Recommended by AJB
A young man escapes deportation to Auschwitz by travelling from Prague to Berlin, where he assumes a false identity - a Jew hiding in the very heart of Nazi Germany.
It’s an extraordinary true story of survival and espionage during the Holocaust and it features strongly in Ariana Neumann’s brilliant new memoir, When Time Stopped. The young man was her father, a man who created a new identity for himself in Venezuela after the war, leaving his daughter only the barest tantalising clues to his former life. Over the years since her father’s death Neumann has gradually pieced together the story of her family during the Second World War and she presents this journey of discovery in the book.
So, both thriller and detective story, the book is as compulsive reading as it sounds, and it proved for me a rare example of a book that I genuinely couldn’t put down. This might make it sound like a quick fix of action and mystery, but the book is so much more than that and made a far greater impact on me than anything else I have read in a very long time. In fact, I think it was the relationships in the story which had me hooked most strongly – a family, ordinary but, of course, extraordinary, and their circle of friends, struggling to support each other in a world that was falling apart around them at astonishing speed.
Particularly fascinating to me was the depiction of life in Terezin, where Neumann's family was transported to ahead of Auschwitz. It makes for distressing reading: appalling overcrowding and malnutrition in this ghetto-turned-concentration-camp significantly reduced the numbers sent on the final leg of their journey. The book offers a deeply moving portrayal of survival in Terezin, a testimony to family love and the remarkable acts of bravery humans are capable of. The amount of material which has survived in the voices of Neumann’s family is remarkable, and there are heart-stopping moments when you are suddenly presented with one of them speaking in their own voice, most memorably letters from Neumann’s grandparents in Terezin and their son’s account of his train journey to Berlin, poised to chew a cyanide capsule at the first sign of discovery.
To discuss the subtle ingenuity of the book’s structure and pacing would be more fitting for an English essay, but just as admirable is the skill with which Neumann balances the horror of Czechoslovakia’s journey into genocide against this tremendous sense of love – love that is never presented in a sentimental way but through the voices of family and friends, through the similarities she spots between her ancestors and her own children and through the relationships she built with people she encountered during nearly twenty years of research - there is a huge redemptive quality in the warmth of their encounters and the desire of strangers to share knowledge that enables Neumann’s family to come alive and be remembered with all the idiosyncrasies that make us human.
Many of us within the Pauline community will know Ariana, and the last time I endorsed a book written by somebody I knew, a student sent me the emoji of a paperclip. Lest I be accused of outrageous attachment again, here are a couple of the many rave reviews the book has received:
You can also hear Ariana discussing her book far more eloquently than I have here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOJs5KaVTFE
I would concur with everything that Mr Broughton has written.By the time I had finished reading the memoir, I felt that I had grown to know and love the author's Czech family and that the author has scored a great victory over Hitler in making her grandparents live again within the pages of the memoir. At times the memoir reads like a novel, and the writing is vivid. The writer's descriptions of her childhood in Venezuela are evocative of a world far away and almost alien from her father's childhood and young adulthood in Czechoslovakia. For me, the insights into life in Terezin (Theresienstadt) were particularly moving and painful as my own great grandparents ended up there. My great grandfather died of pneumonia there within three weeks of his arrival (transportation in the train cattle trucks hadn't done him any good). My great grandmother, Helene, after whom I am named, somehow survived there for over two years, only to be sent on one of the last trains to Auschwitz where she was gassed. Helena Howard
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