The book by Arianna Neumann deserves to be read because of it personal, well-documented approach and the absence of graphic horrors--as if the reality of the Nazi terror was not horrific enough. Shoah in the Czech Lands was almost total. During the Gacha regime 80+% of the pre-war Jews perished--and this was "achieved" by the SS office counting twenty-something officers with--as was the case in Holland with almost complete collaboration by the local authorities.
This fact makes even the more remarkable that Arianna's father survived with the help of his factory's manager, Franz Novak? and the friend Zdenek Tuma, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose in case their ruses to save Hans Neumann were discovered. Novak made almost invisible hiding place for Neumann in the basement of his factory. The clever design walled up the basement so that there was no access from the factory and the window outside looked like belonging to a different and abandoned building. Czech Gestapo minions had to crawl through a narrow ground-level frame into a dark and dirty basement with good handheld lamps to discover traces of human habitation. This feat would not be possible with the modern security cameras.
Zdenek Tuma and female friends (Arianna's dad seemed to be quite popular with girls) helped to smuggle him from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia... to Berlin as the last place he would be looked for. The irony was that green-eyed artificial blond Neumann looked more "Arian" then Tuma on his passport photograph and his hair had to be painted a darker hue. What is especially remarkable is that during Nazi and Stalinist terror there were always people willing to risk their life to resist, to sabotage, to slow down the evil system. Even NKVD officers and state prosecutors sometimes nullified or questioned decisions of their superiors, notwithstanding that they could be easily become defendants in the next round of repression. [1]
Her father always a ladies man, was so much so, that in Berlin he had a German girlfriend. She confided to him that although "Slavs are definitely an inferior race, the factory manager considers him intelligent and so does she. Obviously, Czech women deliberately mated with German men to improve their racial stock". This shows how deep was the penetration of Nazi propaganda even in the questions of intimacy and how difficult it was to relieve Germans of their inherent sense of superiority.
[1] Similarly, at a completely different level of risk, there were people who gave work to blacklisted writers and hired faculty without stupid oaths. Equally, during Brezhnev's era, there were bosses who, despite secret prohibitions, employed Jews, were willing to overlook discrepancies in the anketa--colloquial name for the collection of open and secret files, or gave work to the dissidents and otkazniks. No such thing can exist in the contemporary United States. Nobody, not even the Congressional Committees and courts tasked with supervision of the intelligence services and the Armed Forces, challenged their establishment of secret torture chambers, unconstitutional blanket surveillance over American citizens and the like. Seemingly, public disapproval or career sabotage can deter honest behavior more than the executions. Beware: similar situation of blanket silence around Government surveillance was maintained in DDR, the East German Republic with rather puny sanctions for transgressors, rarely a suspended jail term. Yet, demoralization of society was so deep that the whole state machinery self-destructed literally in 48 hours after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
