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

by Ariana Neumann

Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.

As I interviewed people about my family’s history, I learned that detailed questions often did little to trigger specific memories. People returned to distant facts in roundabout ways, along their own winding paths, which seemed more mapped by emotion than by logic.

“Please stop. Your thanks are not due, because my father did not do anything extraordinary. He only did the correct thing. Simply, he did what everybody should have done. We should all, as a country, have behaved like Frank Novák. And it is us who apologize to you that we did not.”

“You have to fight. Not with violence but with your mind, not for people but for ideas. Fight and work for what you believe in, Handa. That struggle is all that matters.”

“If you want to be truly just in this life, when you see people who are weak, you must stand with them. Because you are strong, and it is the weak who need you more, not the strong.”