is it's sort is
(26:18):
remarkable to me. Pretty is that my son in particular,
reminds me a lot, a lot of my fathers. He
stands the same way. She's very black and white and
very absolute. And it might might be because teen and um,
and he's an opinionated teenager. But the other thing that
he charged that he's obsessed with time, which is interesting
(26:42):
to me because my father's obsession the plan was obviously
something that he wasn't born with. What my children have
inherited from them, in addition to many other things, is
this obsession with time with has to have this a
product to the trauma, so that I passed onto them,
whether that he has passed on through me to them.
(27:05):
Are our genes that are warphed or changed by the
trauma that he lived through, because he certainly wasn't like
that he was sixteen seventeen eighteen, and yet my son,
who is my father, was before the war. It is
very much how my father was afterwards. Ariana's meticulously researched
(27:28):
family history strikes me as the deepest kind of devotion,
not religious devotion, the devotion to all that was lost.
The father, she never knew, the grandparents, She never knew
the grandparents. Her children have never known the extended family
that perished in the Nazi death camps. She can't bring
them back, not exactly, but she can offer us an
(27:52):
enduring glimpse of their vanished world. As I started peeping
it together and doing family tree, letter had lot of
them doing, describing this man who cold hands, who I
couldn't recognize as my father, who the young man who
wanted to be a poet for a really bad poetry,
(28:12):
and he was a complete shambles. He arrived late for dinner,
he was always bowing off fins, He was not punctual,
he was chaostic, he didn't want to study. He was
doing stink bombs of native in nineteen nine. You know,
it was not at all that sort of very controlled
um that I had met. So it was wonderful really
(28:33):
that I got to meet my father as a young man,
and a young man that obviously has you know, pretty
much disappeared after the war and pretty much disappeared by
the time I came around. In a way, you really
end up with two different relationships with your father, you know,
over the course of your life. Thus far, you have
(28:54):
the relationship with your father when he was living in
which his secret was mostly held and not on the
table for any kind of conversation. And then you have
the relationship with your father and his history and your
whole family's history after he passes away. Because that is
(29:15):
possibly the biggest joy of having done this research. I
think when you lose a parent, you never really fully
lose a parent, because they're with you, the women in
your heart that remain genetically with you. But the search
has been a way of keeping him with me still,
and it's been marvels. Here's Ariana reading one last brief
(29:35):
passage from when time stopped. 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 hole to
the long windowless room. And as he raises his visor
(29:58):
and looks up from his watches, explained 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 longed
to tell my father that I strolled around the garden
(30:18):
of his house in Lepche and wrote our book on
a desk crafted by the person who now lived 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. I
(30:53):
want to thank Arianna Noyman for taking the time to
share her story with us. For more on Ariana's debut book,
When Time Stopped, A Memoir of My Father's War and
What Remains, visit Arianna Neuman dot com. That's a r
I A N A N e U M A n
(31:13):
N dot com. Family Secrets is an I heeart media production.
Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, and Julie Douglas and
beth Anne Macaluso are the executive producers. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, you can get
in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets
podcast dot com. You can also find us on Instagram
(31:35):
at Danny writer and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and
Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance,
visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts from My
(31:57):
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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