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.
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