When Time Stopped

 My most recent read was When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains by Ariana Neumann. 

Ariana grew up in Venezuela with a Czech father and a Venezuelan mother. She knew nothing about her father's experiences in World War II. She did not even know he and his family were Jews. He never talked about it. Only after his death did Ariana start to learn about those years. Her father left her a box of documents and her cousin sent her more (her uncle had also not talked about the war year). There were letters, government documents from Czechoslovakia and Germany, and photographs of people Ariana had never heard about. All of this led her on a journey to find out what happened; in the process, she found family she had never known.

I quite enjoyed this book. It starts with Ariana's childhood memories, especially of her father. It then becomes a mix of the story of her father's life and the story of Ariana's quest to find the truth. The book is heartbreaking at times; after all, it is the story of a Jewish family in Prague during the Second World War. It is very intense at times as well. Even knowing that Ariana's father survived the war, there were still some very tense moments where it looked like he might not.

It is the story of survival, of a man who hid right under the nose of the Nazis, working in a Berlin factory for roughly the last two years of the war. It is the story of how a carefree boy became a careful man. It is the story of secrets kept, not because they were dirty secrets but rather because they were too painful to talk about.

I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in World War II from the human side.