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