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. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1903

Finding out about those who came before us had as much to do with the present and with the future as it did with the past.

Perhaps all remembrance is a process of compilation and creation. Every day we absorb what is around us and assemble observations of a specific time: sounds, smells, textures, words, images, and feelings. Of course, we prioritize and edit as we go, subjective witnesses to our own lives, providing recollections that are often biased and incomplete.

I have collated these recollections that capture my grandparents’ essence and consolidated them with the photographs and the hundreds of documents. Now my family are no longer a passed-over palette of faded shadows. I can conjure them.

Memories, like misfiled documents, are not always where you expect to find them. My direct questions as to Zdenka’s story had produced no helpful answers. 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.

“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.”

I have discovered the family who was never spoken about, the one who was not so much forgotten as veiled in the silence. And I finally have the grandparents I secretly longed to meet. I now know Otto and Ella Neumann. I have found them in the photographs, through the words of their letters and anecdotes that have emerged from the boxes and the research. I have retrieved an intimate sense of who they were, and I carry them in my heart. They are no longer distant figures in a picture of faded grays. Maybe