When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann

In When Time Stopped, Ariana Neumann uncovers her father's experiences during WWII in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia . When time stopped is what she thinks of when she finds that her father, when hidden in a concealed room, took apart a watch to make sure it was working because it seemed to him, in his hidden compartment, that time had stopped.
It is decades later that Ariana starts to find out about her family and what they endured as Jews during an atrocious time. When her father receives orders to be transported to the Terezin concentration camp (a stopping off point before the death camp of Auschwitz) he hides for a while but the Gestapo is ruthless in their search and a friend points out that it is darkest below the light of the candle. This makes Hans Neumann consider something that others might think foolhardy - he headed to Berlin with a friend's passport and forged documents showing he was a gentile and there, as a chemist, finds work in a German paint factory helping the Nazis.

Like many Jews during and after the war, families separated to different countries and Hans Neumann headed to South America where Ariana was brought up in a Venezuelan home.