The Austrian dramatist and novelist Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969) dedicated his memoir A Civilian in the Balkan War to the village of Porodin in East Serbia. In exile in Belgrade, shortly before the start of the invasion of Yugoslavia, press reports drew Csokor’s attention to a murder in the village. A local youth robbed and killed a wandering Jewish peddler. It was the first ever recorded murder in Porodin, but this was not what made it special in Csokor’s eyes. The village elders met in the aftermath of the murder and ordered the whole village to undertake a fast for two months. After they had fasted, the villagers were to confess, repent, take communion, and gather money to pay back the indemnity for the murder. Struck by this ancient patriarchal communal ethic still present in the Balkans, Csokor praised the place where the guilt was common to all, like life and death – a place of sin and repentance. All of this happened while the country was under attack, at a time when bombers were destroying innocent cities, in the middle of a war to which no one could see an end. Csokor survived the war in that country, and immediately afterwards he published his memoir.1 Much has happened since then, and a lot has been written about the Second World War in the Balkans. However, the stories of the foreign, mostly Jewish, refugees arriving in the 1930s, with many being stranded during the war, is still largely unknown.
A chance encounter in London with another Viennese refugee survivor from Yugoslavia, Imre Rochlitz, opened this chapter of history for me and my students when Imre came to talk to them. Imre’s experience, recounted in a book he published with additional research and support by his son, struck me as both poignant and largely absent from both the history of the Holocaust and Yugoslav history.2 So, I embarked on a decade-long research project looking for literature and archival records. As these were scarce, I searched for more books written by survivors, then for their unpublished manuscripts, and finally for interviews with them. In one of them, Francis Ofner claimed that Yugoslavia and the Balkans, which for centuries had been on the periphery of Jewish history, became central in the 1930s.3 The Balkans, according to Ofner, provided the escape route, and comfort along the way, for tens of thousands of Jews and others, and remained one of their ultimate destinations before the Nazis shut it almost completely and most brutally, as in the case of the mass murder of Jewish refugees on the so-called Kladovo transport, which could be considered as the beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Describing how his family from Vienna illegally crossed into Yugoslavia, (Zwi) Heinrich Queller insisted that ‘only the Yugoslav people and its government showed humanity and empathy for Jews fleeing Germany. Border guards did not shoot at these desperate men, women and children that crawled over snow-covered hills. Nor would they send them back.’4 After extensive publications about the Western European or American exile of the Jewish people, it struck me that studying the journey to or via the Balkans could provide important comparative insights into the paths of the persecuted, while also illuminating the particular political context in the Balkan countries, and the responses of their respective Jewish communities, which differed from more well-known destinations.5 Before exploring this, a number of issues arose that needed to be addressed.
First, the Balkan countries did not operate under the same legal, institutional, economic, and, most importantly, discursive framework in addressing and reacting to the flow of people streaming from the rest of Europe to its often-forsaken corner. Protagonists (or victims) also perceived themselves in a different way during their flight or exile, and later as they recalled their experiences. Another question that naturally arose was how to identify a Jewish refugee in interwar Europe. Specialized literature insists on a difference in terminology between studies of: (1) migrants as a generic category; (2) refugees with a focus on status, rights, and protection given (or, in most cases, not given); and (3) (political) exiles, mostly concerned with the activities of those who chose or were forced into exile. Yet sources and more general historiography often do not make this distinction, and the same people are recorded as migrants and refugees or lumped together with local Balkan Jews.6 These administrative categories were only slowly codified in the interwar period, with authorities and/or common people in the Balkans making little sense of them while dealing with the newcomers. Eventually, I had to opt for a wide understanding of the term Jewish refugee for the sake of encompassing all three categories and maximizing the effort in reconstructing an otherwise fragmented history. A further methodological problem was who counted as a Jewish refugee in different periods. In 1942, when Mussolini succumbed to Ribbentrop’s demand to deport the Jews who, along with many others, had fled to territories under Italian occupation or military control, the general in command in Dalmatia, Mario Roatta, pointed out the practical difficulties hindering the execution of this programme. Roatta stated that the refugees were scattered throughout the territories under the control of the Italian Army, but also mixed with local Jews and Jews from territories annexed by Italy (who, of course, could not be candidates for deportation). The Italian Foreign Ministry and Army Staff Headquarters kept postponing the decision because there were no exact criteria to be used to classify the Jews raising objections such as: What is the definition of ‘refugee’? What is the cut-off date for someone to be considered a refugee? What about those who originally came from Italian-held areas? Or those who fled from Croatia, but who had originally lived elsewhere, for example, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, or even Spain or Portugal (from whence their ancestors had emigrated in the fifteenth century)?7 As Carpi noted, questions of this sort could be asked ad infinitum. The Italian Army authorities in Croatia claimed that the clarification of the family origin of the Jews was a complicated matter that would take a very long time to solve, and eventually saved the lives of thousands (of whatever category). But for subsequent generations of historians, these complications were too often deemed impenetrable, rendering the fate of many victims or survivors to oblivion. Therefore, while keeping the focus on mostly German (and other Central European) Jewish refugees who fled to the Balkans between 1933 and 1941, this book also considers the experience of domicile Jews to the extent their experiences interacted. Needless to say, some of the domicile Jews also moved to the region just before 1933; others moved in a series of earlier waves of migration. During the war, almost all Jews in the Balkans who survived the Holocaust ended up as refugees, making their stories relevant for several chapters in this book, not least for Chapter 5 on Italian-held Dalmatia mentioned above. Finally, Gentile spouses and rare, but significant, German Gentile (so-termed Aryan) escapees are also included, for two reasons. Their lives were closely intertwined with Jewish refugees (often through marriage or close friendship), and their writings shed light on the destiny of Jewish refugees, and thus represent an unmissable body of evidence.
The second issue to be addressed is that of sheer numbers. Most estimates of Jewish refugees in Europe’s richest and best-known neutral country, Switzerland, hover at around twenty-four thousand, with highest estimates not beyond thirty thousand, or only 10 per cent of war refugees in Switzerland, a rather negligible number in terms of the millions on the run.8 The number of Europe’s Jews seeking refuge via or in the mostly remote and poor lands of the Balkans is impossible to ascertain, but estimates point to at least double the figure for Switzerland. According to the literature, from 1933 onwards, Yugoslavia was a transit or exile country for over fifty-five thousand Jewish refugees from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, and elsewhere), forty thousand entering only in the short period between 1938 and 1940.9 These numbers will be scrutinized later, while the figures for Greece and Albania are even less precise. Greece’s geographic proximity to Palestine and other Allied-held territories (Cyprus) enabled many rescues, although not without significant trouble, and with some left stranded there upon the Nazi invasion. There are well-told stories of the war bravery of Greek Jews, including rescue efforts that saved a number of European Jews stranded in Greece via the so-called Evia–Çesme route, despite the obstacles posed by the British political and military strategy in Greece.10 In addition, this book will look at the fate of hundreds Jews who escaped to Albania, which was so remote, and without a significant local Jewish community to assist the welcome, that it remained an unpopular destination, despite the fact that anti-Semitism was almost non-existent there. Remarkably, all several hundred refugees in Albania survived, as will be detailed in Chapter 7, dedicated to this little-known country, the hospitality of its people, and the resilience of the refugees landing there.
What is more certain is that an overwhelming majority of those who escaped Nazi Germany, and later Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland travelled on their own. In addition, from 1937 to 1944, the international Zionist movement organized the escape of eighteen thousand Central and Eastern European Jews to British Palestine, mostly via Black Sea ports in Bulgaria and Romania. Bulgaria was one of the key gateways through which Jews fleeing persecution in Europe departed for Palestine, with over ten thousand non-Bulgarian Jews estimated as being allowed to emigrate through Bulgaria between 1939 and 1945. Using Turkey’s neutrality, ships with Bulgarian crew or using Bulgarian ports boarded to Palestine, which also posed serious risks, including sudden storms, the British or German submarines, and the British ban on vessels entering Haifa without a permit, which all contributed to hundreds of deaths.11 Romania and Bulgaria, however, were not destinations of exile. Refugee Jews were very few and far between, and thus will not feature in this book.12 In Romania, anti-Semitism was rampant at the time, forcing Jews to migrate from, rather than to, Romania.13 Unlike our topic, there is ample research on the Aliyah Bet – the illegal but organized Jewish immigration to Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel.14 Dalia Ofer’s fascinating story of these immigrants, organizers, and all the forces who tried to exploit or prevent the flow of refugees to Palestine reads like a detective thriller. Even though the context of her research is different from that of individual migration/exile, Ofer shows how important the Balkan route was, and illuminates the key roles played by the Balkan actors, local Jewish communities, individual Jewish activists, entrepreneurs, and assorted criminals. Finally, Turkey also welcomed Jewish refugees, but only scholars, who were tasked to support the new country’s reform of its education system, and to develop science and the arts. However, as Turkey stayed out of the war and the Holocaust, and the experience of these intellectuals has been widely studied, it will not be discussed further here.15
The story of non-organized Jewish migration to the Balkans in this book will be presented chronologically, with a couple of case studies illuminating the fate of Jewish refugees in detail. The first chapter, following the introduction, shows how the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany were initially welcomed, or at least tolerated. In Yugoslavia, many prominent artists and intellectuals contributed to their new host country’s culture and development. Open doors or relative tolerance in the Balkans lasted longer than elsewhere. A few newcomers happily settled, whereas others felt trapped because they saw their Balkan journeys only as a brief interlude on their way overseas. From 1938, as seen in Chapter 2, the influx of numerous Jewish refugees from Austria put the governments both in Belgrade and Athens under significant pressure, to which they responded with a range of bans concerning their passage or stay, to restrict immigration. Whereas the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 opened the door for Adolf Eichmann’s policy of expulsion of Jews, the pogroms of Kristallnacht on 9 November that year began the policy of annihilation. What had previously been Jewish emigration turned into flight or escape. The chapter details both legal and illegal flight, mostly by Austrian Jews, as well as ingenious and desperate ways to legalize or normalize their status in the Balkans. The following year, the massive exodus widened to Czechoslovak and Polish Jews, who were often without any financial means, which eventually led to the creation of internment camps in Yugoslavia, a bad omen of things to come. At the same time, the Balkan Jewish communities, although relatively small, showed enormous solidarity and sacrifice in caring for the refugees, with financial aid also provided by the international Jewish organizations. The chapter ends with efforts to evacuate the refugees, which were racing against time, as the war raged across Europe and the German invasion of the Balkans was looming. Eventually, thousands of refugees were stuck in the Balkans at the point of its occupation in April 1941. Chapter 3 documents the brutal campaign of destruction aimed at Jewish communities after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Often, the Jewish refugees were the first targeted, such as around one thousand and fifty of the passengers of the above mentioned Kladovo transport.16 The chapter recounts attempts to escape, hide, or join resistance in cases where testimonies remain, although in most other cases it only records locations, numbers, and names of those who perished and were identified. A more thorough examination of the Final Solution and its implications for the refugees is offered in Chapter 4 on the Jews in the town of Ruma, which during the war belonged to the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, run by the Croatian collaborationist and fascist Ustaša. In contrast to the destruction of Jews in Ruma, and the almost total annihilation of other Jewish communities in Yugoslavia and Greece, some ten thousand local and foreign Jews survived by escaping to the Italian-occupied areas of the Balkans. The Italian rescue in the years from 1941 to 1943 is documented in Chapter 5, and in a separate case study about exile on the island of Korčula, which spans the period from 1933 to 1945 (Chapter 6). The Italian connection was also crucial to the survival and rescue of Jews in Albania, along with the Albanian local government and, most importantly, its common people, whose efforts meant that Albania came out of the war as the only continental European country with an increased number of Jews, as detailed in Chapter 7. The eighth and final chapter deals with the anti-fascist resistance of Jewish refugees, an almost completely unexplored topic in previous historiography. Therefore, this is also the longest chapter, engaging with the multitude of ways that resistance was manifested before the war, followed by an analysis of the participation of Jews in the Yugoslav armed struggle. The refugees were among thousands of Yugoslav Jews (4572) to join the Yugoslav Partisan resistance.17 The Partisan rescue of thousands of Jews is subjected to in-depth scrutiny, given that some controversies have arisen in recollections and historiographic interpretations in recent years.
Most refugee narratives continue well into the post-war years, involving troublesome evacuations, transport to Italy, long waits in displaced persons’ camps in order to go to Palestine, the troublesome return from concentration camps and other places of Partisan or Italian rescue. Given that people were still transported in cattle wagons, and that food was rationed or extremely scarce, it is no wonder that many narratives consider the post-liberation period to be a continuation of their ordeal. This challenging experience, akin to that faced during the war, was made worse by having to come to terms with the loss of family and friends. Unfortunately, there is no space for this important segment of (post)war and Holocaust experience, and only basic information about the epilogue of some survivors’ destinies is provided in the footnotes.
Significance of the Jewish Experience of/in the Balkans
An informal hierarchy within Holocaust studies and Jewish history seems to have played a role resulting in an important aspect of the Jewish past being absent from larger surveys of their history in the Balkans and Eastern Europe in major languages.18 This lacuna is most notably reflected in publications on Jewish anti-fascist resistance, with the Balkans often missing, despite offering some of the most remarkable examples.19 Paradoxically, Holocaust research literature has managed to reproduce Balkan marginality, as in Walter Laquer’s Generation Exodus, one of the key works on flight from the Nazi German Reich, which makes no mention of exile into or via the Balkans.20 Similarly, Jean-Michel Palmier, in his study on anti-fascist emigration, asserts that Yugoslavia was not a land of exile from Germany.21 Most major collections of personal stories, such as Hitler’s Exiles or those of women refugees or so-called common people, similarly omit the Balkan route of escape and the refugees there.22 Cynical as it may sound, the existing research seems to suggest that if you escaped through Paris, your experience is more valuable than if you escaped through Tirana.23 Seventeen volumes of The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies do not have a single paper or reference to the Balkans as one of the main directions and locations of German, and particularly Austrian, exile. Similarly, the volume on the creative achievements of Austrian Jewish refugees mainly deals with their British exile, and the scores of artists emigrating to the Balkans are not mentioned.24 The recent volume on the governments-in-exile and the Jews ignores Yugoslavia too, although its government and missions abroad worked tirelessly to protect not only Yugoslav Jews, but also, as this book will show, in some cases foreign Jews who had previously taken refuge there.25 The recent shift of attention from the north-west of Europe as a place of exile to less known destinations in the so-called global South also conveniently skips over the Balkans.26 Laqueur is thus no exception, and exile in the Balkans remains under-researched, although it seems that all other destinations have been covered.
Exemplary of the marginalization of the Balkan context is an otherwise fascinating book by David Clay Large, And the World Closed its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust, which uses preserved family correspondence and other primary sources to create a micro history of the Holocaust. However, detailing the Schohl family’s misfortunes, Large dedicates the least attention to Yugoslavia, to where they actually escaped after they were turned down by the US, the UK, and Brazil, and found themselves unable to flee to Holland or anywhere to the West. This is unfortunate, as they were initially quite happy with their escape to Yugoslavia, best described by the mother Liesel in a letter to their cousins in the US, as ‘little America’ for them.27 Nazi occupation changed their situation, and eventually brought a tragic end for the father, Max, but no archive research or secondary source survey covers the Schohl’s stay in Yugoslavia compared to other issues treated in the book, resulting in errors, generalizations, and misunderstandings of the key stage of their exodus. This is another reason why Ruma, where the Schohls ended up, and where all local and several hundred refugee Jews perished, is a subject of a separate chapter in this book.
Shockingly or not, another wave of misunderstanding and misinterpretation concerning the refugees in the Balkans has arisen since 2015 in the media and public of the global West, as another wave of refugees has moved (and still does) through the Balkans, this time in the opposite direction (from the Middle East to Central Europe). The Balkan countries and Balkanites have been accused of a lack of empathy or, more frequently, have simply been left to deal with the refugees, whose plight they did not cause and cannot relieve, raising parallels with the previous refugee crises with which this book deals. Nevertheless, not all this lack of study is due to marginalization and misrepresentation of the Balkans in the West. For decades, studies of German or Austrian (Reich) Jewry simply lost sight of these people once they were no longer in Central Europe or were not on one of the organized rescue efforts or, tragically, deportation trains.28 Post-war developments in the Balkan countries had other priorities, with Jews often added to the collective category of Nazi victims without much stratification and analytical distinction between foreign and local Jews. Some earlier compilations of testimonies and evidence for the Holocaust of Yugoslav Jewry mentioned Jewish refugees as victims on many occasions, but they were never identified, nor was their fate particularly clarified.29
Despite this exclusion from mainstream scholarship, my study aims to demonstrate that the Jewish exile experience in the Balkans is worth studying, even more so when it is about the fate of the people rejected in their immigration bids to Western Europe or the Americas. Except for some Austrian Jews with family connections, most Jews fleeing the Reich and its occupied territories to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania did so as their last resort. Their only reason was the Balkans’ location on the way from Central Europe to Palestine, and more significantly to Fascist Italy, which to many Jews was a promise of freedom and oasis of humanity in Europe in its darkest hour. A smaller number managed to escape to another of Hitler’s allies – Admiral Horthy’s Hungary, but there too in 1944, they faced brutal deportations and extinction. Eventually, it was the mountainous terrain and remoteness of the Balkans which offered the possibility of survival or escape for those in danger. They were often saved either by mostly illiterate peasants or by Communist-led Partisan resisters.
At the same time, looking at the fate of Jewish refugees in the Balkans also highlights the particularly tragic experience of the Holocaust in the Balkans, which is also less widely known, partly because of the relatively small number of Jews in the region. Most Balkan Jews and refugees trapped there were subsequently killed in some of the most gruesome and exceptional aspects of the Nazi German-led Holocaust. The number of victims reached 287 thousand in Romania, 67 thousand in Greece, 65 thousand in Yugoslavia, and more than 11 thousand in the Bulgarian occupation zones.30 Serbia was the first country in which Nazis embarked on the Final Solution, and the first to be declared ‘Judenfrei’.31 In Belgrade, Jews were already being exterminated in the first year of the war. The executions took place in the capital itself, in one of its four concentration camps, or literally on its peripheral streets, where Jewish women and children were gassed in a specially designed vehicle. In Macedonia, over 98 per cent of its Jewry perished in several transports to Treblinka in 1943, the highest proportion in all occupied Europe. In this tragedy Bulgarian authorities assisted the Nazis, but the cruellest and most notorious reputation among the Nazi collaborators is reserved for the Croatian Ustaša, whose atrocities stunned even the Nazis.32 Moreover, the experience of the occupation and the Holocaust in the Balkans has been entangled with the bloody civil war, with Jews and Gentiles often executed as reprisal for the Yugoslav Partisan resistance. The same Partisans were responsible for one of the biggest Jewish rescue operations during the war, which lasted from September 1943 until spring 1945, and which saved the lives of at least three thousand people. After years – for some more than a decade – on the run, it was a miracle that there were survivors, and thus even more urgency for their story to be told.
It is only in the last couple of decades that historians from the former Yugoslavia and Austria have begun to unearth some archival evidence for the survival, but more often the tragic death, of the Jewish refugees from which this work could benefit.33 Anna Maria Grünfelder has thoroughly covered the refugee situation in Croatia, mostly based on sources from the Croatian archives.34 Walter Brunner wrote a monograph on Joseph Schleich, the best known or most notorious ‘Judenschlepper’ or trafficker based on Austrian but also HICEM archives that were also visited by Marija Vulesica.35 Esther Gitman has focused on rescue in Croatia, and in one chapter of her book looks at the Italian efforts in their annexed or occupied areas.36 Milan Ristović and Milan Koljanin have written several studies dealing with the Yugoslav government’s and public response to refugee pressure in the most important period after the Anschluss.37 Recently, Mirjam Rajner has published a monograph on Jewish artists in Yugoslavia, which includes some of the refugee artists, describing the minutiae of their experience.38 The areas under Italian control have also been covered in several Italian- or English-language publications, but based only on the Italian sources.39 As many Jews, especially from Yugoslavia, escaped to and remained in Italian-held Dalmatia with forged documents, they did not feature in the Italian sources and statistics, something which this work attempts to rectify. Drawing a complete picture of the Jewish refugee experience in the Balkans faces almost unsurmountable obstacles, as the archival material is scattered, only partially available, written in several languages, and by no means sufficient. More importantly, there is a danger of overestimating the relevance of a rendition of the past based on few and scattered files. Last but not least, after a long period of Partisan/Communist ideological domination, the historical narrative of the Second World War in Yugoslavia (and/or Albania) is no longer coherent. The former ideologically loaded accounts were replaced by a plethora of different, highly polarized and conflicting versions, making the stories of outsiders such as the Jewish refugees, who often became insiders, extremely precious. In recent years, Albania’s wartime rescue of Jews was a particularly frequent topic for Albanian and Italian scholars.
Despite these advances, the inquiry into the fate of refugees has benefited little from regional comparative perspectives and new research developments in the study of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Prominent among them is the so-called ‘localization’ of the Holocaust, which insists on taking account of the multitude of events and entanglements it encompassed, connecting research on the lives of victims in their original settlements, their relationship with their Gentile neighbours, and the role played by the latter in the persecution, killing, or, for that matter, saving of Jews.40 Yet, the very nature of refugee flight precludes attempts at localization. Similarly, recent attempts to investigate the dispossession of Jews are almost impossible with movable property on the run. The greatest challenge of research conducted in local, and especially national, contexts is accounting for and identifying all the victims. Many were missed, as they carried false papers, used fake names and baptism certificates, their (mostly German) names were misspelled, and, most tragically, there was often no one to inquire about them or record their deaths, as they lost contact with their close ones, or sometimes lost them altogether. As Julian Barnes put it,
‘History is that Certainty Produced at the Point Where the Imperfections of Memory Meet the Inadequacies of Documentation.’41
In order to overcome some of the lacunae in the archives and obstacles in the historiography, I have turned to contemporary witnesses and used the interviews, letters, diaries, and memoirs of the survivors, published in several languages, or still in manuscripts in collections and archives around the world. For reasons partially described above, the memoirs of the European refugee Jews were never integrated in the histories published about the Second World War in the Balkans. Relying on recollections of survivors in addition to all other available evidence, this book aims to show that their experiences traverse the issues at the heart of the European, and often colonial and global, crisis unfolding with the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust as its peak. The memoirs of refugees used in writing this book provide detailed accounts of conflict, the clash of civilizations, class war and genocide, along with that of inter-ethnic connections, cooperation, or enthusiastic, even romantic, encounters. Chased from the old capitals of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, often contemplated among the birthplaces of modern civilization, some Jewish refugees ended up in Europe’s backyard, and found rescue in the islands and mountains of the Balkans, habitually deemed the last strongholds of barbarity. Analysing lesser-known trajectories of European Jews stranded in the Balkans underlines the complexity of European anti-Semitism. Moreover, unveiling the stories of the implementation, mediation, and experience of the Holocaust in Europe’s periphery shows a sharp contrast with settings where structures of discrimination were long established and routine.
Adding personal narratives to the existing historiographical records in order to piece together the story of death and survival of Jewish refugees in the Balkans brings many benefits and challenges at the same time. Hannah Arendt insisted on the distinction between ‘reporting’ and ‘communicating’ as two different modes of representation, expressing doubt about the extent to which historiography is capable of communicating extremely traumatic experiences.42 Still, in most of the past historical research, personal reminiscences about the Holocaust have long been side-lined into psychological or memory research or literary studies, if not altogether neglected.43 As a result, a multitude of layers offered by the first-hand insight and depth of survivors’ personal reflection have been missing. Therefore, one of the aims of my project has been to restore the subjectivity of the Holocaust survivors and to rescue their writings from the preserve of shelves of memoirs. Moreover, their survival stories, which incorporate the cross-national and European dimension of the war and Holocaust, provide a transnational perspective so crucially absent from the historiography, especially in the Balkans. They overcome the traditional national framing that ironically persists despite organized efforts to transform Europe from an object of debate into an actual subject.44 Furthermore, personal narratives allow for addressing broader questions beyond the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. They contribute a great wealth of information and perception about diaspora identity, immigration, transnationalism, memory, and commemoration. Especially precious are testimonies about the relations of ethnic groups and national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, and the intertwined lives of Jews and Gentiles as a way of interweaving Jewish and non-Jewish histories, and as a more apt way of addressing questions of identity. This is even more important, given the recent trend to situate Jewish history more firmly in its European context, and to dwell beyond the dichotomy of ‘Jewish’ versus ‘European’ (or ‘German’, ‘French’, and so on – and thus implicitly ‘non-Jewish’) history.45 Finally, the book about émigré experience of the Central European Jews on the margins of Europe, including dislocation, identity dilemmas, and Holocaust, also contributes to the already well-developed study of Jewish émigrés as the makers of post-war European and transatlantic culture, its intellectual paths and utopias.46
Eventually, the narrative sources have come to influence the structure of the entire book and the selection of topics that it addresses. I felt compelled to consider survivors’ own preoccupations, and how they reflected on their affective states. This proved productive, as the existing historical studies based on scarce archival records often miss some of the key issues in describing the plight of Jewish refugees, such as illegal border crossings, support networks and information sharing, corruption, and other thorny issues that help re-evaluate and re-contextualize the knowledge on state policies, discrimination, and/or exclusion. Similarly, the narrative sources in this study remain the only source for all sorts of wartime financial and other transactions that led to dispossession, but also sometimes to the saving of lives. Countless stories of gold napoleons and other coins, diamonds, or valuable postage stamps that often seem to have saved more lives than neighbours, colleagues, fellow humans. Hidden, woven into clothes or hair, buried and unearthed, lost and found, borrowed, lent, offered but never forgotten, they feature significantly in many stories collected here.47 More importantly, the details of everyday life that emerge in autobiographical, literary works, and interviews with survivors, deepen the understanding of how their plight and the Holocaust were experienced. In the case of refugees who reached the Italian-controlled areas, almost all survived, and from their memoirs or interviews we learn about their treatment by the Italian army and state officials, and about the Italian camps of free internment, as detailed in the chapter about the Jewish exile on the island of Korčula. In destitution, and uncertainty about the next day, we discover cultural life, theatrical productions, music performances, and, most importantly, the continuous drive for education, so crucial in Jewish pre-war life. Instead of a simplistic perception of exile as uprootedness, personal narratives evidence cultural transfer and exchange.
Even more significantly, treated as ‘Others’ themselves, the authors of testimonies used in compiling this book reveal how their attitudes to otherness wavered, and lost or changed their meaning when traversing the borders, and after spending long years on the run. Writings of this particular group of Europeans may thus enrich our understanding of Balkanism, a concept elaborated by Maria Todorova as a discourse akin to, but different from, Orientalism, whereby the Balkans have often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the ‘European’ has been built.48 In addition, Milica Bakić-Hayden proposes a concept of ‘nesting Orientalisms’, based on the gradation of ‘Orients’, that is, otherness and primitiveness, showing how each part of the Balkans tended to view the cultures and religions to its South and East as more primitive, and how a group which creates the Orientalized other can itself also be the subject of Orientalization by another group.49 Maria Todorova consequently introduced the related concept of ‘nesting Balkanisms’, emphasizing its importance for identity constructions. Testimonies of refugee Jews indicate that Balkanisms not only nest, but also shift or come and go, in a very fluid and flexible manner, and in a constant interplay with power relations. One of the refugees who later became a writer, Wolfgang Fischer, was astounded by barefoot peasants selling rings of onions in Zagreb’s central square, while the celebrated German actress Tilla Durieux was equally surprised by the peasant women in their traditional white and red embroidered garbs, and live turkeys running across the Zagreb marketplace.50 Those who ended up in rural or small town settings, such as Croatian Koprivnica (which translates as ‘the place where nettles grow’), were in for a further surprise: shack outhouses or pots for toilets, as recalled by Ernie Weiss.51 Yet, they were all pleased by the welcome, and soon had only praise for their new homes. In Zagreb, Werner Reich enjoyed big, brown, muzzled bears dancing with Gypsies, organ grinders with monkeys, and fortune tellers who looked at the grounds of Turkish coffee after the cup was inverted. After all, Reich joked, this is the best method for forecasting the future, as it is the only method based on solid ‘grounds’. The old lady looking at his fildžan (small coffee cup) foretold his deportation and ordeal in a concentration camp.52 Fischer’s autobiographical novel about exile in Yugoslavia becomes both Orientalist and self-deprecating. Pawel in his recollections contrasts the notion of the Balkans as the Stone Age with his deep sympathy and affiliation with both Belgrade as a place and with its inhabitants.53 Neumann left a first-hand account of how otherwise very Orientalized Albania was bereft of anti-Semitism. People did not even understand what it meant, as the historical isolation of Albania prevented not only the country’s development, but also its nemeses, such as European chauvinism and Judenhass. In Albania, Neumann explains, saving Jews had more to do with patriarchal principles of honour and morality than with decisive anti-fascist or anti-German positions, as even collaborators with Nazis saved the Jews.54
Whether termed Orientalist or Balkanist, the perspectives explored in this book also question the notion of informal networking, which has traditionally been derided as burdensome practice undermining the ‘good governance’ associated with states where formal rules are enforceable and effective.55 But in a world described by Chaim Weizmann in 1936 as ‘divided into places where they [Jews] cannot live and places where they [Jews] cannot enter’, informal networking, entrenched by local customs, traditions, and social norms assumes a different meaning.56 Illegally crossing borders to flee persecution, or bribing officials to extend a residence permit, cannot be simply dismissed as unfair and unjust forms of competitive advantage, or as corruption. Based on the testimonies of survivors, countries in the Balkans, where such practices dominated, should no longer be characterized as weak, dysfunctional, or exploitative, rejecting the approach that blankly chastises whole regions of the world. Thus, this first comprehensive study on Jewish exodus to the Balkans joins a chorus of critique of the normative approach to informality that ignores local practices, social norms, and informal relationships, especially in periods of conflict, war, and other frequent contexts when formal state institutions are dysfunctional.57
The greatest benefit that comes with the use of narrative sources is their sheer number and variety. Refugee Jews in the Balkans could not be a more complex group, arriving from a multitude of countries and diverse class, political, and social backgrounds. Scattered across the world after the war, with no formal links or organizations, many of their personal stories remained hidden for decades. Not being famous, their authors often did not boast any authority. Most saw themselves as protagonists, and rarely as victims. A few of them recorded their experiences during or immediately after their plight, but these remained buried for decades, like the diaries and recollections of Gertrude Najmann, Ludwig Biró, or Irene Grünbaum.58 Some are still unpublished in the collections at Yad Vashem, the Wiener Library, the Leo Baeck Institute, and Bad Arolsen Archives (International Tracing Service). Writers among the refugees, such as Theodor Csokor, Alexander von Sacher-Masoch, and Dina Nelken, often kept notes and published their accounts as novels immediately after the war, but there was not much interest in the topic in post-war Europe. Others, such as Ernst Pawel and Wolfgang Georg Fischer, who were refugees as children and could write up and publish their recollections only much later in the early 1970s or 1980s, also struggled to find the right audience for their odd stories full of sarcastic survival humour.59 The last, and perhaps most numerous, group to record or publish their memoirs or accounts of wartime survival in Yugoslavia or Albania was prompted by the fundamental shift of the general attitude towards the Holocaust in the 1980s. The Old Testament Judaist exhortation to remember, mixed with the pressure from grandchildren, motivated many to write and recount even on their death beds. Most interviews also date from this period, such as those found in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Oral Histories project, the Vienna Project of the Centropa Jewish historical institute in Vienna, the Mi smo preživeli/We Survived project of the Jewish Museum in Belgrade, and others.
For a very long time, publishers had strict editorial rules against any romanticized accounts of the war. Gertrude Najman(n) (Neumann), who survived the Kladovo transport ordeal was back in Berlin in the 1950s when she tried to publish her memoirs. Under the title ‘Verlorene Jugend’, Gertrude combined her experience with that of another Jewish boy whom she met in Yugoslavia, and whose story she knew and recorded.60 In the ample correspondence with several editors, they objected to language deficiencies (Otto Zadek), or saturation with works for feuilleton (Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland), or sent the manuscript to wrong departments, as in the case with Der Tagesspiegel, where, inadvertently but tellingly, the manuscript ended up in their travel section. Doubleday in New York and Gollancz in London also rejected the manuscript. Eventually, they all discarded it as being too long and not attractive as a novel, and no one, neither author nor editors, ever thought of treating it as personal testimony or as a historical source. Lucie Begov recorded her ordeal, which took her from the Dalmatian Island of Rab to Auschwitz, immediately after she was liberated, but it took her another four decades to publish it, which she eventually managed with the support of Simon Wiesenthal.61 Others encountered different kinds of problems. Ilse Strauss admitted that recalling her years on the run led her to lapse into a state of severe depression which forced her to abandon writing for months.62 Eventually, with the help of her children, Ilse managed to finish her story, which remains unpublished. True, Ilse’s memoir, like many others, focuses on her family and on intimacy. We learn very little historical detail, only as much as to frame the large family and personal story that is at the heart of memoir. Trude Binder’s memoirs, dictated to her nieces, also remained unpublished.63 Yet her directness, sincerity, and almost brutal avoidance of any taboos is unparalleled. Eventually deported to Auschwitz with her husband, Binder admitted that she was relieved when they were separated immediately upon their arrival (and he was murdered), as she could not care for him any longer. Similarly, Binder did not mince her words in her descriptions of bodily functions, hygiene, food consumption (or lack of it) throughout her Yugoslav and Italian experience – all aspects entirely missing from published accounts, let alone historiography based on archival sources. The same goes for rare, good moments. Rudolf Kandel and Blanka Selinger confided in their son-in-law to write their survival memoir, which was to be published after their deaths. Amid all the horror stories and narrow escapes, they detailed every good meal they ate along the escape route.64 They also proudly noted sightings along the way, such as the frescoes from Ghirlandaio or Masaccio, as did Edmund Berger on his way to the Ferramonti internment camp.65
On the other hand, Tilla Durieux’s autobiography with the witty title ‘My First Ninety Years’ is a typical narrative of an actress and celebrity, which easily found its way to publishers.66 Yet in its last part, about her war experience in Yugoslavia, it begs to differ with some of the most vivid and humble descriptions of war and refugee experiences in Yugoslavia. There is no trace of glamour, but heartbreaking accounts written by a very well-versed actress, who, due to her personal circumstances, was a remarkably positioned chronicler of her times who kept a detailed personal diary upon which the book is based. Also well received were the letters written by a young refugee in Greece, Peter Schwiefert, in The Bird Has No Wings, which were even compared to Rainer Maria Rilke and Albert Camus for their sincerity and simplicity. Their authenticity and literary prowess were deemed serene and sublime by Simone de Beauvoir – little wonder, given that Peter Schwiefert was the son of a writer and wanted to become one himself. De Beauvoir praised them because of Schwiefert’s commitment to freedom and his free mind, despite the tempest and the confusion surrounding him.67
As for the recollections written in the 1980s and later, they too can hardly belong to the same camp. Many survivors felt compelled to combine scholarship with personal recollections, with some so meticulous in detail and names as if to compete with ‘official’ histories, such as Gertrude Schneider’s brilliant example, which includes personal recollections, family correspondence, and scholarly research based on archival sources and secondary literature.68 Imre Rochlitz went back to visit the places of his ordeal and escape, and passionately researched the context and personalities involved, before publishing his recollection, which is clearly authoritative in its presentation of events. Ivan Singer’s lengthy insider testimonial of the mistakes made by Partisan intelligence and command preceding the airborne attack on their headquarters in Drvar, which almost cost their leader Tito and the members of foreign missions their lives, and which killed hundreds, provides a corrective to official version of the events.69 Branko Polić published his memoirs in four volumes decades after the events, but used an impressive collection of his preserved notes, diaries, letters to family members, and so on, with incomparable details about the history of Jewish escape from Zagreb, internment in Dalmatia, and survival with the Partisans.70 Authors such as Singer and Rochlitz also felt compelled to include vivid accounts of their first sexual encounters, and speculations about the black market, alongside those of the exterminations of their family and their near-death escapades. Most survivors did not abruptly end their memoirs with liberation in 1944 or 1945, as this book does in order to stick to artificially enforced historical periodization. They go on to write about Italy, Egypt, the Oswego camp in the US, Russian training camps, and a myriad of other places where their odyssey continued. For survivors, these places were equally challenging, and in their mind, they represented the continuation of their wartime experience. For Grünbaum post-liberation was the worst period of destitution, hunger, and disease, which is usually omitted from heroic narratives of war and liberation. Instead, as Alcalay testifies, ‘how absurd it was, after surviving five years of war, exile, internment, and flight into hiding, that liberation should have brought us freedom and liberty, but only the freedom and liberty to perish from hunger’.71
Unlike archival sources, the personal testimonies are very good in recording every trace and display of humanity, including from the Germans, such as a carpenter in Kladovo, who helped the refugees stuck there to make everything from shoes to money.72 At the same time, testimonies do not miss recording those among the Jews who sealed their fate by associating and collaborating with Germans, or who behaved in an ugly and shameful way. Others are singled out for naivety and failure to act, with so many not able to ‘detach themselves from their blind middle-class love for beautiful objects, for chandeliers and furniture in rare polished woods and all those beautiful rugs and all the books and paintings’.73 Alcalay condemns refugees who found shelter in Split and continued their comfortable bourgeois lives for their indifference, irresponsibility, and lack of solidarity.74 At the same time, he registers every instance of resistance, even when only showing a fist to a German soldier.75 Other frequent references that are virtually impossible to find outside of personal narratives are those about losing one’s religion, or becoming religious after humiliating or life-saving experiences.76
Among testimonies unearthed here, many were written by women. This is a unique quality, as almost all other sources from the Balkans in this period are authored by men. In that sense, the history of the Second World War in the Balkans, usually described as contested, would be better termed partial, as it is almost entirely lacking the experience and the perception of women.77 Women were not affected in the same way, and here we have novel perspectives on women’s lives cast into the most extraordinary circumstances. Fears of roundups and deportations, flights across borders, hiding, and faking papers or marriages pushed women towards taking risks which were previously unthinkable, or reserved for men. The women responded in a variety of ways well beyond the domestic sphere and the menial jobs to which they were sentenced in order to survive. Ilse Strauss’s refugee experience in Yugoslavia prepared her well for the troublesome war years in poverty and under bombardment in London. It also drastically changed her political and ethical outlooks as she became a loving and caring mother and grandmother with much empathy for all who suffer. Despite losing her parents, Ilse had no hatred for Germans and Germany, which she visited regularly after the war. Johanna Lutzer, a refugee artist from Vienna, whose diaries were described recently by Miriam Rajner, is another woman from whom we learn about coping skills and survival. Her art too was created not to document death and suffering, but rather to depict life as it enveloped her and her fellow refugees, situations in which they were involved, and experiences that they lived through.78 Lutzer wrote and painted in order to express her emotions, to document and visualize the atmosphere and mood in which she found herself, and to instil hope. In addition to these newly acquired roles, women’s voices, such as those of Sara Raisky or Irene Grünbaum, reveal a different angle on the war, and they write about many issues we know very little about from other sources, such as love, sex, disease, hygiene, food, dress, and so on. Generally, women more than men expose their most intimate and often personally (or family) damaging moments, with no subject out of bounds, although some young men also begged to differ. Women also stress their particular politicization and countless gender-specific resistance and survival strategies, while not hiding their powerlessness. Examining the differences and similarities between men’s and women’s accounts contributes to revealing some of the complexities hidden under the single category of ‘Jews’.
Lastly, many of the survivors’ memoirs impress with their sheer literary eloquence, broad horizons, the capacity for reflection, and sense of history as transcending borders, classes, and ethnicities. Paradoxically, the tragedy of the Holocaust brought some of Europe’s most competent literary persons to regions that were overwhelmingly illiterate. Some recollections of Jewish refugees are the only written testimonies about regions where most locals could not write. While Jewish refugees usually stemmed from the urban middle and upper classes, their most likely rescue was to be found in remote rural settings, providing for the encounter, clash, and symbiosis of rural and urban.
Nevertheless, relying on personal narratives has also attracted considerable criticism. Despite scrupulous attempts by many memoirists to be as truthful as possible, with no intent to deceive or defraud or get anything wrong, personal narratives have been considered more akin to works of fiction, because memory is a tool of fictionalization. Furthermore, they are often deemed to be written to fit in with predetermined ideas. Indeed, some authors who were too young to remember and wrote many decades after the event did so almost entirely along the stereotypical tropes of survivors’ stories, rendering their works useless.79 The selective nature of memory influences how authors viewed their past, especially when recorded many decades after the actual events, and this may lead to the blurring of fact and fiction. But do not all written recordings arise out of the process of selection and omission, relativizing their ability to ‘recapture the past’? This is common to other genres – interviews, police or trial reports, correspondence – all commonly used as historical sources. Whether or not a particular story or some detail in these accounts is ‘true’, there is still value in the ways in which the authors of testimonies have interpreted its meaning. One example is the case of the treatment of Jews by the Italians. If one looks at official files, what is preserved are documents about arrests, internment, transfer, and all sorts of restrictions, all consequences of anti-Semitic laws in Italy and the handling of refugees by military and civilian authorities. If one turns to personal recollections, almost all encounters with Italian common people and officials alike are interpreted in a positive way. How, then, not to believe this overwhelming commonality in memory and not take it as ‘true’!? To draw from Hannah Arendt again, ‘self-understanding and self-interpretation are the very foundation of all analysis and understanding’. We cannot deny this capacity to personal narrative, and pretend that we know better, and tell them what the real ‘motives’ or ‘trends’ were, no matter how they understood them.80 Switching events around, conflating characters or approximating dialogue, which is indeed common to many of the memoirs, does not undermine the essence of what is recalled. On the other hand, one of the greatest shortcomings of the recollections consulted here, and in sharp contrast to most other autobiographical writings and even the stories of survivors, is that they are accompanied with almost no material trace. Hardly any photographic or visual source remains.
Fictionalized accounts, published as novels, raise eyebrows because they read like travelogues, with adventures such as bribes for various permits to stay in Zagreb, or funny ways to save or transport money and wealth. Yet their authors, such as Fischer, Sacher-Masoch or Csokor, render all the events and people, and especially sights and landscapes, with the impressive atmospheric precision that exile experience can impress on someone – still remembering the children’s counting rhymes of Dalmatian songs, for example. Lejeune tried to resolve the ‘seemingly insoluble problem of establishing a distinction between autobiography and fiction’ by invoking the reader and eliciting a pact between author and reader in which the author commits to the sincere effort of coming to terms with and representing his or her experience.81 In my understanding, the historian thus becomes both the reader and the author. Memory is not fully reliable, and subjectivity is unavoidable, but these records are not a deliberate falsification. Moreover, they transmit so much that other sources do not convey, and crucially they tell us how events were perceived and experienced. Saul Friedländer, the doyen of Holocaust research, who was praised by Richard Evans for the use of letters and journals from victims instead of ‘the sometimes-unreliable testimony of memoirs’, recently did just this and published two volumes of his own memoirs, acknowledging the paradox:
It is a self-criticism, from the historian’s viewpoint. There is a danger in memoir-writing, many years after the event. Memoirs written immediately after the war, like that of Primo Levi, of Auschwitz and others which were very close to the events, may be compared almost to on-the-spot diaries. But otherwise, and I don’t know how far I could say it about my own memoir, with the passage of time one tends to reorganize the past. The traumatic past remains very much engraved, but nonetheless you have left the period behind, you have spoken to many people about it, you have spoken to yourself, mostly.82
On the other hand, there have also been provocative suggestions for the imbrication of Holocaust stories with travel writing accounts.83 Graham Huggan, based on reading Finkelstein and Huyssen, warns of commodification, trivialization, and the unchecked proliferation of the master Holocaust trope, and sees some chance of it being rescued in the narrative conventions of travel writing, taking Hilberg’s point that the Holocaust transportation was only the most extreme form of dislocation and displacement that marked the entire history of European Jewry.84 The travel writing genre, predicated on encounter and exchange, is fundamentally concerned with both difference and similarity, constructing them in myriad ways. Nevertheless, previous scholarly analysis of travel writing in the Balkans and elsewhere focused on how travellers constructed difference and used it to justify all sorts of inequities. In the case of Jewish refugees in the Balkans, occupying contradictory positions as literate, and thus culturally ‘advanced’, but dependent upon their ‘backward’ protectors, their memoirs, treated as ‘extreme travel writings’, raise or question difference and similarity with totally new criteria, from cultural to moral, even in the same text. Their aim at the end is the same – to understand what it means to be human, and not just Jewish, national, or even individual.
Yet Huggan also warns of three problems in these literary or travellers’ representations of the Holocaust: first, the moral intensity of Holocaust writing; second, the reliability for which they all strive despite the selectivity and embellishment intrinsic to memory itself; and third, the issue of interpretability. To paraphrase Young, the evidential status of the text is by no means guaranteed; instead, the reader is enjoined to search less for direct evidence of lived experience than, via the conceptual presuppositions through which the narrator has apprehended experience, for mediated knowledge of recorded events.85 But, acknowledging the selective and changing nature of memory, which explains discrepancies between the events of the past and the account of those events, is a challenge only if one looks at history in a narrow sense. History is more than a record of events, and by now we do have a solid record of events, even in the Balkans. On the other hand, there are advantages of the texts I propose to analyse, which are devoid of the one-sidedness typical of (and not only of) many sources deriving from conflicting parties. They are accounts of people written with different time distances, often written privately and only published after their authors’ death. Most of their authors have lived in countries far away from Yugoslavia and its successor states, and have had no evident personal interest in its numerous conflicts or its Holocaust records (or any other material or political/professional interest for that matter). As foreigners, they bring the much-needed outsider perspective, and they often incorporate both outsider and insider insight.
Unlike the archive, the memory is vibrant and alive, clearly emerging out of the continuous and tenuous fissure between past and present, and often thought of as accommodating the events of the past to the interests of the present. Rather than giving us verifiable access to the real, memory, especially in its belatedness, according to Huyssen, is itself based on representation.86 The past, we are told, is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory. Clearly, the fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. But did not Hayden White and Michel de Certeau show decades ago how closely intertwined traditional historiography is with rhetorical and literary strategies? In the meantime, all writing about the Holocaust, including that done by survivors, has been subjected to textual criticism and historical interpretation, as every act of memory has also come to be understood as an act of narrative.87 So, rather than lamenting or ignoring it, this split could be acknowledged and contemplated against the powerful stimulant and added benefit of exploring a wholly new perspective upon a region where the historiographic approach has shown considerable limitations and where evidence is patchy. While memoirs indeed express the point of view of their authors, they are nevertheless useful if read alongside other versions, or facts recorded elsewhere. They offer a wealth of other information and add the human and dramatic element to a historical description, expanding the historian’s probing for the unseen and unrecorded aspects of experience – with some exceptions.88
The memoirs used in writing this book are less known compared to the writings of Tadeusz Borowski, Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész or Saul Friedländer. Many, like that of Ruth Gutman, match in strength and detail the famous bestsellers, but her manuscript is not even known, let alone published.89 Furthermore, I do not plead their ontological value as suggested by Elie Wiesel in his statement that ‘any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened’.90 Testimonies published by Yugoslav Jews or Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania explicitly reject any moral high ground. Their authors are often critical of themselves or their fellow Jews. In that sense, they are transgressive, and they offer an addition or alternative to existing sources, and to history based on them. Often written to make sense of their survival to the authors themselves, they surprise with their candour, as when they assign their survival to sheer luck or ‘accident of fate’, according to Imre Rohlitz.
Finally, another commonly given reason why historiography (but also literature) has been reluctant to rely or draw on Holocaust memoirs is because of the fear to ‘use’ accounts which arose out of tragedy. This fundamental challenge to all Holocaust commentary, or the possibility to relay trauma, was aptly formulated by Agamben as bearing witness to ‘what it is impossible to bear witness to’.91 One of the authors on whom I have relied heavily in this book is Ivan Singer, who reiterates: ‘No one can feel vicariously what I felt when I was inside the cattle car in transport. There is no poet who can describe the feeling, […] no writer who can imagine the scene. Only those who were in it, can.’92 At the same time, Singer is providing the most suggestive argument in favour of the ‘use’ of testimonies as offered by survivors, who often spent their last moments of life and dedicated enormous energy to have their experiences recorded, published, and offered for ‘use’ to historians and future generations. Many stressed in their forewords or prologues the crucial role of writing in mastering and coming to terms with reality, as argued by Langer.93 Time and again, we are reminded to widen our understanding of resistance, and for many, surviving and leaving a testimony was exactly that. The Holocaust is a tragedy of millions, whose lives were extinguished and whose voices were obliterated. Its perpetrators also wanted the memory of these people to be obliterated. By acknowledging the right of survivors to enrich our historical knowledge about the Holocaust we are reversing the obliteration to which they were sentenced. It is the only justice we can give to the victims and the survivors who wanted their recollections to be published, to become known to their children and grandchildren, and to everybody’s children and grandchildren. With the so-called acceleration of history in contemporary popular culture, which threatens to wipe out the art of remembrance itself, it is an imperative.94
Despite the great time lapse and other obstacles discussed above, the personal stories were allowed to shape this book in the belief that the experiences of ordinary people on the run were best transmitted through their own testimonies used alongside other sources. These unique stories put a human face and voice to the otherwise dull numbers and records, and the tragic lists of the murdered among those trapped in the Balkans, and hopefully they will resonate with readers. Most importantly, there is a sense of fulfilment in including the testimony of survivors. The personal sacrifice and communal effort elucidated in many of them have grown rare in today’s world. By the time this book sees the light of the day, there may be no more Balkan refugee survivors alive to tell their story.
Franz Theodor Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg (Vienna: Ephelant, 2000) (1st edn, 1947), p. 5. Besides this novel-like memoir, Csokor described his refugee years in Yugoslavia in the book of memoirs, Auf fremden Strassen (Vienna: Kurt Desch, 1955), in a tragedy in four acts set in Korčula about the Yugoslav Partisan struggle published immediately after the war and played in Burgtheather in 1946 entitled Der verlorene Sohn, and in a collection of his letters from the exile, Zeuge einer Zeit (Munich: Müller, 1964).
Imre Rochlitz, Accident of Fate: A Personal Account, 1938–1945 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011).
Interviews with Francis and Eili Ofner, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. About the prominence of the Balkans for Jewish history during the Second World War and the role of the Ofners, see Tuvia Friling, ‘Istanbul 1942–1945: The Kollek-Avriel and Berman-Ofner Networks’, in Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust, ed. by David Bankier (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2006), pp. 105–56.
Zwi Heinrich Queller, Meine Erlebnisse: Erinnerungen (Ramat Gan: the author, 1996), p. 45. All translations throughout the book are mine, unless otherwise stated.
The same point was recently made by Marija Vulesica in ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s: Local Zionist Networks and Aid Efforts for Jewish Refugees’, Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts. Dubnow Institute Yearbook, XVI (2017), 199–220 (p. 202).
This is evident in many of the large databases, such as that of foreign Jews interned in Italy, Ebrei stranieri internati in Italia durante il periodo bellico compiled by Anna Pizzuti, which lists all Jews who escaped to or via Italy and its occupied territories, but in describing their origin follows sources from the period, resulting in non-systematic and non-reliable data as to their origin and itinerary. Similarly, Židovski (biographical) leksikon, a project of the Croatian lexicographic society and the Jewish cultural society Miroslav Šalom Freiberger, sums up research about thousands of Croatian (and Yugoslav) Jews and their fate during the war, but includes also migrant and refugee Jews in the period.
Daniel Carpi, Rescue of Jews (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Shoa Resource Center, 1977; repr. of Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, April 1974), pp. 1–43 (p. 18).
Frieda Johles Forman, Jewish Refugees in Switzerland During the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009), p. 3.
See Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978), p. 180; Milan Ristović, ‘Die Flüchtlinge und ihre Verbündeten: Solidarität und Hilfe in Serbien 1941–1944’, in Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS-Zeit (Regionalstudien 4), ed. by Wolfgang Benz-Juliane Wetzel (Berlin: Metropol, 2004), pp. 99–154.
For more, see Steven Bowman, Jewish Resistance in Wartime Greece (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); Steven Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Matsas, The Illusion of Safety: The Story of the Greek Jews During World War II (New York: Pella, 1997).
On 12 December 1941, the Salvador sank with 352 people on board. A further tragedy occurred on 24 February 1942, when another ship, the Struma, was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and capsized in the Black Sea. All 760 passengers (mostly Jews from Romanian Bukowina and Bessarabia) and the Bulgarian crew aboard perished. See Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at Sea (New York: Ecco, 2004); Jürgen Rohwer, ‘Jüdische Flücthlingsschiffe im Schwarzen Meer (1934–1944)’, in Das Unrechtsregime. Band 2: Verfolgung / Exil / Belasteter Neubeginn, ed. by Ursula Büttner (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1986), pp. 197–248.
The story of Bulgaria and its Jews is both noble, as it saved its Jews, and tragic, for its deportation of Jews from territories it occupied. For more, see Nadège Ragaru, ‘Et les Juifs bulgares furent sauvés …’: Une histoire des savoirs sur la Shoah en Bulgarie (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2020); Shelomo Alfassa, Shameful Behavior: Bulgaria and the Holocaust (New York: Judaic Studies Academic Paper Series, 2011); Björn Opfer, Im Schatten des Krieges: Besatzung oder Anschluss – Befreiung oder Unterdrückung? Eine komparative Untersuchung über die bulgarische Herrschaft in Vardar-Makedonien 1915–1918 und 1941–1944 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005); Nadège Ragaru, La Shoah en Europe du Sud-Est: Les Juifs en Bulgarie et dans les territoires sous administration bulgare (1941–1944) (Paris: Les publications du Mémorial de la Shoah, 2014). A rather unusual case of a German Jew in Bulgaria is that of Else Schrobsdorff, née Kirschner, who, in 1939, married a Bulgarian, Dimiter Lingorski, and moved with her two daughters from Berlin to Bulgaria, where they spent the entire duration of the war in safety pretending to be German. One of her daughters, Angelika Schrobsdorff, recounted their story in ‘Du bist nicht so wie andere Mütter’: Die Geschichte einer leidenschaftlichen Frau (Munich: dtv, 2016), translated by Steven Rendall as You are Not Like Other Mothers: The Story of a Passionate Woman (Europa Editions, 2012).
International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania Presented to Romanian President Ion Iliescu, November 11, 2004, Bucharest, Romania (2004). The only time that Jews escaped to Romania, or sometimes through it to Palestine, was 1943–44, after its wartime leader, Marshal Antonescu, changed the policy regarding deportations and allowed repatriations of Jews formerly deported to Transnistria, who were then allowed to emigrate to Palestine. In 1944, some Hungarian and Polish Jews also escaped deportations, fleeing to southern, then Romanian-controlled, Transylvania. See Denis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Dalia Ofer, Escape from the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Other works include Menaḥem Shelaḥ, ha-Ḳesher ha-Yugoslavi: Yugoslavyah ṿa-‘aliyah 2, 1938–1948 (Tel Aviv: ha-‘Amutah le-ḥeḳer ma‘arkhot ha-ha‘palah ‘a. sh. Shaʾul Avigur, Universiṭat Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘oved, 1994) and, recently, Artur Patek, Jews on Route to Palestine 1934–1944: Sketches from the History of Aliyah Bet – Clandestine Jewish Immigration (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2012).
A rich literature on this segment of Jewish exile from Germany comprises I. Izzet Bahar, Turkey and the Rescue of European Jews (New York: Routledge, 2015); Corry Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Arnold Reisman, Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s Vision (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishers, 2006).
Over one thousand two hundred Jews fleeing Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia by boat were held at the Danube port of Kladovo in October 1939 because of the British refusal of further immigration into Palestine and the lack of means of transport. Their odyssey lasted for almost two years, while the Yugoslav Jewish Community and several Jewish aid agencies struggled to help them survive and continue their journey. See Željko Dragić, Die Reise in die Ewigkeit: 70 Jahre Kladovo Transport. Putovanje u večnost. 70 godina Kladovo transporta (Vienna: Twist Zeitschriften Verlag GmbH, 2013); Kladovo transport: zbornik radova sa okruglog stola, Beograd, oktobar, 2002 = The Kladovo transport: roundtable transcripts, Belgrade, October, 2002, ed. by Milica Mihailović (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2006); Kladovo – Eine Flucht nach Palästina/Escape to Palestine, ed. by Alisa Douer (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2001); Dalia Ofer and Hannah Wiener, The Dead-End Journey: The Tragic Story of the Kladovo-Sabac Group (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996); Gabriele Anderl and Walter Manoschek, Gescheiterte Flucht: Der jüdische “Kladovo-Transport” auf dem Weg nach Palästina 1939–42 (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1993).
Jaša Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945: Žrtve genocida i učesnici NOR (Belgrade: The Federation Of Jewish Communities In Yugoslavia, 1980), p. 303.
The Jews from Central and Eastern Europe are most studied, followed by (Balkan) Sephardim, whereas Jews from North Africa are at the bottom of the list. Among the Balkan Jews, the Jews of Yugoslavia are most studied, followed by Bulgaria, Greece and, at the bottom, Turkey – the criterion obviously being the proximity to the ‘West’. See Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 191. The Balkans are absent from Bela Vago and George L. Mosse, Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe 1918–-1945 (New York: Halsted Press, Israel Universities Press, 1974). In her work on the Balkan Jews, Minna Rozen only mentions Yugoslavia as a way station for refugees, stating that their treatment was initially quite favourable, but that it became worse as the tide of anti-Semitic propaganda mounted – Minna Rozen, The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond: The Jews in Turkey and the Balkans 1808–1945, 2 vols (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2005), I, p. 334.
See, for example, Doreen Rappaport, Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2012), which also comes up with the most up-to-date bibliography of Jewish Resistance, with the Balkans entirely missing except for Greece.
Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001).
Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (New York: Verso, 2016), p. 218.
Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946 (New York: Norton, 2009); Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Fight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. by Mark M. Anderson (New York: The New Press, 1998); Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period, ed. by Sibylle Quack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Das Exil der kleinen Leute: Alltagserfahrung deutscher Juden in der Emigration, ed. by Wolfgang Benz (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991); Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue (New York: Holocaust Library, 1970); all omit the Balkans, both from the selection of stories and from the accompanying historical elaboration.
An important exception is Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, the most recognized reference book on the subject. It mentions Yugoslavia as a transit country and praises Yugoslav Jewry for their financial and organizational efforts to help the refugees, but it does not detail their destiny, or differentiate it from that of Yugoslav Jewry. See the article on Yugoslavia by Menachem Shelah in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. by Israel Gutman, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1718–22.
Austrian Exodus: The Creative Achievements of Refugees from National Socialism, ed. by Edward Timms and Ritchie Robertson, Austrian Studies VI (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995).
See Governments-in-Exile and the Jews During the Second World War, ed. by Jan Láníček and James Jordan (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013).
Refugees from Nazi-Occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories, ed. by Swen Steinberg and Anthony Grenville (Leiden: Brill, 2020), in its introduction provides an overview of how far the study of Jewish and other refugees has gone.
David Clay Large, And the World Closed its Doors. The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 208.
Norman Bentwich, ‘The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Austria 1938–1942’ and Herbert Rosenkranz, ‘The Anschluss and the Tragedy of Austrian Jewry’, in The Jews of Austria, ed. by Josef Fraenkel (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1967), pp. 467–546.
Zločini fašističkih okupatora i njihovih pomagača protiv Jevreja u Jugoslaviji, ed. by Zdenko Levental, (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1952); also available as The Crimes of the Fascist Occupants and their Collaborators Against Jews in Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Federation of Jewish Communities of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, 1957). Recently, German researchers have published a selection of sources on the Holocaust in the Balkans, clearly identifying Jewish refugees in several documents. See Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (VEJ), Bd. 14: Besetztes Südosteuropa und Italien, ed. by Sara Berger and others (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017).
Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl Der Jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991); Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. by Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990).
Walter Manoschek, ‘Serbien ist judenfrei’: militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1995).
A recent analysis of Ustaša genocide is Alexander Korb, ‘A Multipronged Attack: Ustaša Persecution of Serbs, Jews, and Romas in Wartime Croatia’, in Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated Europe, ed. by Anton Weiss Wendt (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 145–63.
Among major works on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia are Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) (a translation of their previous Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi Liber, 2001); Walter Manoschek, ‘Serbien ist judenfrei’; Christopher Browning, The Fateful Months: Essay on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985); Ženi Lebl, ‘Do konačnog rešenja’: Jevreji u Beogradu 1521–1942 (Belgrade: Čigoja, 2001).
Anna Maria Grünfelder, Von der Shoa eingeholt: ausländische jüdische Flüchtlinge im ehemaligen Jugoslawien 1933–1945 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013). An extended, slightly changed version translated to Croatian is Anna Maria Gruenfelder, Sustigla ih Šoa – Strani židovski izbjeglice u Jugoslaviji (1933.-1945.) (Zagreb: Srednja Evropa, 2018).
Walter Brunner, Josef Schleich “Judenschlepper” aus Graz 1938–1941. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2017); Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration’, and other articles.
Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945 (St Paul, MN: Paragon, 2011).
Milan Ristović, ‘“Unsere” und “fremde” Juden: Zum Problem der jüdischen Flüchtlinge in Jugoslawien 1938–1941’, in Zwischen großen Erwartungen und bösem Erwachen: Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Südosteuropa 1918–1945, ed. by Anke Hilbrenner and Dittmar Dahlmann (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), pp. 191–215; ‘Turisti pod sumnjom, o jednom vidu politike Kraljevine Jugoslavije prema jevrejskim izbeglicama 1938–1941 godine’, in Kladovo transport: Zbornik radova sa okruglog stola, pp. 170–89; ‘Jugoslavija i jevrejske izbeglice 1938–1941’, Istorija 20. Veka, 1 (1996), pp. 21–43. Milan Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji 1918–1941 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju 2008) is the foremost study on anti-Semitism in interwar Yugoslavia, which also deals with government’s and public reaction to the arrival of Jewish refugees.
Mirjam Rajner, Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
An example is Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The literature on Italian rescue will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
Marina Cattaruzza and Constantin Iordachi, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in East-Central Europe: New Research Trends and Perspectives’, East Central Europe, 39/1 (2012), 1–12 (p. 2).
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (London: Random House, 2011), p. 17.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’, in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, ed. by Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 232–47.
Personal recollections are not mentioned or discussed in the recent overview of new research trends and perspectives of Holocaust studies in East Central Europe by Cattaruzza and Iordachi, ‘Anti-Semitism’. Similarly, no survivors’ testimony is mentioned in the otherwise comprehensive recent overview of research on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia by Jovan Ćulibrk, Istoriografija holokausta u Jugoslaviji (Belgrade: Pravoslavni bogoslovski fakultet, 2011).
As suggested in Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, ed. by Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger (New York: Berghahn, 2011).
See, for example, Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Zvi Gitelman, The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).
See Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture, ed. by Julie Mell and Malachi Hacohen (Basel: MDPI, 2014, a reprint of the special issue of the open-access online journal Religions in 2012).
Sara Raisky provides detailed instruction about how to sew precious stones and coins into clothes in her La Matassa: Ovvero la signora delle tredici picche (Trieste: Mgs Press, 2010), p. 172. Similarly in the Interview with Eva Fischer. I campi fascisti Dalle guerre in Africa alla Repubblica di Salò.
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54/4 (1995), 917–931.
Tilla Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1990), p. 358; Wolfgang Georg Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, trans. by Inge Goodwin (London: Owen, 1979), p. 121.
Ernie Weiss, Out of Vienna: Eight Years of Flight from the Nazis (Cumberland Foreside, ME: Eldorado, 2008), p. 112.
William V. Rauscher (in collaboration with Werner Reich), The Death Camp Magicians: A True Story of Holocaust Survivors Werner Reich and Helbert Nivelli ([n.p.]: 1878 Press Co., 2015), p. 69.
Ernst Pawel, Life in Dark Ages: A Memoir (New York: Fromm International, 1995).
Johanna Jutta Neumann, Escape to Albania: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl from Hamburg (first published as Via Albania: A Personal Account in 1990) (London: Centre for Albanian Studies, 2015), p. 39, pp. 260–61.
As argued in Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. II, series B, December 1931–April 1952, ed. by Barnet Litvinoff (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1984), p. 102.
Only recently, informal networking in the Balkans was reappraised in Adnan Efendic and Alena Ledeneva, ‘The Importance of Being Networked: The Costs of Informal Networking in the Western Balkans Region’, Economic Systems, 44/4 (2020).
Ludwig Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens. Erinnerungen eines Grazer jüdischen Rechtsanwaltes 1900–1940 (Graz: Droschl, 1998) was written in 1942; Irene Grünbaum, Escape Through the Balkans: The Autobiography of Irene Grünbaum, trans. by Katherine Norris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) was similarly published half a century after it was written. Najmann’s recollections, also written immediately after the war, were never published.
Fischer’s Lodgings in Exile was published first as Möblierte Zimmer (Munich: Hanser, 1972). Pawel’s memoir was published only in 1995, after all his other novels and biographies.
Gertrude Najman(n), ‘Verlorene Jugend’ and ‘Die Reise nach Palästina,’ Eva Mills Papers, Wiener Library 1816/1, London.
Lucie Begov, Mit meinen Augen: Botschaft einer Auschwitz-Überlebenden. Mit einem Nachwort von Simon Wiesenthal (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1983).
Ilse Strauss, Unpublished Memoir 4413, Wiener Library, p. 18. Apart from recounting her refugee journey, Ilse Strauss (née Lewin) from Halle (an der Saale) details growing up in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and discusses the assimilation of Jews.
Trude S. Binder, ‘A Survivor’s Memoirs of the Holocaust’, LBI Memoir Collection (30 M). It is not clear when these memoirs were written, but they were handed to the Leo Baeck Institute after Binder’s death in 1994.
Manfred Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe. Wie Blanka und Rudolf den Holocaust überlebten (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2004).
Interview with S. Edmund Berger, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive.
Tilla Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre.
The Bird Has No Wings: Letters of Peter Schwiefert, ed. by Claude Lanzmann, trans. [from the French] by Barbara Lucas (London: Search Press, 1976). De Beauvoir’s and other comments are on the front and back flap of the book covers.
Gertrude Schneider, Exile and Destruction: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).
Ivan Singer, My Father’s Blessing: My Salvation, (Sydney: Singer consulting 2002), pp. 300–20. Tito and his entourage were eventually evacuated by Russians to Bari.
The first two volumes, used in this book, are Vjetrenjasta klepsidra (Zagreb: Durieux, 2004), and Imao sam sreće (Zagreb: Durieux, 2006).
Albert Alcalay, The Persistence of Hope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), p. 306.
Queller, Meine Erlebnisse, p. 59a. Compare Alcalay, The Persistence of Hope, pp. 81–82.
Alcalay, The Persistence of Hope, p. 82.
Ibid., pp. 118–19.
Ibid., p. 76.
Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 68; Alcalay’s father at Monte Sant’ Angelo, The Persistence of Hope, p. 277.
This is not unique to the Balkans. See Gender and Catastrophe, ed. by Ronit Lentin (New York: Zed Books, 1999), especially the chapter by Joan Ringelheim, ‘Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory’ pp. 18–33.
Rajner, Fragile Images, p. 9.
One example from the region is Dorit Oliver-Wolff, From Yellow Star to Pop Star (Burgess Hill: Red Door, 2015).
Hannah Arendt, ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding’, in her Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), pp. 338–39.
Philip Lejeune, as quoted in Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 9.
Martin Pengelly, ‘Where Memory Leads: Saul Friedländer on Holocaust, History and Trump’, The Guardian, 20 November 2016.
Susi (Kirsch) Friedmann’s recollections read like a travelogue of an extended vacation, with tales about bathing resorts and turtles instead of dangers or humiliations, ‘Friedmann, Susi. “Segment 44–87.” Interview, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1996.
Graham Huggan, Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), pp. 147–57.
See James E. Young, ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs’, New Literary History, 18 (1987), 403–23 (p. 420).
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 2–3.
Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses, p. 12.
What has been left out were frequent grudges against some people (Jewish or Gentile) in many recollections, mostly for not returning money or other valuables lent, as they were deemed too personal, and impossible to verify. Unfortunately, this omission also distorts the aim of describing the refugee experience, because these financial transactions made up an important part of it.
Ruth Gutman, ‘Through Hell With a Guardian Angel’ (manuscript typewritten in Haifa in 1990), Leo Baeck Institute, New York.
Harry J. Cargas, ‘An Interview with Elie Wiesel’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1 (1986), 5–10 (p. 5).
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (New York, Zone Books, 1999), pp. 12–14.
Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 450.
But those who perished never had a chance to apply this belief to the lived experience of the camp world. Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. xii.
Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–25 (p. 7).