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

Description

In 1941, the first member of the Neumann family was arrested for swimming in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later, his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.

Of thirty-four Neumann family members living in Czechoslovakia before World War II, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. What Ariana Neumann’s father, Hans, experiences was unspeakable. Decades later, after he’d built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. Ariana knew nothing of his past–not even that his family was Jewish.

When, after his death, Hans left her a box crammed with letters, diary entries, and memorabilia, including an identification card with a different name, she felt she had permission to search into her father’s past, which included a harrowing stint in Berlin smuggling secrets out to the Allies.

When Time Stopped is two stories–the first, of a woman who becomes an astonishingly tenacious detective, assembling the most devastating details of life and death in Nazi Germany, and the second, of the man she’s determined to understand: her own father.