It was also chosen as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick and a Bookpage Readers Choice Best books of 2020.

It was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and a Financial Times and Daily Mail “Book of the Week”. When Time Stopped has been reviewed in the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, TLS, The Spectator, Daily Mail, The Oldie, JC, Times of Israel, The Sydney Morning Herald. Her memoir When Time Stopped (Scribner, February 2020 Argo CZ, May 2020 Les Escales FR 2021 Nagrela ES, 2021,Politiken DK 2021, Shanghai Nanquan Cultural Diffusion Co CN, 2023, Into Kustannus FI, 2023 20/20 PR, 2022) tells her journey of discovery about her father’s unlikely survival after hiding in plain sight in Berlin during WWII and gives glimpses of the lives, hopes and loves of a family lost in the Holocaust.

She has been researching her family history, tracing people, uncovering untold stories and solving the mysteries of her father's past for over a decade. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.Īriana was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. When Time Stopped is an unputdownable detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated, and she began reading. When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in war-torn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew.

When time stopped book