When Time Stopped - Ariana Neumann

Ariana Neumann’s story is quite incredible! My own mother has been working on our family tree for years, and I know how many hours, days, years it takes, and how amazing it is to find lost family members, and fascinating it is to learn so much more about our heritage. 

When she was growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, Ariana’s father, Hans Neumann, kept a tight lid on his past. Ariana knew that he had grown up in the Czech Republic, and over the years he gave her a few peeks into his childhood, but never enough for her to understand anything. When he died he left her a box of papers, most of which dated from WW2. With these few pieces of an enormous puzzle in her hands, Ariana started on a quest to find out the truth about her father’s past, and in return found a whole part of her family that until then had been hidden from her. 

When Time Stopped is Ariana Neumann’s story of how she managed to put together the story of her father’s childhood and early adulthood, and of how he managed to survive the war literally hidden in plain sight. But it isn’t just that, because during her quest Ariana also discovers her grandparents, who were both interned in Terezin, and then deported to Auschwitz where they perished. These stories are so important for us to read, even more so now as most people who lived through and survived WW2 and the atrocities that took place are now dead. We must carry these stories with us so that they do not become forgotten and/or whitewashed. I have personally visited Terezin, and felt the exact same as Ariana describes during her own visit. We must never forget.

This book reads as a memoir, and also partly as a detective novel. I love how Ariana lets us discover information with her along the narrative, it makes the reader feel involved and invested in the story. What a wonderful, but also heartbreaking read. No one can fault Holocaust survivors for wanting to bury the past, which is why it is our job, those of us lucky enough to never have had to experience it, to keep passing the stories along.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in return for an honest review of this book.