Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933–1945. [1. ed.] 9783506791740, 9783657791743

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Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933–1945

Balkan Studies Library Series Editors Zoran Milutinović (University College London) Alex Drace-Francis (University of Amsterdam)

Advisory Board Gordon N. Bardos (SEERECON) Marie-Janine Calic (University of Munich) Lenard J. Cohen (Simon Fraser University) Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London) Radmila Gorup (Columbia University) Robert M. Hayden (University of Pittsburgh) Robert Hodel (Hamburg University) Anna Krasteva (New Bulgarian University) Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London) Maria Todorova (University of Illinois) Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin) Andrew Wachtel (Northwestern University)

VOLUME 34

Jewish Refugees in the Balkans, 1933–1945 by

Bojan Aleksov

The author: Bojan Aleksov is an Associate Professor of South-East European History at the University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Cover image: Excerpt from the diary of Trude Scarlett Epstein (1922–2014), née Grünwald, held by the Wiener Holocaust Library (London) – Courtesy of her daughters Michelle and Debbie.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. © 2023 by Brill Schöningh, Wollmarktstraße 115, 33098 Paderborn, Germany, an imprint of the Brill Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland; Brill Österreich GmbH, Wien, Österreich) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. www.schoeningh.de Cover design: Celine van Hoek, Leiden Production: Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn ISSN 1877-6272 ISBN 978-3-506-79174-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-3-657-79174-3 (e-book)

Table of Contents Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Note on Spelling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Significance of the Jewish Experience of/in the Balkans  . . . . . xxi ‘History is that Certainty Produced at the Point Where the Imperfections of Memory Meet the Inadequacies of Documentation.’  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvii Chapter 1: The Jewish Exodus to the South 1933–1938  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yugoslavia as a Destination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Many Jews Fled to Yugoslavia? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Everyday Life  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prominent Refugees  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 2 10 25 34

Chapter 2: After the Anschluss  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 The Vienna Exodus  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 At the Height of Refugee Pressure  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Fictive Marriages  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Illegal Migration and Border Crossings  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Smuggled by Josef Schleich  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 War and Internment  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Belgrade: ‘Das vierte Tor’  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Last-Minute Escapes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Chapter 3: Annihilation of Jewry in the Balkans  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Attack and Escape(s)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Occupation and Implementation of the Holocaust  . . . . . . . . . . . . The Final Solution in the Hungarian- and Bulgarian-Occupied Areas of Yugoslavia and Greece  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rescue and Survival  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instead of a Conclusion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

111 112 121 141 146 154

Chapter 4: Ruma: The Town From Which All Jews Perished  . . . . . . . . . . . 156

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Chapter 5: Italian Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Flight to the Italians  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Life Under Italian Protection  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Internment in Camps/Centres Along the Adriatic Coast  . . . . . . . Rab  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epilogue  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

172 180 198 217 223 225

Chapter 6: Exile on Korčula  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Chapter 7: Rescue in Albania  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arrivals Before the War  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yugoslav Jews Flee to Italian-Held Albania  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Escaping and Hiding in Albania After the Italian Surrender  . . . . Kosovo Deportation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Humanity and Modernity  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

259 261 268 277 284 285

Chapter 8: Resistance of Jewish Refugees in Yugoslavia  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Resistance Before the War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . War Resistance  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jewish Refugees and the Partisans  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

289 289 300 302

Conclusion: Refugee Survival Guide  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Bibliography  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 Index  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am indebted to Imre Rochlitz (1925–2012), who inspired this research, and to whose memory, this book is dedicated. I began my study of Jewish refugees in earnest only after Imre’s death, but in Budapest, the place of his birth, when the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the Central European University (CEU), then led by Professor Nadia Al-Bagdadi and Éva Gönczi, and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung awarded their generous fellowship to me in 2016/2017. The great intellectual surroundings of the CEU, and its Raoul Wallenberg guesthouse overlooking the city, provided the perfect launching point, despite the freezing Budapest winter. I was deeply grateful to CEU professors Jasmina Lukić, Marsha Siefert, Alfred Rieber and Michael Miller, who all shared their opinions and advice on how to proceed. In parallel, I embarked on collecting sources, archival and narrative, and exploring databases of oral history. Here, I want to acknowledge in particular the assistance of the staff of the Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, the Croatian State Archive in Zagreb, Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, archives in Sremska Mitrovica, Split, Rijeka, and Brčko, and the archival collection of the Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in Belgrade, where Branka Džidić offered warmest welcome. Tonko Barčot of the Korčula Archive was most helpful in sharing whatever information and documentation was available for the chapter on Korčula. Finally, in London, I surveyed the National Archives and British Library, but I spent most time in the Wiener Holocaust Library, with its superb holdings and friendly atmosphere. Special thanks to their Reader Service Librarian, Sonia Bacca, who seriously cared about the researchers. In the Wiener Library I could also access other precious databases of interviews and memoirs of survivors (Yad Vashem, Leo Baeck, USHMM and USC Shoah Foundation, among the others listed in the bibliography), without which this book would not be possible. In particular, I am grateful to Boris and Vicko Marelić for their hospitality, cooperation and inspiration in Korčula. In Croatia, I also got further help from Mateo Bratanić from the island of Hvar, historians Sanja Simper and Zoran Jeličić in Rijeka, and Ivo Goldstein, Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Gabi Abramac, Julija Koš, and Ljiljana Dobrovšak in Zagreb. In Belgrade, I owe thanks to Milovan Pisarri, Slobodan Marković, Danilo Šarenac, Krinka Vidaković Petrov, and most of all to Olga Manojlović Pintar. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, I am grateful to colleagues Husnija Kamberović and Sonja Dujmović in Sarajevo, Vladan Vukliš in Banja Luka, and Tamara Vijoglavin Mančić in Brčko. Further gratitude goes to historians in Israel, Mirjam Rajner, Yitzchak Kerem, and Olga

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Ungar. In Austria, I got information from Hans Haider. In Italy, I was offered helping hands by Marco Abram, Eric Gobetti, Alessandro Sette, Enrico Acciai, and Professor Alberto Basciani. My student Lim Ying Xuan generously helped with transcribing some of the interviews. Also, I should stress that all my students throughout the previous years acted as constant inspiration and motivation. My colleagues at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL SSEES), especially professors Wendy Bracewell and Alena Ledeneva, as well as Thomas Lorman and Jakub Benes, raised some key questions, and offered much needed guidance with theoretical issues and implications about equally important factual detail. Librarians at the SSEES library deserve equal praise for their commitment and assistance. Fellow historians, professors Robert Gildea, Renée Poznanski, Roderick Bailey, Yaacov Falkov, and all other colleagues from the project on Transnational Resistance, who are too many to mention, have played the key part in my growing interest and understanding of the topic. Parts of the last chapter on resistance in this book were first published in the collective volume that came out of this project under the title Fighters across frontiers: Transnational resistance in Europe, 1936–48 with Manchester University Press. Being invited to present at the conference on The Second World War in Southeastern Europe organised by the Topography of Terror Foundation Berlin in 2017 put me in contact with several war and violence scholars from all over Europe, which benefited this book. Thanks to professor Onur Yildirim who invited me, I shared some early thoughts about my research at a conference A Century of Human Displacement and Dispossession: Europe and the Middle East 1919–2019 at the American University in Beirut in May 2019, where I learnt the most about refugees and exile. In addition, over the last years, I have had long discussions, email exchanges, and talks over coffee with many other friends and colleagues who inspired, supported, and pushed me with ideas, opinions, explanations, and corrections. Starting with my partner Cristiano Ragni, and naming Noëmie Duhaut, Đorđe Balmazović, Oto Luthar, Anna Hajkova, Francois Guesnet, Carl Bethke, Rory Yeomans, Ed Naylor, Eliot Tretter, Nevena Ivanović, Emil Kerenji, Florian Bieber, Stefan Halikowski-Smith, Loukianos Hassiotis, Cecilie Endresen, Gezim Krasniqi, and Raul Carstocea, I apologise to all those I fail to mention. Furthermore, I was invited by professors Renate Hansen-Kokorus and Olaf Terpitz to present a chapter on Korčula at the conference on the Jewish Literatures and Cultures in Southeastern Europe at the University of Graz. Subsequently, and benefiting from their feedback, parts of it featured in the volume published with Böhlau Verlag. Professor Jolanta Sujecka from the University of Warsaw also invited me to present my project at its early stage,

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which she followed through, promoting it in her edited volume on the Balkan Jews and Minority Issue in South-eastern Europe. Other people from all over the world, including professors Ingeborg Fialová and Eduard Mühle, Stephen Shapiro, Mischa Gabowitsch, Joseph Rochlitz, Claude Cahn, Gwen Walker, the late Jakov Jaša Almuli, and Martina Bitunjac shared advice, sources, and texts, for which I owe sincere gratitude. Michael Neal carefully assisted the editing process. Finally, I profited from the guidance and feedback of Brill’s Balkan Studies Library editor Zoran Milutinović and anonymous reviewers. Needless to say, all interpretations of historical events in this book, including all possible mistakes, are mine.

Note on Spelling Place names are given in common English-language spelling where this exists, so Belgrade and not Beograd, Vienna and not Wien. Other place names are rendered in the local languages, whereby diacritical marks of the Serbo-Croatian and Albanian are preserved. Similarly, the local words which have become familiar to English readers and students of history are kept in their original spelling, so Ustaša instead of Ustasha, and Četniks instead of Chetniks. In the case of names of places whose ownership changed hands, effort has been made to list names in two languages, to reflect how they appear in documents of the time. It was much more difficult with personal names, which were recorded and spelled differently across time, state jurisdictions and languages in which they were written, and some confusion there is inevitable, despite the effort to render them in a uniform way throughout this book.

Introduction 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 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).

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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 oftenforsaken 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

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).

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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 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).

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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 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).

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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 nonBulgarian 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 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

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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 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).

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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 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:

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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. 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.

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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

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 antiSemitic 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

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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 socalled 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

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.

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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 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).

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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, 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

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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 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

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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, 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).

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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

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (London: Random House, 2011), p. 17.

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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 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).

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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 reevaluate 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 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.

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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 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.

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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, 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).

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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,

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.

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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. 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.

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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 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).

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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, 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.

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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, 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.

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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 One example from the region is Dorit Oliver-Wolff, From Yellow Star to Pop Star (Burgess Hill: Red Door, 2015).

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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:

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.

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It is a self-criticism, from the historian’s viewpoint. There is a danger in memoirwriting, 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 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.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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 socalled 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.

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).

Chapter 1

The Jewish Exodus to the South 1933–1938 The Jewish flight to the Balkans in the 1930s was shaped by the interplay between the Jewish responses in Germany (and later Austria) to anti-Semitism, and the political and economic reality in Balkan countries as potential emigration destinations. Recently, David Jünger illuminated how the dynamic within the Jewish community in Germany, the situation in Palestine, and disagreements among the leading Jewish political organizations, influenced emigration, or led to its rejection or postponement.1 Despite all the alarms, the unprecedented nature of developments in Nazi-ruled Germany over a number of years provoked mixed responses. The political opponents of the Nazi regime, and the Jews as those most affected, were, for the most part, left to confront their fate on their own. Therefore, the first wave of fugitives from Germany, many of whom were Jewish, was caused by political rather than racial persecution. In addition, Jewish university staff, state employees, and journalists were dismissed, and many of them sought jobs and safety elsewhere. After 1935, many chose to leave Germany because they were in breach of the Nuremberg racial laws through being married to those categorized as Aryans. There were also those whose property was sought after, and who became targets if they refused to surrender it under unfavourable conditions. Eventually, the most vulnerable group turned out to be the so-called Ostjuden, the Polish-born Jews and their children – even if the children were born in Germany.2 Given the variety of targets and different degrees of threat, emigration from Germany after 1933 was chaotic, but it was primarily an individual, or at best a family, decision. Their decisions to emigrate or flee, and their potential destinations, depended upon individual circumstances, networks, and information circulating at the David Jünger, Jahre der Ungewissheit: Emigrationspläne deutscher Juden 1933–1938 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); ‘Beyond Flight and Rescue: The Migration Setting of German Jewry before 1938’, Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts. Dubnow Institute Yearbook, XVI (2017), 173–98. See also Fritz Kieffer, Judenverfolgung in Deutschland – eine innere Angelegenheit? Internationale Reaktionen auf die Flüchtlingsproblematik 1933–1939 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003); Abraham Margaliot, Between Rescue and Annihilation: Studies in the History of German Jewry, 1932–1938 (Jerusalem: Mekhon Le’o Beḳ, 1990) (in Hebrew); Eliahu Ben-Elissar, La Diplomatie du IIIe Reich et les Juifs (1933–1939) (Paris: Julliard, 1969). During the Weimer Republic period (1919–33), only about sixteen thousand of the roughly one hundred thousand Ostjuden were judged to have qualified for citizenship. Wm. Laird Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Bitter Prerequisites: A Faculty for Survival from Nazi Terror (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), p. 19.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_002

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time. This is reflected in the story, or rather stories, told here about the initial period of Jewish exodus to south-eastern Europe. This chapter looks at individual trajectories and singles out experiences and perceptions of German Jews arriving in the Balkans, but it also looks at the effect of their arrival in host countries, especially on the Yugoslav Jewish community. It also introduces the Zionist Hachshara (training farm) in Golenić in Croatia, the first attempt at semi-organized emigration. Finally, it sketches the escape paths of some prominent Jewish refugees, not because they merit more attention than others, but because this information was easier to find, and, in some instances, became reflective of wider experiences.

Yugoslavia as a Destination Yugoslavia and the Balkans were not a sought-after destination, although historically Jews played an important social, cultural, and economic role in the region, and in the 1930s faced relatively little or no discrimination there compared to other parts of Europe. Yet the Balkan countries were mostly poor, and there were few if any opportunities for employment or business without some previous family or other connection (the primary reason for German Jewish refugees to head that way). In the 1930s, as elsewhere in Europe, states did not look after refugees, and the issue was usually left to the local Jewish community. At that time, a vibrant Jewish life existed in a few larger Balkan cities such as Salonika (Thessaloniki), Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo, although there were also a few smaller towns with significant Jewish populations, such as Bitola in the south or Osijek and Subotica in the north. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, established after the First World War out of Serbia and Montenegro, and other previously Ottoman and Habsburg lands (now Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia), occupied a large part of the Balkan peninsula, and formed a transit area between Central Europe and the Mediterranean ports and Palestine. With other routes for escape from Germany becoming increasingly difficult, expensive, and restrictive, Yugoslavia, alongside Greece and Bulgaria, turned into a major transit country for the refugees, while some of them remained or became stuck. Those who reached Greece were usually able to proceed further. Only a few went to remote Albania, although their numbers drastically increased in 1938, when all other options were shut. While Jews had been living in the Balkans since ancient Roman times (Romaniots), most arrived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries after the Sephardi Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal and settled in what was then the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed them. Whereas Sephardim spoke Ladino, the German-speaking (and later Hungarian-speaking) Ashkenazi

The Jewish Exodus to the South 1933–1938

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Jews had been gradually settling in the northern areas – reconquered from the Ottomans by the Habsburg Empire from the end of the eighteenth century. The biggest influx occurred after the Agreement of 1867, cementing Austria-Hungary as a complex state. A great majority of Jews had migrated to Croatia only a few decades before the First World War, after the Croatian nobility allowed such settlement, and especially after 1873, when Jews were given full equality before the law.3 Some engaged in the wood or agricultural trade from the lands of that very same nobility, and they were consequently viewed negatively by the exploited population. Others worked in liberal professions, but they were nevertheless often perceived with suspicion and seen as ‘German’ or ‘Hungarian’ by the predominantly Slavic local population. A similar situation unfolded in Bosnia and Herzegovina after its occupation by Austria-Hungary in 1878, when thousands of Ashkenazim moved in to find jobs in the imperial administration or new business opportunities. They too encountered a different reaction from the locals compared to that enjoyed by Sephardi communities, which for centuries had been part of the urban fabric of the Ottoman Balkans. This distinction continued well into the interwar period, when the Ashkenazim or Te(u)descos (literally ‘Germans’ in Ladino) were sometimes negatively viewed, especially compared to the well-integrated Sephardim.4 When anti-Semitism first emerged in Sarajevo, it had a distinct anti-Ashkenazi slant, and the Ashkenazim were considered foreign, not only by local Slavs, but also by the local Sephardim.5 The Sephardim also waged a sort of class warfare against the more affluent Ashkenazim, impugning their allegiance to Yugoslavia. The newly established country could not erase the huge differences in political culture and cultural background between the former Habsburg and Ottoman lands. Comparing Zagreb and Belgrade in the late 1930s, British journalist Lovett Fielding Edwards noted: Also, the[ir] Jews are different: in Zagreb they are Ashkenazi, the familiar Yiddish-German speaking type of Central Europe, noisy, exuberant and numerous; in Belgrade they are mostly the more aristocratic Sephardi, Spanish speaking, more restrained and not easy to distinguish from those about them.6 Agneza Szabo, ‘Židovi i proces modernizacije građanskog društva u Hrvatskoj između 1873. do 1914. Godine’, in Dva stoljeća povijesti i kulture Židova u Zagrebu i Hrvatskoj, ed. by Ognjen Kraus (Zagreb: Židovska općina Zagreb, 1998), pp. 142–55 (p. 146). Also, Melita Švob, Židovi u Hrvatskoj Migracije i promjene u židovskoj populaciji (Zagreb: Židovska općina Zagreb, 1997). Francine Friedman, Like Salt for Bread. The Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 270–73, 349–52. Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 38. Lovett Fielding Edwards, Profane Pilgrimage: Wanderings through Yugoslavia (London: Duckworth, 1938), p. 283.

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The Jewish refugees also distinguished between what Ludwig Biró described as autochthonous Serbian Jews, and Croatian Jews who were culturally Austrian or Hungarian. Sarajevan Jasha Levi claimed that they were simply two different tribes, only designated by others as one.7 Notwithstanding these impressions, by the 1930s, the vast majority of Yugoslav Jews spoke Serbo-Croatian and were well-integrated.8 The Sephardim, as described by Harriet Freidenreich, the foremost researcher into Yugoslav Jewry, enjoyed amicable relationships with their neighbours, particularly with Serbs, who appreciated their support for Serbia before and during the First World War. Belgrade and Sarajevo Sephardim voted for the ruling Serb-dominated parties, and their later tribulations were often attributed to their association with Serbs.9 There was a similar situation in other postOttoman Balkan countries featuring strong cultural, social, and economic ties between Jews and non-Jews. However, in the interwar period, the Jews were also transforming into a more self-aware minority, keeping their own religious, as well as social and political, representation, while at the same time accepting the national identity of the majority society through acculturation and language integration. In Yugoslavia by the 1930s, members of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities now coexisted peacefully and frequently intermarried, despite the latter sometimes feeling sidelined.10 Time and again, the Jewish leadership expressed their loyalty to, and satisfaction with, Yugoslavia, whereas anti-Semitism in other countries such as Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania was condemned.11 There was even speculation that Yugoslavia, like Fascist Italy, was interested in the mandate on Palestine, based on its exceptionally good rapport with its Jewish citizens, and its support for the Zionist project and the Balfour Declaration. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 330–31; Jasha M. Levi, The Last Exile: Tapestry of a Life (Plainsboro, NJ: BookSurge, LLC, 2009), pp. 34, 60. Agneza Szabo, ‘Židovi i proces modernizacije građanskog društva u Hrvatskoj između 1873. i 1914. Godine’, p. 146. Harriet Freidenreich, ‘Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Interwar Yugoslavia: Attitudes toward Jewish Nationalism’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 74 (1977), 53–80. For the consequences of the pro-Serb orientation of Sephardi Jews, see Nadège Ragaru, ‘Nationalizing the Holocaust: “Foreign” Jews and the Making of Indifference in Macedonia under Bulgarian Occupation (1941–1944)’, in The Holocaust and European Societies: Social Processes and Social Dynamics, ed. by Andrea Löw and Frank Bajohr (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 105–26. Loker Cvi, ‘Sarajevski spor i sefardski pokret u Jugoslaviji’, Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja, 7 (1997), 72–79. Ivo Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, pp. 339–76. Sonja Dujmović, ‘Uzajamna lojalnost – državna politika i jevrejstvo Sarajeva u međuratnom periodu’, Prilozi, 48 (2019), 129–76 (pp. 160–61).

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Still, Jews made up a very small portion of Yugoslavia’s population. Compared to well over half a million ethnic Germans, there were only 68,405 Jews (39,010 Ashkenazim, 26,168, Sephardim, and 3227 Orthodox in six smaller Hungarian-speaking communities in the north), according to the last prewar census conducted in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1931. With several hundred acquiring citizenship each year, and increased immigration of Jews (including, but not only, refugees), it is safe to assume that there were close to eighty thousand Jews on the eve of the Second World War, making up half a per cent of Yugoslavia’s 15.5 million population. In terms of languages used, occupation, wealth, integration, and political views, Yugoslav Jewry reflected, if not exceeded, Yugoslav diversity. The largest communities were in Zagreb (between ten and twelve thousand), Belgrade (ten to eleven thousand), and Sarajevo (nine thousand), where they represented 6.5 per cent, 3.5 per cent, and 10.5 per cent of the population respectively. In terms of social structure, most were middle class, with a few rich individuals, and some destitute communities, especially in the southern region of Macedonia. It is among those poor communities that immigrants to Palestine, Chile, and North America were recruited at a steady but rather insignificant pace of a couple of hundred per year. Almost 40 per cent of those employed were merchants, 25 per cent were in state employment, around 13 per cent were artisans, and 8 per cent belonged to liberal professions. Jews were especially well-represented among lawyers and doctors.12 There was also a notable difference in wealth and occupation between the much poorer Sephardim in former Serbian and Ottoman territories, and the Ashkenazim of the former Austro-Hungarian provinces, who mostly belonged to the middle and upper classes and excelled in trade. While there is no direct link between anti-Semitism and Jewish emigration in the early 1930s, most studies recognize the impact of the particular sociopolitical and ideological climate, including local anti-Semitism. Compared to other European countries, anti-Semitism in the Balkans was seen as marginal or non-existent by Benbassa and Rodrigue in their seminal historical overview.13 Through the legal, administrative, and schooling policies of the state, and the activities of the respective Jewish communities in both Greece and Yugoslavia, a notion of a particular Greek and Yugoslav Jewish identity emerged in the 1920s. The Salonikan Jewish community, the largest in the Balkans, was nevertheless targeted by ultra-nationalist groups of refugees from Asia Minor, who Freidenreich, Jews of Yugoslavia, pp. 65–67; Melita Švob, Židovska populacija u Hrvatskoj i Zagrebu. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Les Juifs des Balkans: Espaces judeo-iberique, XIV–XX siècles (Paris: La Découverte, 1993), pp. 274–75.

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swelled the town after the Greek–Turkish population exchange, accusing Jews of previous pro-Ottoman or pro-Bulgarian attitudes, and the mass support of Communists among the younger Jews, most notably in the so-called Campbell affair in 1931.14 On the other hand, before the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, there were only isolated instances of anti-Semitism, and relatively few problems reported by the Jewish community in Yugoslavia. As described by Zdenka Novak, born Steiner, in 1919 into a German-speaking family in Zagreb: The political system in Yugoslavia was tolerant and Jews were free to practice their rites: we stayed home from school during our holidays, after the prayers we gathered in front of the synagogue. I cannot remember any resentment against us, any sign of anti-Semitism, at least not openly.15

Throughout the interwar period, the great majority of Jews expressed deep loyalty to the King and royal family and cherished the idea of Yugoslav unification. Two Foreign Ministers of the Kingdom, Momčilo Ninčić and Vojislav Marinković, both close to the monarch, were descended from assimilated Ashkenazi Jews. The Law on Jewish Religious Community in Yugoslavia, passed on 13 December 1929, was a major historical breakthrough ‘written with golden letters in the history of Yugoslav Jews’, as celebrated in Osijek, formalizing the full equality of Jews with other confessions, and spurring a significant increase in the activities of most communities in the country.16 The curriculum of Jewish religious instruction was widened to include the customs, history, and language of the Jews, and it was successfully managed by the Union of Jewish Religious Communities of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, as a state-recognized roof organization. This organization also elected the Great Rabbi, who enjoyed equal rights and honours to the three other leaders of religious communities (Orthodox and Catholic Christian and Islamic). The state paid his large salary, he was addressed as Eminence, and during his tours of inspection, in accordance with national custom, the nine provincial governors had to kiss his hand. The Zagreb community, and a few others belonging to former Austria-Hungary, objected to the centralized character of the Union. While it had a similar size population to Belgrade, the Zagreb Jewish community contributed more than double to the central budget and various ad hoc collections. Only due to the overpowering Zionist majority was a compromise The so-called Campbell district was a poor area where Jewish refugees of the 1917 Salonika fire had been resettled, and which was targeted in 1931 by anti-Semitic gangs of Greek nationalists. K. E. Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 97–99. Zdenka Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked: Zagreb Memories (Braunton, Devon: Merlin, 1995), p. 14. Zlata Živaković-Kerže, Židovi u Osijeku (1918–1941) (Osijek: Židovska općina, 2005), p. 45.

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reached, and Zionist help was needed again throughout the 1930s when the Zagreb community objected to the Union being headquartered in Belgrade. Later, Sephardi communities objected to Šime (Shimon, Shime) Spitzer (Špicer) as head of the Union from 1936, but his role in care for refugees soon overshadowed these concerns. An early sign of anti-Semitism, or a bad omen of things to come in Yugoslavia, might have been seen in relation to the mass migration of Polish Jews in the mid-1920s. While there was a steady stream of Jewish migrants to Yugoslavia throughout the interwar period, in 1925 Zagreb police headquarters raised an alarm, and soon the Interior Ministry requested an inquiry from all local police authorities to identify and report on what seemed to be a mass wave of Polish immigrants.17 The response revealed both the nature of this immigration and reactions to it. The most virulent anti-Semitic response came from the mayor of Senta/Szenta, close to the Hungarian border, which was one of the centres of the Satmarer Hasidim Orthodox Jewish community, better known as Zenta Yidden.18 Altogether, there were between seven hundred and one thousand newcomers in Senta and its surroundings in 1925/26, with some heading to other Orthodox Jewish communities in nearby Ada, Kanjiža, Subotica, Bačko Petrovo Selo, and further afield in Ilok (these few communities did not join the Union of Jewish Communities described above). A further 78 Polish Orthodox Jews were recorded as arrived in Zagreb in that year, mostly merchants and craftsmen, but also a cantor, engineer, dental technician, students, housewives, and so on.19 The investigation showed the increased migration from Poland to be short-lasting, family based, and sectarian. The anti-Semitic response on behalf of some authorities, and attempts to curtail the Jewish migration mostly via the Yugoslav Embassy in Warsaw, typical of the interwar attitude to the so-called Ostjuden throughout Europe, was eventually halted, and Yugoslavia would not impose any legal obstacles to Jewish migrants until 1938. In 1930, for example, 657 Yugoslav citizenships were granted (plus several hundred for family members), and at least a couple of hundred were to Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Austrian, and Romanian Jews.20 The government actively encouraged wealthy Jewish industrialists to move to Yugoslavia, as in the case of Wilhelm Löbl, and later Vilko Larič and Franz Mautner in Maribor.21 Yet acquiring citizenship remained a long and difficult process, and many of AJ (Belgrade, Archive of Yugoslavia)-14 (Ministry of Interior), 38-120-140, 584. AJ-14, 38-120-140, 632. AJ-14, 38-120-140, 633. AJ-14, 37-114-119. The list of persons who obtained citizenship in 1930, 522–42. Hannah Starman, ‘Twice Disowned by Slovenia?: The Holocaust, Postwar Trials of Jewish Textile Manufacturers, and a Six-Decade Quest for Justice’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 32/2 (2018), 173–206, (p. 175).

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the 4882 Jews recorded with foreign citizenship in 1931 only had residence permits.22 Yugoslavia’s main migrants were the so-called White Russians, fleeing the Bolsheviks. More than fifty thousand passed through Yugoslavia, and approximately thirty-five thousand settled in the 1920s, including several hundred Jews.23 Yugoslavia had taken a leading part in sheltering and giving protection to the refugees from Russia, given the close political, cultural, and historical ties between the two countries and their two royal families. Less known, but significant for our topic, is another group who fled to Yugoslavia – over three thousand Austrian Nazis came after their failed July putsch of 1934.24 Despite the Yugoslav official anti-Nazi stand, they encountered a friendly welcome, especially from members of Yugoslavia’s large German minority – the socalled Volksdeutsche. Most of them found refuge in Maribor, Osijek, Varaždin, Bjelovar, Slavonska Požega, and Zagreb, all places with a significant German population and near the border, but also places with numbers of Jewish refugees. Austrian Nazi refugees stayed with relatives or in internment camps supported by the Yugoslav and German governments, which also provided them with German passports and organized the transports that would take them to Germany in 1935. Most Volksdeutsche belonged to the so-called Donauschwaben, colonized by the Habsburg Empire in the late eighteenth century along the Danube, although for centuries Germans had also inhabited the Slovenian regions of Carinthia, Styria, and Carniola in the north of Yugoslavia on the border with Austria (and, from 1938, the German Reich). Long years of Nazi propaganda turned powerful German minority organizations in Yugoslavia, such as the Kulturbund, into the most important vehicles of anti-Semitism, which identified Jews with the Yugoslav regime and its ruling ideology.25 In 1935 in the In 1938, there were 3082 Jews with foreign citizenship. There is a detailed report on the citizenship application of Desider Hof in Ivo Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi Liber, 2004), p. 329, and data on p. 494. Miroslav Jovanović, Doseljavanje ruskih izbeglica u Kraljevinu SHS 1919–1924 (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 1996) and Ruska emigracija na Balkanu (1920–1940) (Belgrade: Čigoja, 2006). The only study of the Jewish segment of Russian migration is an article on Russian Jewish artists that settled in Belgrade, see Milenko R. Vesnić, ‘Jevreji na srpskoj pozorišnoj sceni tokom 19. i 20. Veka’, Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja, 7 (1997), 210–31. Dušan Nećak, Die österreichische Legion II: Nationalsozialistische Flüchtlinge in Jugoslawien nach dem mißlungenen Putsch vom 25. Juli 1934 (Aus dem Slowenischen von Franci Zwitter) (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996). For the German minority in Yugoslavia, see Karl Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache: Aspekte deutsch-juedischer: Geschichte in Slavonien 1900–1945 (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013); Zoran Janjetović, Nemci u Vojvodini (Belgrade: Inis, 2009).

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town of Vršac, where Germans made up one third of the population, the local Kulturbund organized public gatherings to pray for all Jews to drown in the Red Sea.26 There were numerous incidents caused by the celebration of Hitler’s birthday in places such as Maribor, provocative visits by German consuls, and so on.27 Besides local incidents and fights among youths, a number of Yugoslav Germans and German citizens were arrested for spying, but the German Government and Embassy often intervened on their behalf, managing to release those detained or to halt expulsions. The British Foreign Office reported a number of incidents and arrests that spread from Slovenia, where most pro-Nazi demonstrations took place, to Vojvodina and Belgrade itself.28 The Nazification of the Kulturbund German minority organization was a special concern for the American Embassy, which reported that Germany directly financed anti-Semitic publications, newspapers, and political organizations, such as the Yugoslav fascist Zbor.29 As many Yugoslav and Croatian Jews supported the Yugoslav Government, they were also an easy target for radicalized Croatian nationalists, who in the 1930s increasingly looked to Nazi Germany for ideas and support. On the other hand, some Serbian nationalist circles connected Jews with the Croatian national project, envious of Zagreb developing into the biggest industrial and commercial centre of Yugoslavia, with its Jewish bourgeoisie playing a significant role. Finally, and most paradoxically, Jewish refugees were identified with the Germans from whom they had escaped, even being reporting to police as ‘suspicious Nazis’.30 Something similar was happening with German-speaking Jews in Italy, who were a target of anti-German vitriol among the people of Germany’s closest ally.31 Nevertheless, initially, the plight of Jews and anti-Semitism were marginal issues in a country in the dire straits of recession, coming out of the personal rule, or dictatorship, established by King Alexander  I Karađorđević in 1929 to prevent it from sinking into ethnic conflict between Serbs and Croats, deemed two tribes of the same Yugoslav people by the official state ideology.

Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 10–11. AJ-334 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), 16–41, (Reports of the Political Department of 1939–1940). FO Annual Report 1938, Yugoslavia (London, British Library) IOR/L/PS/12/119, PT I, p. 31. Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, p. 442. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 284. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 237.

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How Many Jews Fled to Yugoslavia? Well-established data refer to thirty-seven thousand Jews who fled Germany in 1933. Thereafter, the numbers went down to between twenty and twenty-five thousand a year until 1938.32 Initially, most (over 70 per cent) travelled to other European countries, with between 4 and 9 per cent going overseas, and 19 per cent to Palestine. Yet from 1936/7 the destinations changed, as European countries closed their doors. Then, up to 60 per cent of German Jews emigrated overseas (North and South America, China, and so on), and only 20 to 25 per cent stayed in Europe, with around 15 per cent emigrating to Palestine. As Jünger showed from a multitude of sources, that initial emigration was often not considered permanent, but seen only as a temporary flight until Hitler’s demise and a return to the German homeland.33 Political opponents of Nazism were most threatened, so the initial wave saw many left-oriented Jews leave, along with Aryans fearing prosecution for their Communist or anti-fascist activities. How many of them ended up in the Balkans is impossible to ascertain accurately. Most earlier surveys of the Holocaust estimated seven thousand refugees stranded in Yugoslavia in 1941, without providing any sources.34 The so-called Loewenherz report of the Viennese Jewish Kultusgemeinde in 1941 listed 1644 Austrian Jews as having fled to Yugoslavia. Yet, as Schneider notes, this is the lowest possible estimate as it does not include any who went illegally or on their own.35 In 1939, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the ‘Joint’) estimated about two thousand Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia when it sent a small sum of money ($4300) to aid the Zagreb community.36 Joint numbers are slightly lower than those published by the Union of Jewish Communities in May 1939, when it recorded 624 foreign Jewish families in Yugoslavia, with 2182 individuals, and another 450 single Jewish refugees.37According to Koljanin, almost all of the three thousand refugees who found themselves in Yugoslavia

Jünger, Jahre der Ungewissheit, p. 59. Ibid., pp. 59–61. Kurt  R.  Grossmann, Emigration: Geschichte der Hitler-Flüchtlinge 1933–1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1969), p. 233. This is than replicated in Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Atlas of Jewish History (London: Routledge, 1994) and Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Jewish Civilisation (New York: Macmillan, 1990). Gertrude Schneider, Exile and Destruction, p. 154. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1929–1939 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), p. 269. Moscowitz, Moses, ‘Yugoslavia’, The American Jewish Year Book, 41 (1939–1940), pp. 325–26.

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in 1941 perished.38 Historians who have previously worked on the topic more specifically, such as Voigt, Ristović, Völkl, and Gruenfelder, all drew their information from a report by Aleksandar Klein (later Arnon), the Zagreb Jewish Community’s refugee aid administrator, according to whom over fifty-five thousand Jews fleeing from the Nazis passed through Yugoslavia between 1933 and 1941, with around a thousand still in the country when it was attacked on 6 April 1941.39 While Klein’s short manuscript gave a persuasive narrative about an important aspect of Jewish history, of which the Jewish community was proud, it was written entirely based on his memory. It was never subjected to critical analysis, although historians Menachem Shelah and Raul Hilberg accused Klein of cooperation with the Ustaša before his flight to Switzerland in 1942.40 Klein himself authored other reports referring to much smaller numbers.41 Of similar value is the report by Dragutin Rosenberg, who escaped to Switzerland one year after Klein, during which time he was de facto president of the Jewish Community in Zagreb.42 Klein’s and Rosenberg’s manuscripts remain important records, but more as reflections on their political and Milan Koljanin, ‘The Yugoslav Jews in World War Two’, in Jewish Youth Societies in Yugoslavia, 1919–1941, Catalogue of the Exhibition, Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade, 9 May 1995 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 1995), pp. 87–89 (p. 87). Katrin Völkl, ‘Die jüdische Gemeinde von Zagreb – Sozialarbeit und gesellschaftliche Einrichtungen in der Zwischenkriegszeit’, Münchner Zeitschrift für Balkankunde, 9 (1993), 105–54; Grünfelder, Sustigla ih Šoa; Ristović, “Unsere” und “fremde” Juden; Klaus Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf: Exil in Italien, 1933–1945, Vol.  1–2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, c. 1989– c. 1993). Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Harper 1961), p. 457; accusations against Klein are based on the report of the German Police Attaché in Zagreb, SS Obersturmbannführer Helm, also used at the Nuremberg trials, where Helm admits that Klein was carrying out important purchases for the Ustaša government in Italy and Hungary during the war. See Report of Ostuf. HELM, Police Attaché in Zagreb, and Report of the German Embassy at Zagreb to the German Foreign Office concerning the progress of the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’ in Croatia dated 18 April 1944, Reference Number: 1655/2429, The Wiener Holocaust Library. Klein claimed he was arrested by the Ustaša and sent to Budapest to obtain funds in foreign currency from the Joint, which secured his release. See Session 46, p. 6, pp. 5–6 [accessed 5 December 2021]. Klein reported in June 1934 that the Zagreb Community registered eight hundred refugees from Germany, out of whom only two hundred remained in Yugoslavia (Židov, 15 June 1934). In ‘Židovska emigracija u Zagrebu’ (Židov, 4 September 1936), Klein claimed that there were only four hundred Jews in the entire Kingdom. Rosenberg’s report to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) New York in Joint Archives, SM 66 Yugoslavia/General, 1939–1944. Published in Zdenko Levental, Auf glühendem Boden: ein jüdisches Überlebensschicksal in Jugoslawien 1941–1947: mit den Berichten Dragutin Rosenbergs über die Lage der Juden in Jugoslawien an Saly Mayer als ehemaligen Präsidenten des Schweizerischen Israelitischen Gemeindebundes und das

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personal roles within Zagreb’s Jewish Community. Given the circumstances in Yugoslavia, especially during the war, their knowledge of the situation of refugees beyond Zagreb is very questionable. Other official reports differ greatly in their figures. The Report for the Jewish Central Information Office in 1937 listed three hundred refugees from Germany, and a further one hundred and twenty working on Hachshara, on the Golenić estate.43 Berlin lawyer and writer Gerhard H. Wilk, who spent time in Zagreb as a refugee and wrote a memorandum describing the situation there to Jewish aid organizations in Paris and London, listed only six hundred Jewish refugees left in 1938, and around fifty who had established themselves or their businesses. Finally, Wilk also reported about one hundred refugees without any status and documents, as their German passports had expired and they could not obtain any other.44 The Jewish Yearbook similarly estimated that there were about one thousand refugee Jewish families in Yugoslavia at that time, but the international Jewish aid organization HICEM was assisting one thousand in Zagreb alone.45 Marija Vulesica recently questioned the figures of refugees circulating for decades in historiography, contrasting the figure of fifty-five thousand refugees that were said to have fled through or to Yugoslavia (as per Klein) with other official figures of around eight thousand for the first two years (1933–34), after which the numbers dropped sharply until late 1938, leading her to scale down her estimate to only one thousand between the two waves.46 During this period, many German Jews were actually in transit as Halutzim, travelling through Yugoslavia in order to reach the ports of Sušak and Split, or the Italian ports of Fiume and Trieste, only remembering thick Balkan forests on their train journeys.47 It is possible that they were not counted and that, as Vulesica reasons, Jewish officials diminished the number of those staying during the 1930s in order not to provoke more anti-Jewish sentiment than was already rife.48 Yugoslavia and all the Balkan countries suffered disproportionately long and delayed effects of the Great Recession, and incoming Jews could be used as American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ed. by Erhard R. Wiehn and Jacques Picard (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre, 1994). Rosenberg disappeared after the war. Wiener Holocaust Library, Report on the Position of Jews in Yugoslavia, 3000/7/1/1/27, p. 5. Wilk’s Memorandum is reproduced in Grossmann, Emigration, pp. 21–22. Schneiderman, Harry, ‘Yugoslavia’, The American Jewish Year Book, 40, (1938–1939), 308– 09; HICEM archive in USHMM, Fond 1430 (1933–1941). Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 207. Jackie Renka, ‘Errinerungen an die Kindeit in München und die Emigrationsjahre’, in Die Erfahrung des Exils ed. by Andreas Heusler and Andrea Sinn (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), pp. 130–33 (p. 131). Marija Vulesica, ‘Formen des Widerstandes jugoslawischer Zionistinnen und Zionisten gegen die NS-Judenpolitik und den Antisemitismus’, in Jüdischer Widerstand in

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scapegoats to blame for everything from taking jobs to living on social aid. On the other hand, it is also possible that the numbers were inflated after the war to accentuate the work of some of the Jewish activists. The two main Jewish communities in Belgrade and Zagreb often clashed, including over care for refugees, so it is very unlikely that any one activist could have an overall picture. What is clear, however, is that numerous personal names on the files of Jewish communities, and especially of international Jewish aid organizations such as HICEM, rarely coincide with the hundreds of people whose personal narratives and interviews about their refugee experience in Yugoslavia I found. To put it simply, most people in this book do not figure in any files, as many, maybe even a majority, did not ask for aid and were not included in the official figures, indicating that the number of Jewish and other refugees who passed through Yugoslavia in the 1930s must be much higher than any contemporary reports. While there is no evidence for the widely circulated figure of fifty-five thousand, it is likely that the number of refugees was in the tens of thousands. The exact figure may never be established, and only studies of small communities have some chance of establishing data for certain localities, as will be shown in the case studies of Ruma and Korčula in this book. Among the hundreds of Jews who registered in Yugoslavia as refugees from Germany in 1933, most of them found shelter in the country’s two largest cities, Belgrade and Zagreb.49 Others found their way to smaller northern Yugoslav towns, where German was widely spoken, and settled mostly through family connections. This was the case of the family of Margarete Stern (née Hirsch in 1925, in Fürth, Bavaria), who arrived in Yugoslavia by train via Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and settled with an aunt who married in Maribor.50 Nevertheless, these were small numbers in a country that had already seen years of huge influx of refugees or economic migrants.51 As elsewhere in Europe, the burden of care for those who could not support themselves fell almost exclusively on the Jewish community.52 In summer 1933, the Union of Jewish Communities responded to the first wave of German refugees, ordering all communities Europa 1933–1941, ed. by Julius H. Schoeps, Dieter Bingen, and Gideon Botsch (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016), pp. 89–105 (p. 99). La Situation Economique des Minorites Juive (Paris: Congrès Juif Mondial Départment Economique, 1938), p. 315. Margarete Stern, My Story (London: Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), 2018), p. 25. In 1933, there were 118,273 foreign citizens in Yugoslavia: 52,389 workers or business owners, and 65,884 family members. There were no other organizations offering aid to refugees at that time. Goldstein could not find any confirmation that the Catholic Church, especially Zagreb Archbishop Stepinac, supported the Jewish refugees, as is often claimed in his biographies and other publications. Židovi u Zagrebu, p. 409.

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to organize collecting money, food, and other aid, which was successfully completed by August.53 In turn, it opened a soup kitchen, organized lessons for refugee children, assisted with advice, and, in emergencies, with financial support. Because Zagreb experienced the biggest influx of refugees, the Union approved the formation of its special Committee for Refugees, headed by Dr Makso Pšerhof/Pscherhof, the vice-president of the Zagreb Jewish Community, with Aleksandar Klein as secretary. Furthermore, from mid1934, the Zagreb committee also took up communication with HICEM and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, with Klein acting as their representative for Yugoslavia, and maintained close contact with the Relief Association of German Jews in Berlin. Besides the Jewish refugee aid, Zagreb had another committee created to care for non-Jewish, political refugees from Germany headed by Vladimir Pfeifer, prominent trade unionist, and later one of the first victims of the Ustaša regime.54 Other Jewish communities and organizations such as WIZO (the Yugoslav branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization) began collecting aid, clothes, books, and toys for children. Further aid was distributed by the six Yugoslav B’nai B’rith lodges. As already stressed, the approach whereby no refugee, whether temporary or permanent, was to become a burden on public funds was common throughout Europe. While the influx of German Jewish refugees was not the greatest test for the newly created Yugoslavia, it was for its recently united Jewish community. The report by Klein on the Zagreb Aid Committee, discussed above, is unclear about how effective the Committee was in registering, let alone assisting, those who arrived at places beyond major centres. The Jewish Community could employ only a very few, usually as rabbis.55 Smaller towns and Jewish communities such as Dubrovnik, historically the oldest continuous Jewish settlement in the country, found it harder to grapple with refugees. Boasting only 24 paying out of about 120 members in the 1930s, Dubrovnik repeatedly complained to the Union in Belgrade that they were disproportionately burdened by the demands for assistance from the newly arrived.56 Even more difficult was to maintain a cordial and cooperative relationship with the authorities. Živaković-Kerže, Židovi u Osijeku (1918–1941), p. 86. ‘U Zagrebu je osnovan odbor za zbrinjavanje emigranata iz Nemačke’, Politika, 31 December 1933, p. 4. One of them, Lazar Margulies, served in the new art nouveau synagogue in Bjelovar in Croatia. See Mladen Medar, ‘Prilog istraživanju povijesti Židova u Bjelovaru’, Radovi Zavoda za naučnoistraživački i umjetnički rad, 1 (Gradski muzej Bjelovar, 2007), pp. 164– 68. Mirjam Rajner, Fragile Images, p. 295. The Margulies family fled via Ljubljana to Italy, where they survived. Bernard Stulli, Židovi u Dubrovniku (Zagreb: Jevrejska općina Zagreb, 1989), pp. 80–81.

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Soon after the first wave of arrivals, the delegation of Yugoslav Jews paid a visit to Foreign Minister Bogoljub Jevtić, who pledged that Yugoslavia would welcome Jewish refugees.57 Yet no one could predict how long the issue would persist. At that time Britain, for example, was largely seen as a port of transit as far as refugees were concerned, allowing a stay of somewhere between four and twelve weeks. The Board of Deputies of British Jews feared that many of the refugees would be made up of the professional classes, with little prospect of jobs and the potential for stirring up anti-Semitism in the country.58 This fear proved itself in Yugoslavia too, albeit with a different twist. Already in November 1933, a member of the Senate of the Yugoslav Parliament, Dr Ivan Majstorović, questioned the decision of the Government to accept three hundred and fifty German Jewish families, condemning anti-Semitism, but insisting that German or Ashkenazi Jews represented ‘pan-German Kulturträger mission in the Balkans’, tended to associate with authoritarian regimes, had no respect for local people and traditions, and, as already demonstrated in France, could become a security threat in border areas.59 As proof, Majstorović quoted the magazine of Jewish refugee intellectuals in Amsterdam, Die Sammlung, which explicitly stated its aim to become the ‘hub of German culture abroad’. Interior Minister Živojin Lazić admitted that asylum was granted to some Jewish refugees, but that it was not indefinite, and that most Jews wanted to emigrate to Palestine or further away. Among initial arrivals, according to the Minister, only two hundred were currently staying, while six hundred had already emigrated. He added that among those remaining, there were wealthy people who would invest and connect the country to Western markets. Finally, Lazić insisted that it was state tradition to accept émigrés regardless of their fate, which is ‘an honour for Yugoslavia, our culture and humanity’.60 Yugoslav Chief Rabi Dr Isak Alkalaj, the only Jewish member of the Senate, followed in the debate, praising the speech of the Interior Minister as a reflection of ‘the great soul of Yugoslav people’, providing further details on the Minister’s figures of only 200 refugees, asserting that 93 individuals were being sponsored by the Jewish Community, while a further 109 were wealthy. Alkalaj concluded the Senate debate, insisting that Jewish loyalty to Yugoslavia, both from Sephardim

Olivera Milosavljević, Savremenici fašizma 2: Jugoslavija u okruženju, 1933–1941 (Belgrade: Helsinški odbor, 2010), p. 117. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 18–28. Milosavljević, Savremenici fašizma 2, p. 120. Cited in Milosavljević, Savremenici fašizma 2, p. 121.

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and Ashkenazim, would remain beyond any doubt, even if there were thousands of newcomers.61 Indeed, most new arrivals in Yugoslavia waited for affidavits or tried to obtain visas to emigrate to the Americas, while only a minority tried to make Yugoslavia their new home. At the same time, Greece turned into a chief transit point for the illegal immigration into Palestine, with Polish Jews soon overtaking German ones. When the Greek Government bowed to British pressure to curb this traffic from Athens, it continued unabated from the Aegean islands, as reported in 1934/35.62 Some transports were held, such as the steamship Velos, with some four hundred Polish Jews on board, who were prevented from disembarking between Jaffa and Haifa in 1934 and forced to return to Piraeus. This prompted the Deputy Inspector-General of the British-Mandate Palestinian police to come to Athens, where Velos was detained, to investigate illegal immigration.63 Yet the transit continued, and Jews from Poland were sent to Palestine from Athens on another, Romanian vessel. In the meantime, a major debate ensued among Yugoslav Jews about whether the refugees should stay or emigrate further. Leading Zionists such as Aleksandar Licht insisted that aid for the German Jewish refugees should not dissipate into simple philanthropy, and insisted that it was essential for every Jew to understand that Eretz Yisrael was the only territory where it would be possible to permanently accommodate them, presenting this view as both a moral and an economic/practical solution.64 Another leading Yugoslav Zionist, Lavoslav Šik (Schick), also tried to persuade German refugees to emigrate to Palestine, and lamented that their women were ‘particularly aggrieved when it is suggested to them that they leave Europe and retreat to uncultured Asia’.65 Both condemned the refugees for not being sufficiently aware of their Jewish identity, and for still seeing themselves as members of the German nation and wanting to return to Germany. The Jewish Central Information Office report on Yugoslavia reaffirmed that very few refugees emigrated in order to create a

‘Yugoslavia and Exiled Jews,’ The Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1933, p. 13. FO Annual Report 1935, Greece, BL IOR/L/PS/12/156, p. 11. FO Annual Report 1934, Greece, BL IOR/L/PS/12/156, p. 13. The report does not mention what happened to the remaining hundred (presumably they landed illegally). Marija Vulesica, ‘“What Will Become of the German Jews?” National Socialism, Flight and Resistance in the Intellectual Debate of Yugoslav Zionists in the 1930s’, in Catastrophe and Utopia: Jewish Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by Ferenc Laczó and Joachim von Puttkammer (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), pp. 45–70 (p. 64). Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 326; Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 206.

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new life in Palestine.66 Condemning the ‘assimilatory’ ways of German Jews, the Yugoslav Zionist press went along, expressing surprise that many German Jews (just like many respectable Germans) did not share Yugoslav outrage about the rise of Nazism.67 Narrative sources corroborate some, if not all, of these accusations and misunderstandings. Viennese author Fischer ridiculed the behaviour of German assimilated Jewry, describing his grandfather and his friends as ‘the most entrenched, Iron-Cross-decorated members of the Association of Jewish ex-front-line-veterans of 1914–1918 […] who haven’t the brains of a flea’.68 Others tried to explain this attachment to German culture. Imre Rochlitz from Vienna described the incredulous reaction of many Jews to the German anti-Semitic laws, including in his own family. He described them as susceptible to the very same anti-Semitic prejudices to which they eventually fell victim, often despising the unassimilated Jews: Why should they persecute us? The various accusations of the Nazis did not seem to fit us: We were not rich, we did not exploit Gentiles, we certainly were not international conspirators, financiers, or Zionists, our culture was Germanic, we spoke Hochdeutsch without an accent and we didn’t even have big noses. They could not possibly mean us; surely their hostility was directed against the Jews of other cultures and nationalities …69

Thus, it should not come as a surprise that for the vast majority of German Jews in Yugoslavia, as stated by a number of interviewees and testimonies, Palestine was not an option. Common to recollections of both ‘bourgeois’ or socialist-leaning refugees from Germany and Austria was that they described themselves as secular, stressing that they went to synagogue on the high holidays only, and never celebrated a Friday evening or Seder night at home, as recalled by Werner Reich.70 Ruth Gutman and her husband George, medical doctors from Vienna, were diehard socialists, and she remained true to this ‘faith’ throughout her life, despite her later horrifying war experience.71 Ilse The Wiener Holocaust Library, ‘Report on the Position of Jews in Yugoslavia’, 3000/7/1/1/27, p. 5. Dina Katan Ben-Zion, ‘Polemics with Nazism in the Newspapers Zidov and Jevrejski Glas in Yugoslavia, 1935–1941’, Yad Vashem Studies, XX1 (1991), 287–314; Vulesica, ‘Formen des Widerstandes’, pp. 89–105. Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, pp. 112, 190. Fischer only spent a couple of years in Yugoslav exile (1938–40) as a child, before his father managed to get a business visa to go to London, while he returned with his non-Jewish mother to Vienna. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 20. Interview with Werner Reich, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, USHMM Collection, Gift of Hannes Ravic for BILD TV. Gutman, ‘Through Hell with a Guardian Angel’, p. 56.

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Strauss recalled: ‘Chanukah was, for me, just another children’s party organized by the community where I only remember that we all got a hot cup of cocoa each year.’72 In the fictionalized narration of Wolfgang Fischer’s father, he insisted: I’ve always made a point of teasing old friends turned Zionist, with their Old Home-New Country fantasies, and anyone who tried to argue seriously with me about Palestine, kibbutz settlements, the new harbour works at Haifa, or the future of Jaffa oranges as an export, I’d immediately invite them to the master butcher Rabenlechner’s for a dish of hot pork cracklings.73

In the light of the assimilationism of German Jewry, the Yugoslav Zionist press reported little about the plight of Jewish refugees and instead, according to a survey by the Goldsteins, fostered a sense of optimism and hope right until the destruction of Jewry in Yugoslavia, despite differences in opinion and approach.74 Yet, as Vulesica demonstrated, for Yugoslav Zionists too, Palestine was far away, both geographically and politically. Their Palestine nationalism strengthened their position versus those Jews who supported Serbian or Croatian nationalist forces, and it allowed them to assert their leadership with Yugoslav Jewry. Darko Suvin (Schlesinger/Šlesinger) described the Zagreb Zionist women’s organization as social rather than political, comparing it to a bridge club.75 One of the members, Sara Raisky, perceived it as a bourgeois club, supporting Zionism as a noble but not a practical idea to follow in terms of moving to Palestine.76 Furthermore, Zionism was rejected by Orthodox Jews entirely, but very little is known about their separate community, as no official records of their activities remain.77 While all parties and associations with an explicitly nationalist orientation were banned in Yugoslavia in 1929 in order to ease inter-ethnic tensions, the Zionists were able to continue their work, as the Jews were recognized not as a national, but as a religious, minority.78 Although the General Zionists, headed Ilse Strauss, Unpublished Memoir 4413, Wiener Library, p. 8. Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, p. 139. Ivo Goldstein and Slavko Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 52–75. Darko Suvin, ‘Slatki dani, strašni dani. Iz Memoara jednog skojevca, dio 1’, Gordogan (Zagreb), VI/VII (2008/2009), 26–54 (p. 28 and p. 54). Raisky, La matassa, pp. 68–69. Pavel Deutsch, the son of Orthodox community leader Josef Deutsch, Austrian-born industrialist, wrote that his father and their community organized aid for refugees arriving in Zagreb, and sent packages to other Orthodox families in Poland, Austria, and Germany. Deutsch was deported to, and died in, Jasenovac camp in the first year of the war. See Deutsch, Josef in Židovski leksikon. Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 209.

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by Aleksandar Licht, clearly commanded the support of the majority of Jewish communities, and were able to maintain their leadership position until 1941, two further factions emerged during the 1930s: the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) and the Revisionist Bet(h)ar movement.79 In addition, particularly in Bosnia, there was a strong Sephardi movement that was close to the Zionist philosophy in principle, but which demanded a special status for the Sephardim, their history, and culture.80 Notwithstanding criticism of German Jews as assimilationists, many contemporaries contested the widespread Zionist appeal for Yugoslav Jews. Zagreb B’nai B’rith President Mavro Kandel claimed that the Balkan Jews accepted Zionism more or less along political lines, rather than as a nationalist movement aiming at the unification of all Jews and emigration into one Jewish state.81 This is most evident in the lack of enthusiasm for Zionist activities related to Palestine, as most Jews and Jewish organizations clearly focused on Yugoslav issues, and even more on the local issues concerning their own Jewish communities.82 The project of building and settling a Yugoslav farm in Palestine failed, and many of its early emigrants returned. Eventually, only around one thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine from or via Yugoslavia in the 1930s, with half of them being refugee Jews and the other half mostly coming from the impoverished town of Bitola/Monastir.83 As Freidenreich concluded many years ago, few Yugoslav Jews felt the need to emigrate, given their country’s generally good treatment of the Jews.84 It was similar in Greece, with less than three thousand Greek Jews emigrating to Palestine in this period.85 Zagreb ethnologist and psychologist Vera Stein-Ehrlich publicly intervened in the often one-sided debate in the Zionist press with a series of articles criticizing the view that German Jewish refugees should immediately travel to Interviews with Francis and Eili Ofner. Vulesica, ‘“What Will Become of the German Jews?”’, p. 51. Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, p. 97; Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 327–32. Dujmović, ‘Uzajamna lojalnost’, pp. 150–53. In fact, of 490 Yugoslav Jews who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s, the Monastirlis accounted for 429. The Monastirlis emigrated in much greater numbers to the US and to Latin American countries, and in the 1930s increasingly to Belgrade and Zagreb. See Mark Cohen, Last Century of a Sephardic Community: The Jews of Monastir, 1839–1943 (New York: The Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 2003), p. 151. According to the Palestine Office report, 1076 people emigrated to Palestine from Yugoslavia in the period 1933–39, with half being halutzim from Germany and other countries trained at the Golenić Hachshara. See ‘Palestinski ured o svome radu,’ Židov XXIII/50 (8. 12.1939.), p. 6. Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia, pp. 71–72, 179–80. Fleming, Greece, p. 106.

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Palestine in order to build the Jewish state there. She deliberately used different terminology, describing the Jewish refugees as emigrants who were trying to keep their pride and fight their social decline. Stein-Ehrlich also criticized Yugoslav Jewish welfare associations for continuously saying that they had to do something, but hardly doing anything at all, and even accusing the new arrivals of provoking anti-Semitic attitudes by worsening the economic situation and stubbornly speaking German. Instead of constantly condemning refugees for lacking Jewish consciousness and sticking to German culture, Stein-Ehrlich appealed to Yugoslav Jews to help the refugees unconditionally, without judging them. She warned against the adoption of economically determined anti-Semitism, which was similarly part of the Nazi ideology, and insisted that migration to Palestine could not be the solution for the lives of this entire generation, as building a state there would be a lengthy process. Stein-Ehrlich’s more coherent and realistic approach, which she developed both as a woman who met refugees in real-life situations and as an academic, downplayed the political issues of Zionism, and instead pleaded for empathy and understanding for the emigrants, solidarity, and willingness to help, which could be seen as a lesson for our contemporary approach to issues of migration.86 However, Vera and her sister Ina, of whom more later, were dismissed by the mainstream in the Jewish Community as Femmes savantes.87 Despite clear differences, the advent of refugees aroused Jewishness among many in the well-integrated Jewish community of Yugoslavia.88 By the mid1930s, some of the conflicts between various political orientations were overcome, compromises were made with the Revisionists, and the Zionists clearly triumphed over the assimilationist generation of their fathers. On a more practical level, in 1934, the Zionists founded their Central Office for Social and Productive Aid, the aim of which was to persuade both Yugoslav and foreign Jews, younger ones in particular, to prepare for life, and for manual and agricultural jobs, in Palestine.89 Some money for the Hachsharas in Yugoslavia was allocated by the Council for German Jewry, although the Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia were not among their priorities.90 A year before, a baron, Vulesica, ‘“What Will Become of the German Jews?”’ pp. 67–68. Communist-Zionist Ina (Juhn-Broda) and her sister Vera Stein were daughters of Adolf Ehrlich, Zagreb construction entrepreneur, and brother of a famous architect, Hugo Ehrlich. After the war that made them both widows, Ina became a translator of South Slavic literature into German in Vienna, whereas Vera Ehrlich-Stein became a scholar and pioneer ethnologist. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 9. Interviews with Francis and Eili Ofner; Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked, p. 38. Vulesica, ‘“What Will Become of the German Jews?’, p. 65. Council for German Jewry, Report for 1938 (London: Steler & Young, 1939), p. 15.

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decorated Austrian war veteran and scion of probably the wealthiest Jewish family in Yugoslavia, Viktor Gutmann, lent part of his enormous Golenić estate to the Zagreb branch of the Youth Zionist organization HeChalutz for young German Jews to work in agriculture, mostly tending cows and other domestic animals.91 The main goal of the Hachshara in Golenić was to educate and prepare Jewish youth for the hard, pioneering work of building a Jewish state in Palestine. Golenić hosted 278 youngsters from 1933 to 1936, but most came from Poland and Lithuania, with a few Yugoslav Jews (from the impoverished Sephardi community of Bitola). Among the few German Jewish trainees was Elfriede Blanari from Hamburg, who came in 1934 and, after several years, managed to emigrate to Palestine and later to the USA, while her parents, who remained in Hamburg, perished.92 She was joined in 1937 by young Zionist activists Herbert Lewin from Osterode in East Prussia and Alfred Rosettenstein from Frankfurt an der Oder.93 In 1937, a few more German Jews came as a way to escape concentration camps or prisons, as was the case with Ernst/Ernesto Kroch and his friends, Lothar and Käschen (Uri?) from Breslau, and Georg and Walter from Leipzig. While eagerly doing their agricultural tasks, the German newcomers interfered in political education, spreading a clear Communist alternative to Zionist education, and with their affairs also interfered with the widespread fake-marriage practice in order to make better use of British Palestine certificates.94 Kroch’s group was then transferred to nearby Pusta (estate) Marićevac, which was run by socialist Zionists, the Hashomer Hatzair (Ha-shomer ha-Za’ir). In the 1930s, Hashomer became the most active and attractive organization among the Yugoslav Jewish youth, and the Yugoslav police became alarmed with what it viewed as a ‘communist-suspected Zionist organization’.95 Indeed, when the Germans invaded in 1941, those associated Viktor Guttmann and his family were arrested by the Ustaša Police in February 1943, but they were later released by the personal intervention of Adolf Eichmann, and they fled to Italy (see The Adolf Eichmann Trial – The District Court Session 47, part 1, p. 3). After the war, Baron Gutmann was arrested by the new communist regime on charges of collaboration with the Nazis, sentenced to death on 23 November 1945, and executed. For more on the Gutmann family, see Hrvoje Volner, Od industrijalaca do kažnjenika “Gutmann” i “Našička” u industrijalizaciji Slavonije (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2019). From Project Stolepersteine Hamburg [accessed 5 December 2021]. Interviewee: Herbert Lewin, interviewer: Tanja Eckstein, November 2002 in Vienna. Ernst Kroch (1917–2012) was sentenced to prison in 1934 as a Communist when he was only 17 years old. He came out of KZ Lichtenburg in 1937 and fled to Yugoslavia. Ernesto Kroch, Exil in der Heimat – Heim ins Exil (Frankfurt a.M.: dipa-Verlag, 1990), pp. 79–84. Teodor Kovač, ‘Something about Ha-shomer Ha-Za’ir and its “Nest” in Novi Sad’, in Jewish Youth Societies in Yugoslavia, 1919–1941, pp. 71–78 (p. 73).

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with Hashomer and another youth group, Techelet Lavan, crossed en masse into the Yugoslav communist youth movement and became the backbone of the resistance.96 The illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia also managed to infiltrate the Boy Scouts, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and other organizations that had a strong appeal among German refugees.97 Hashomer was so profoundly secular that rabbis too despaired of these young Jews, calling them goyim for associating with Jewishness only by tradition, rather than by religion.98 It ran another agricultural Hachshara near Jagodnjak in Baranja, close to the Hungarian border on the land of the Pisker family, with 54 participants, and there were two smaller maritime Hachsharas (Hachshara jamit), with several tens of young men learning to become fishermen or handle boats, set near Sušak from 1938 and in Vela Luka on the island of Korčula from 1937, of which more later. The Golenić Hachshara continued unabated until the Nazi occupation, so one can assume that after the Anschluss numbers rose further. In addition, there was another short-term Hachshara in Lipovac, near Daruvar, while revisionist Betar had a couple of its own camps in Slavonia and near Sarajevo.99 A stay in Hachshara was not only remembered as providing for young people without legal status or wealth and enjoying what many claimed to be the best years of their lives, but also as offering an opportunity to emigrate to Palestine illegally. Herbert Lewin recalled how, in spring 1939, their passports were taken to Prague, where a Jewish consul from Ecuador promised to stamp Ecuador entry visas on the condition that they later get rid of them. Apart from the youngsters from Golenić, there were another five hundred Jewish Halutzim from Czechoslovakia who had the same Ecuadorian visas. When they reached Sušak on the Adriatic (a Yugoslav port town next to Rijeka/Fiume), they slept for a week on straw bags in the local synagogue, being fed by the local Jewish community, and waiting for the Czechoslovak group to arrive. Eventually, the police chief of Sušak was bribed so that they could clandestinely board the Greek boat Galilea, where they were hidden in the machine room. The Czechoslovak group arrived by train in sealed wagons directly to the port. On the boat, hundreds slept in narrow bunk beds on three levels. The air was so bad that Lewin preferred to be awake as a guard, and to take care of a live cow, which they had on board as provision. After three days, they slaughtered the

Interview with D(j)ord(j)e Hajzler. Pawel, Life in Dark Ages, p. 71. Levi, The Last Exile, p. 34. Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, pp. 372, 484.

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cow, and Lewin continued guarding the meat.100 On the seventh day, Galilea entered English waters near Palestine and then, under cover of night, they landed in groups of twenty-five. Greek sailors rowed the lifeboats, and the Haganah people waited on the shore. Despite these examples to the contrary, most aid was sought, and most support received, through unofficial channels about which we know very little. We know that assistance for travel came via one of the wealthiest and most influential Zagreb businessmen, Vladimir Radan (name changed from Aladar Rechnitzer), who was also Greece’s Honorary Consul, and who secured Greek visas for refugees in transit.101 Another prominent industrialist, Aleksandar Ehrmann, was Portugal’s Consul and Acting Consul for Brazil in Zagreb, and he helped secure visas for those countries for many Jews.102 Portugal generally allowed entry to wealthy applicants. Businessman Artur Marić (Mayer) was Albania’s Consul General in Zagreb, and his brother Milan, another one of the country’s most prominent businessmen, was Turkey’s Honorary Consul, with connections that assisted their friends and family.103 A number of other individuals were recorded, such as Valerija Saucha (née Schrenger), who was married to a German and housed a number of refugees. Her privileged status became especially important later, during the war. After the war, she submitted the list of refugees who had stayed with them and returned property that they were keeping.104 Yugoslav political Jewry also assisted by taking Nazi proclamations and threats seriously.105 The Jewish press vehemently condemned anti-Semitism, both in Germany and the rest of Europe, as well as in its own country. Jewish activists and writers called for action and boosted Jewish honour and selfconfidence. Every instance of anti-Semitism in Yugoslav political life or media was attacked, and every attempt was made to prevent the discrimination against Jews that was so prevalent in Europe at the time. While the attempts to boycott German goods made no impact, the frequent calls to help the Reich’s and Czechoslovakian Jews secured Yugoslav Government support until mid1938 and even later, and secured many funds, both collected inside the country Inteview with Herbert Lewin. Radan, Vladimir in Židovski leksikon. Marko Fak, ‘Aleksandar Ehrmann (1879–1965), veleindustrijalac i mecena (skica za portret)’, Radovi, Zavod za hrvatsku povijest Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 41 (2009), 334–35. Marić, Artur (Mayer) in Židovski leksikon. Artur was killed at the beginning of the war in unclear circumstances, and his sister was killed after not evacuating from Rab camp. Saucha, Valerija in Židovski leksikon. Vulesica, ‘“What Will Become of the German Jews?”’, p. 62.

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and received from American and international Jewish organizations.106 The remarkable, indeed unique, attitude of Yugoslav Jewry in Europe in the 1930s is illustrated by an incident that took place in Sarajevo in 1934, on the occasion of a guest performance by the Berlin Jewish choir Hanigun, led by Chemjo Vinaver, following their very successful concerts in Belgrade and Zagreb. When a group of fifteen young Ustašas tried to interrupt the concert, throwing eggs and yelling against ‘Communist Jews’, the local Sarajevo Jews swiftly responded, beating up the Ustašas and keeping them tied up until the police came and arrested them. Eventually, the Ustaša provocateurs were not only beaten, but sentenced to between ten and twenty days in prison.107 This incident was followed by a similar one when two Sarajevo Jews beat up a man who said that Hitler did well to expel the Jews.108 Beyond the Jewish community, there were also visible public interventions throughout Yugoslavia on behalf of Jews in Germany and German Jewish refugees. Already on 21 May 1933, there was a solidarity demonstration for Jews in Germany held in Zagreb. Protests followed in Belgrade, Dubrovnik, and other towns.109 The PEN Congress held in Dubrovnik in June 1933, the first occasion for the global literary elite to voice their protest against Nazism, echoed through the Yugoslav press and intellectuals, despite leaving the PEN association divided.110 Klaus Mann repeated the same message during his tour of Yugoslavia the same summer. The town of Skopje staged Fromental Halévy’s opera La Juive, whereas Belgrade hosted concerts of Jewish composers or Jewish history lectures. All major newspapers, such as Politika, Pravda, Vreme, and Hrvatski dnevnik, reported regularly on anti-Semitic incidents in Germany and elsewhere, and condemned racism unequivocally. Prominent politicians, including those of the ruling Yugoslav Radical Party, and the main opposition leader Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party, castigated anti-Semitism. They were joined by public figures, university professors, and Belgrade sportsmen, who advocated the boycott of the Berlin Olympics because of the persecution of Jews.111 The Belgrade University Choir, Obilić, boycotted their planned tour of Germany in 1936, Vulesica, ‘Formen des Widerstandes’, p. 98. Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, p. 425. On the other hand, the Ustaša youth in Zagreb managed to interrupt the premiere of the play Jews by the Russian writer Eugen Csirikov the following year. Dujmović, ‘Uzajamna lojalnost’, p. 164. Jünger, Jahre der Ungewissheit: Emigrationspläne deutscher Juden 1933–1938, p. 140, points to German diplomatic reports about these protests. On the PEN Congress, see Palmier, Weimar in Exile, Chapter 6. Suzanne McIntire, Speeches in World History (New York: Facts on File, 2009), p. 328. Footballer Milutin Ivković, the organizer of the boycott, would be executed in 1943, during the Nazi occupation. Dejan Zec, ‘Oaza normalnosti ili tužna slika stvarnosti? Fudbal

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with other leftist student organizations also prominent in staging solidarity actions and public events. In 1935, Yugoslavia banned several organizations of its German ethnic minority for anti-Semitic statutes prohibiting marriage to Jews or the intake of Jewish children in their schools, and Yugoslav courts regularly sentenced for anti-Semitism.112

Everyday Life In terms of the actual lived experience of German Jewish refugees, it is important to stress that initially it was rather easy to reach Yugoslavia. Author and journalist Erich Kuby came with his Jewish girlfriend Ruth by bicycle from Hamburg.113 Others flew or drove, such as the Reichs from Berlin, who, in December  1933, also brought their German maid to Zagreb. Wilhelm Reich decided to emigrate from Berlin to Yugoslavia because he had spent part of the First World War in occupied Serbia as an Austro-Hungarian cavalry captain and had befriended some people.114 Most other early refugees came by train and some, especially later, came on foot. This was the case of Salman Stemmer, born Solly Eigner in a Sanzer Hasidim family in Nuremberg in 1916. Salman first fled to France with his family in 1933. After the murders of Yugoslav King Alexander and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseille in 1934 in a plot by fascist Ustašas and the pro-Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO or VMRO), the French authorities ordered all sans-papiers to leave. His parents left by boat to Palestine, whereas Salman, who had a Polish passport, went by foot or hitchhiking. After some time in Italy, Salman crossed into Yugoslavia by foot, and hitchhiked to Zagreb.115

u okupiranoj Srbiji (1941–1944)’, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, 3 (2011), 49–70 (p.  64); Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam, p. 346. ‘Yugoslavia Bans Spreading Anti-Semitic Propaganda’, The American Jewish World, 13  December  1935, p.  9; ‘Yugoslavian Nazi Convicted’, The American Jewish World, 18 September 1936, p. 34. Kuby published his war experiences later in the works Demidoff; oder, von der Unverletzlichkeit des Menschen (Demidoff; or, On the Invulnerability of Mankind, 1947), Nur noch rauchende Trümmer (Nothing but Smoking Ruins, 1959), and his magnum opus, Mein Krieg (My War, 1975). Interview with Werner Reich. Reich’s recollections are also published in Rauscher, The Death Camp Magicians, p. 50. Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), Refugee Voices, Interview  116: Salman Stemmer, 19  February  2006, Manchester, Transcript pp.  9–22. Salman was first sent by Zagreb Zionists to Golenić Hachshara, before moving with Hasidim in Senta for another four

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While entering Yugoslavia was easy, a life in exile was not, especially for the deprived among the refugees. In 1934, the tax base for the Reichsfluchtsteuer, or emigration tax from Germany was increased by over 400 per cent. First introduced in 1931 in Weimar Germany, and conceived as a fiscal deterrent against capital flight, the Reichsfluchtsteuer tax meant that hardly any wealthier refugees could come (as the Union tried to reassure the Yugoslav authorities). Available testimonies confirm that economic survival dominated the everyday life of most refugees. The non-Jewish press occasionally showed an interest in refugees, and described the circumstances in the Belgrade Headquarters of the Union of the Jewish Communities in 1934 as appalling: In the corridors, one can hear only German, as émigrés, sharing the same miserable destiny, find only entertainment in confessing to each other. Or daydreaming about immigrating to countries they know nothing about. Many are still in summer suits, worn out shoes, unshaved and unkempt.116

The Belgrade Jewish Community ran a self-service cafeteria nearby, provided by a local Jewish donor. Other community members brought shoes, clothes, and other items. The community also catered for temporary accommodation, housing forty people in fairly miserable conditions. Its makeshift conditions were justified by claiming that the refugees did not want to stay in Belgrade. Still, the Belgrade Jewish Community reported spending thirty thousand dinars (about six hundred dollars) a month to cater for refugees. In addition to Belgrade and Zagreb, Yugoslavia’s biggest coastal town of Split and nearby resorts housed many refugees desperately awaiting an opportunity to board a ship going overseas. Some were so poor that they stayed on the premises of its Jewish Community. The local wealthy Stock family proved most generous, and not only helped with donations, but also hired refugees to work in their cement factory.117 Turning to the refugees themselves, however, we encounter many who do not recall any assistance being offered, as recorded by Ernst Pawel, born in 1920 in Breslau, who came with his family from Berlin to Belgrade in 1933: In any event, we faced a double threat – starvation on the one hand and, on the other, expulsion as undesirable aliens without visible means of support. No

years. Salman left for Bulgaria just before the Nazi invasion, and eventually boarded a boat which took him to Palestine in 1941. The report from newspaper Vreme, cited in Milosavljević, Savremenici fašizma 2, p. 118–19. Duško Kečkemet, Židovi u povijesti Splita (Split: Jevrejska općina, 1971), pp. 174–75.

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relief organization of any kind existed in Belgrade at the time, nor did the Jewish community offer any assistance.118

Among the first to arrive in Zagreb in December 1933 was Rudolf Lewy, a pharmacist from Berlin.119 According to his memoir written shortly after the war, for the next four and a half years, Rudolf and his wife were stuck without any possibility of emigrating, obtaining visas from foreign embassies, or obtaining any kind of assistance from the Jewish organizations active in Zagreb at the time. Eventually, he was advised by the representative of Lloyds in Zagreb to emigrate to Colombia, which made no entry problems, but which was not a desirable destination. The greatest help came from the director of Zagreb’s Parasitological Institute, who helped Lewy to get work informally for over two years. Eventually, with a certificate from the director of the Institute, Lewi persuaded Colombia’s Consul General in Genoa to issue them with visas, as his expertise as a ‘parasitologist’ would be helpful for the development of agriculture in Colombia. According to Lewy, throughout this period, HICEM in Paris and other Jewish refugees in Zagreb advised against emigrating to Colombia, which was thought to be malaria ridden. Fortunately, they decided against this advice, and they left Zagreb just in time, as the Anschluss further undermined the Jewish refugee situation throughout Europe. Those who were able to sustain themselves could remain in Yugoslavia for many years before emigrating further. This was the case for the family of Max Thalheimer, one of the very few Jews in Lehrensteinsfeld near Heilbronn. He could not continue his dowry products business in 1933, facing the villagers’ boycott, despite being a highly decorated German lieutenant. With his wife Dora, née Ebstein, and their three children, Karoline, Berta, and Hans, they spent five long years in the Belgrade suburb of Čukarica without aid from any organization, before obtaining permits to emigrate to the US.120 Thomas Nagel, one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, was born in Belgrade in 1937,

Pawel, Life in Dark Ages, p. 52. ‘Unsere Emigration nach Kolumbien: 1938–1952’, Unpublished Memoir 4353, Wiener Library, London (compiled in Berlin in 1962, based on a shorter piece written in Bogota in 1950 ‘Unsere Emigration nach Jugoslawien Dezember 1933 bis Juli 1938’). Overall, the author had no good memories of his years in Zagreb exile, whereas he was pleased with his success in Colombia. For more on the Thalheimers, see ‘Lehrensteinsfeld, Ortsteil Lehren (Kreis Heilbronn) Jüdische Geschichte/Betsaal/Synagoge’ [accessed 5  December  2021]. See also Claims Resolution Tribunal, In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Case No. CV96-4849 [accessed 5 December 2021].

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to German Jewish refugees Walter and Karolyn, née Baer.121 The family, like many others, was also able to emigrate to the US in 1939, without leaving any trace in the archives of Jewish aid organizations or with the Yugoslav authorities, demonstrating how illusionary it is to rely on archival evidence or give any exact numbers when writing on refugees. Irene Fisher came to Belgrade with her mother Helene from Warsaw in 1935 as a young girl. Helene opened her clothes business, met a Serbian partner and lover, and, according to Irene’s testimony, the mother and daughter integrated successfully, experiencing no anti-Semitism whatsoever.122 Irene enrolled in a German school, and as a ballet student she performed for the Yugoslav Crown Prince. Irene’s privately owned German Citizens’ School in Belgrade saw its pupils more than double in the school years 1933/34 and 1938/39, reflecting the two biggest waves of émigrés from Germany and Austria.123 In fact, the intake of pupils in this Belgrade school jumped from 20 in 1931/32 to 124 just before the war in 1940/41, with many more attending only temporarily, indicating that there were more refugees than ever admitted by officials. In places such as Maribor, with over 30 per cent German speakers, Jewish children initially enrolled in German-language schools, but over the years that became more and more difficult due to the peer pressure from children who were members of the Volksdeutsche community, which was already thoroughly Nazified by the mid-1930s.124 While many wanted their children to continue their education in German, such as at the German school affiliated with the Evangelical Church in Zagreb, after a while most children switched to regular local schools, as Paul (Shaul) Hirsch from Brno, Werner Reich from Berlin, and others describe in their recollections. The German language was hated across much of Yugoslavia because of Nazism, and young Jewish refugees did not want to stand out like their parents. Renate Reich cut her braids too, in order not to be associated with the unpopular Germans.125 With the help of their peers, they adapted very fast to the new language and environment, as children and young people Encyclopedia.com [accessed 28 October 2022]. Irene Binzer, ‘Segment#: 1.’ Interview.  Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1999. Tables in Ranka Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi. Kulturni uticaji Britanije i Nemačke na beogradsku elitu 1918–1941 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2005), p.  228. Statistical data in AJ 66-2636-2334. Stern, My Story, p. 26. Rauscher, The Death Camp Magicians, p. 59; Suvin, ‘Slatki dani, strašni dani Iz Memoara jednog skojevca, dio 1’, p. 39. For a similar atmosphere in Ljubljana, see Lisa De Curtis, Unpublished memoir written in 1980 in New York, Leo Baeck Institute Archives Memoir Collection (ME 883), p. 48.

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usually do, whereas their parents struggled. Enrolment of Jewish refugee children in Yugoslav schools continued until 1941, thanks to decisions being taken locally, mostly by individual school principals. It was the same in Greece, where refugee children picked up the language with ease, but parents’ nerves, strained by the events and by anxiety about the future, limited their ability to take in the new language, as testified by Rudolf Rosenbaum in Athens.126 The real difficulty proved to be work and earnings. Yugoslavia depended upon the output of its agricultural produce, ore, bauxite, and wood, which was largely exported unprocessed. Combined with the effects of the prolonged depression, the country provided few outlets for skilled labour. Some refugees tried registering their own business or acquiring contracts to represent foreign companies to placate the authorities.127 Others worked illegally. Women were more willing to take on menial and low-paid jobs just to survive or to maintain their husbands and families. Irene Binzer Fisher’s mother Helena immediately took on work as a dress- and hat-maker in Belgrade to support herself and her young daughter.128 Gertrude Najmann, almost 50 when released from certain death in 1942, stayed in Belgrade to work as a maid in a doctor’s household, carrying coal up the stairs from six in the morning, followed by all the other chores in an eighteen-hour working day.129 Barely 15, Ernst Pawel had to work to support his family because paradoxically as a minor he did not need a work permit. He became an apprentice for one of Yugoslavia’s largest publishers, Hungarian-born Jew Geca (Geza) Ko(h) n. Pawel could not hide his contempt for Kon, blaming him for lack of solidarity in helping poor co-religionist refugees: Geca showed up at the Ashkenazi synagogue on the high holidays but otherwise avoided any involvement in the affairs of the Jewish community, rightly fearing that it might cost him some money. Giving a job to a poor refugee youngster, on the other hand, was the sort of thing that made him feel like a philanthropist.130

As an apprentice, Pawel complained that he was paid the equivalent of only six dollars a month for a six-day, sixty-hour week, which barely covered his and his parents’ rent. For him, it was too little for work in Belgrade’s biggest foreign literature bookshop, which stocked an eclectic collection of French,

Rudolf Rosenbaum, The Diaries 1938–1946 (New York: Silver Press, 2017), p. 39. Interview with Werner Reich. Interview with Irene Binzer. Najmann, Die Reise nach Palästina, Eva Mills Papers, p. 15. Pawel, Life in Dark Ages, p. 56.

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German, and English literature, classical as well as current, and which was headed by another refugee, Herr Blumenthal, who had previously run a Frankfurt bookshop that had been taken over by the Nazis.131 At a closer look, however, it becomes evident that Geca Kon paid 15-year-old Ernst Pawel no less than an average monthly salary in Yugoslavia at the time. Rather than a blemish on Geca Kon’s personality, this episode illustrates the clash of expectations and cultures between German Jews and Yugoslavs, even when the latter were Jewish. Fischer comically described the conflicts and laments of some refugees about rented accommodation in Zagreb originating from ‘the old Austrian underworld of lodgers, furnished tenants, ill-shaven bachelors, barely tolerated sharing of lavatories, and other horrors of a region permanently on the dark underside of the world of sun and success, not acknowledged by the bourgeoisie …’132 The challenges faced by career-oriented men were described by a Munich-born mathematician, Michael Golomb, who completed his doctoral dissertation in 1933 at the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität (now Humboldt Universität) in Berlin. Sudden political developments altered his career expectations and made Golomb explore frantically not which country would offer him the best chance for advancing his mathematical development, but which country would admit him at all. The deep economic depression led to high unemployment in all the developed countries, with borders closed to foreigners who might seek work. Golomb belonged to the most threatened group, because although he was born in Germany, he was a Polish citizen, as his parents were immigrants who could never acquire German citizenship. With a Polish passport, he had no chance to be admitted anywhere except Yugoslavia, where his sister had moved after marrying a Yugoslav. Golomb received a visitor visa, valid for two months, and came to Belgrade in October 1933 with the vague hope of establishing himself or of travelling further to a country of his choice. Instead, as Golomb wrote, he was trapped for five and a half years.133 Unable to obtain a job as a mathematician, Golomb moved from Belgrade to Zagreb, Pawel, Life in Dark Ages, p.  61. In 1941, like most of the Belgrade Jews, Geza Kon and his entire family were murdered. For more on the fate of Geza (Geca) Kon, see Velimir Starčević, Knjiga o Geci Konu (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1992); Christina Köstner, ‘Das Schicksal des Belgrader Verlegers Geca Kon’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Buchforschung in Österreich 1 (2005), 7–19; Christina Köstner, ‘Bücherraub am Balkan: Die Nationalbibliothek Wien und der Belgrader Verleger Geca Kon’, in Jüdischer Buchbesitz als Raubgut: Zweites hannoversches Symposium, ed. by Regine Dehmel (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2006), pp. 96–106. Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, p. 115. Michael Golomb, ‘Terror and Exile and a Letter About It’, Topological Commentary, 4 (1) (1999).

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living from one resident permit to another, acquired through the intervention of various influential citizens and officials, or, even worse, going undercover with the support of friends and charity organizations. To survive he tutored students in mathematics and Hebrew, socialized with local leftist intellectuals, and wrote reviews and articles for journals in Germany and Belgrade. In 1938, his fiancée, Dagmar, came up with the idea of writing to Bertrand Russell to seek help to obtain a British visa. Russell replied, but he could not help, directing him to American Quakers instead. Eventually, Golomb obtained affidavits and was granted an American visa, while also managing to get his 9-yearold brother smuggled from Germany to Yugoslavia in 1938.134 In a reverse of Orientalist/Balkanist discourse, Golomb summed up his experience: I will always cherish the wonderful people who befriended me in Yugoslavia, and I will never forget the beauty of the country […] Zagreb had a fine opera, theatre, a concert hall, and some good museums. There were excellent restaurants serving Viennese as well as Balkan cuisine. The local wines were quite good. I particularly liked the outdoor cafes, where you could drink your coffee and eat a dish of delicious ice cream and read European newspapers provided by the management. I liked sitting there and watching the corso, that Mediterranean custom in which masses of people of all ages stroll up and down window shopping, conversing, ogling, flirting, and kissing.135

At the same time, Golomb only has bad words for the authorities, who only temporarily extended his permits. Strict residence policies frustrated many like Golomb. Most affected were those unable to make a living or a life for themselves in exile, and without savings. Some contemplated going back to Germany, and some actually did so.136 For those who believed that exile would be temporary, Yugoslavia was conveniently close for return. Others apparently held a naive belief that Hitler’s rule would soon end. False optimism notwithstanding, for most, everyday life turned into a constant struggle to survive and remain legally abroad, even if the Balkans was not their preferred option. Pawel remembers the Police Prefect who made his family cringe and plead for every three-month residence permit: ‘“This is the Balkans”, my father reminded me;

Golomb eventually obtained a visa and emigrated to the US, where he later joined the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University. See ‘Obituary of Michael Golomb’ [accessed 5 December 2021]. Golomb’s recollections in Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Bitter Prerequisites, pp. 19–73 (p. 69). Pawel, Life in Dark Ages, p. 52.

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the Stone Age, as far as he was concerned’.137 Educated, well-to-do immigrants from big European capitals were disgruntled by the fact that a poor Balkan country about which they knew next to nothing imposed restrictions on them. Emotional turmoil as the ever-present consequence of their status seemed to hurt the most. For Pawel, it was a crushing burden of guilt; for others, an overwhelming despair and hopelessness. The most fragile succumbed. Pawel recalls a certain Weissbart(h), a middle-aged bachelor and former music critic in Munich, with whom he spent hours playing chess in Belgrade’s Hotel Royal, the preferred hangout for refugee Jews, as it was located across from the building of the Belgrade Jewish community. An enormously learned person, a born teacher capable of conveying a passion for books and the arts, Weissbart, like the rest of the refugee crowd, had absolutely nothing else to do. What further distinguished Weissbart from the rest, and raised many eyebrows, was that he was flagrantly homosexual. In January  1935, Weissbart took a lethal dose of barbiturates, among the first of the refugees to commit suicide. In the letter he left behind, Weissbart explained that the plebiscite in the Saarland region robbed him of his last glimmer of hope for a decent, democratic Germany. Weissbart was buried as he had requested, without ceremony of any kind, in a remote corner of Belgrade’s New Cemetery, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between Christians and Jews where he belonged, according to Pawel, who was among the one hundred or so mourners entirely from the Belgrade refugee colony. Not respected while he was alive, Weissbart’s act awoke in all of them the worst fears of what was yet to come.138 Indeed, Weissbart was followed by Kurt Tucholsky, celebrated writer and journalist, who took his life in his Swedish exile in the same year. Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, and countless other less-known Jewish men and women in exile facing humiliation or deportation chose the same. Further contributing to the anxiety of hundreds of refugees was the fact that the police had them under surveillance for their alleged links to German communists and/or the Comintern, as in the case of Ernst Kroch and cabaret artist Oskar Kanitz.139 Jewish refugees were also of interest to Zagreb’s German Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 59–61. AJ–14, Kartoteka (Card Index of Suspicious Persons) lists among others 246–249 Kac Dr Leopold, Communist in Austria crossing the border to Yugoslavia in 1935; 246–271 Kleinhaus 1939 financing Communist bureau, from Antwerp; 246–272 Klaus Lehmann (involved in refugee aid, important agent, surveyed from 5  June  1939); 246–273 Klein (agent of Comintern); 246–274 Klein Theodor – German Communist; 246–275 Klumpp Heinrich – German Communist; 246–276 Kachl or Kochl Herman, German merchant, suspicious; 246–277 Koitkevich – Comintern; 246–278 Komora Hugo, French; 246–279

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Consulate, which, for example, instructed film and theatre producer Fritz Schönherr, who stayed in Zagreb with his partner, the famous German actress Trude Hesterberg, to report on anti-Hitlerism among the refugees.140 In 1937, the Jewish Central Information Office (founded by Alfred Wiener in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to London in 1938) produced a survey of the position of the Jews in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, noting the rise of anti-Semitism following the murder of Yugoslav King Alexander  I, who was regarded as a great protector and friend of Yugoslav Jewry. This was most evident in the German-backed journals Balkan and Erwache. Jewish mediation, as the report stated, was no longer able to suppress these tendencies. The most troubling, however, was the appointment of Slovene Catholic priest Korošec as Minister of the Interior. While the Yugoslav Government had shown itself tolerant towards refugees, Korošec was associated with a series of expulsions (revocations of residence), which the Association nevertheless succeeded in halting. The report concluded that ‘a recrudescence of anti-Semitic propensity is doubtlessly to be noticed and that the Government does not interfere with it as energetically as the murdered King Alexander did, but so far no serious danger is to be seen for the Jews’.141 Yugoslav Jewish officials intervened several times with the newly powerful Prime Minister Stojadinović, interior and justice ministers and other officials against publication of the ‘Protocols of Zion’, and the anti-Semitic writing of the newspapers Balkan, Mlada Hrvatska, Erwache, Sturm, and so on.142 The Prime Minister and officials resolutely denied any Kok Andrics Leo, Dutch agent of Third International; 246–280 Komossa Hermann, German Communist; 246–281 Kraus; 246–282 Kritzer Heinz German Communist; 246– 284 Kutschka Konrad German Communist; 246–285 Kun Bela German Communist; 246– 287, Köblös Elek-Aleksandar, Hungarian Communist; Kraus Ferenc, Edo, Lea-pharmacist 246–297 Kanitz Dr Oskar German Jew, strict surveillance in 1939; Kanitz Olga Sara, Kanitz Barbara Sara in Sarajevo surveillance 1939; 246–345 Kirschner Rudolf, Jewish merchant born in 1910 in Germany …, expelled in 1938 as suspicious and spy; 246–668 Lichtenstein Max, German communist (1933); 246–689 Leyser Ervin, together with above; 246–691 Letzen Elsa (1940); 246–692 Leonnardt Lotte, German communist (1933); 246–700 Lehrer Kaspar, German communist (1933); 246–743 Lebenstein Vilhelm; 246–1580 Stela Bencin, Romanian Jew (1937); 246–1581 Sigmund Steiner (1936); 246–1582 Greta Schladinger (1937); 246–1583 Stal Valter Herman (1940); 246–1590 Vecker Kurt German, Communist (1933); 246–1594 Vatzlavick Georg, German Communist (1933); 246–1596 Vitfogel Karl, German Communist (1933); 246–1597 Voitel Johann (1933); 246–1599 Veinte August (1933); 246–1600 Veindl Karl; 246–1630 Veningerholz Konrad (1936); 246–1964 Windholz Natan (1937). Grossmann, Emigration, pp. 333–34. The Wiener Holocaust Library, Report on the Position of Jews in Yugoslavia, 3000/7/1/1/27, pp. 2–6. Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, p. 433.

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support for anti-Semitic ideas, but a detailed press analysis evidences their gradual rise from 1936 onwards, and especially after 1938.143 Nevertheless, Yugoslavia continued to issue or renew residence permits until 1938/39, much later than most other European countries. Similarly, permits were also issued on the basis of business ownership or investment in existing businesses (the share needed was not fixed), enabling residence for family members rather than by work permit.144 According to official reports for Jewish organizations, most refugees eventually managed to travel further and settle somewhere more permanently.145

Prominent Refugees The following pages illuminate the lives of people whose careers attracted more attention and historical records than more ordinary people, thus allowing the trajectories and experiences of refugees coming to Yugoslavia to be exhibited in more detail. At the same time, they pay tribute to those who made contributions while in exile. As already stressed, the first wave of refugees to Yugoslavia contained many Jews and Gentiles from Germany who were fired from state jobs or had to flee for political reasons, including prominent artists, physicians, and professors.146 In accordance with the official state policy of welcoming Jewish refugees in 1933, the Belgrade University Medical School officially invited several renowned doctors dismissed in Germany, offering them professorial posts. The first was the director of Rostock University Dental Clinic (which now bears his name) and the Dean of Rostock Medical School, Dr Hans Moral, known for the introduction of local anaesthesia in dental practice. Dr Moral accepted the offer to Belgrade, but on the night before his departure on 6 August 1933, he took his own life.147 The most prominent among those who came was Dr Ferdinand Milosavljević, Savremenici Fašizma 2; Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam. AJ Ministarstvo Unutrašnjih Poslova Kraljevine Jugoslavije, 14-36-113. Recipients were mostly identified as business owners or merchants, although there were chemists, engineers, or persons specified simply as owners, or not specified at all. Most were from Germany, followed by Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The Northwestern Dravska Banovina alone in 1937 issued 533 business-related permits; Stern explains how her father took out a 17.5 per cent share in Maribor chocolate factory, which allowed them to stay until 1938, My Story, p. 26. Wilk’s Memorandum, in Grossmann, Emigration, pp. 21–22. Wiener Holocaust Library, Report on the Position of Jews in Yugoslavia, 3000/7/1/1/27. Heinrich von Schwanewede, ‘Hans Moral (1885–1933) – Leben, Wirken und Schicksal eines bedeutenden Vertreters der Zahnheilkunde’, in Die Universität Rostock in den

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Blumenthal (1870–1941), after he was forcefully retired from full professorship and directorship of the Oncological Institute of the Charité Hospital in Berlin as its leading cancer specialist.148 Blumenthal was received by the Yugoslav Health Minister, University Rector, and Faculty Dean to great acclaim. The Dean of Belgrade Medical Faculty was a notable Viennese physiologist, Dr Richard Burian, who certainly influenced the selection. Blumenthal was then able to persuade the Yugoslav authorities to bring another exiled professor from Berlin, who was staying in Paris with his wife and two small children. Ernst Mislowitzer (1895–1985, in New Haven) was a pathologist and a professor at Charité in the field of clinical biochemistry. On 1 October 1933, both he and Ferdinand Blumenthal were promoted to professors at Belgrade University.149 In 1935, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, they founded the Belgrade Oncological Institute. From 1933 to 1936, Blumenthal represented Belgrade University at top international conferences, published in scholarly journals, and gave lectures to both students and doctors in training, in addition to seeing patients twice a week. The translation of his book, Results of Experimental Cancer Research and Cancer Therapy, was published in 1937 by Belgrade’s key publisher Geca Kon, discussed above. Yet Blumenthal eventually became a victim of growing antiSemitism, as documented in Olivera Milosavljević’s study.150 While they were celebrated by the mainstream press, some doctors protested privileging foreigners such as Blumenthal over local experts, objecting that Blumenthal and others gave lectures only in German. Some insisted that foreigners such as he should have their licence for private practice withdrawn. This was a common scenario that unfolded throughout Europe, with doctors and dentists recorded as being most sceptical about immigrants, and especially concerned about the arrival of numerous Jewish doctors, fearing possible competition.151 The Jahren 1933–1945, ed. by Gisela Boeck and Hans-Uwe Lammel (Rostock: Universität Rostock, 2012), pp. 25–45. For Blumenthal’s work in cancer research see Harro Jenss, Peter Reinicke, and Ferdinand Blumenthal, Kämpfer für eine fortschrittliche Kriebsmedizin und Krebsfürsorge (Berlin: Hentrich and Hentrich, 2012). In 1938, Mislowitzer and his family emigrated to the United States, where he adopted the name Ernest Mylon and taught at Yale University’s Department of Pathology. See [accessed 5 December 2021]. Milosavljević, Savremenici Fašizma 2, pp. 143–58. ‘Unmoved by the worldwide reputation of the doctors and dentists of Vienna’, while ‘its representatives, adhering to the strict doctrine of the more rigid trade unionists, assured me that British medicine had nothing to gain from new blood and much to lose from foreign dilution’, Viscount Templewood, Nine Troubled Years (London: Collins, 1954),

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campaign against Blumenthal intensified in December 1936, when Zbor (the journal of the fascist organization with the same name, headed by Dimitrije Ljotić) accused Blumenthal of patenting a dubious medication and evading tax. True, the Belgrade Medical Faculty stood by its professor, rejecting all the accusations as lies, but Blumenthal decided to leave at the end of his threeyear contract. He held his last lecture on 27 January 1937, thanking his Belgrade colleagues and especially his students, and stressing that his time in Belgrade would remain among his best memories. The country’s biggest journal, Politika, lamented his departure. From Belgrade, Blumenthal moved to Vienna, where he was arrested by the Gestapo after the Anschluss and detained for three months. Upon release, Blumenthal and his family returned to Yugoslavia and tried unsuccessfully to obtain a visa for Great Britain. Eventually, the Blumenthals went to Albania at the invitation of its government. However, they had to flee once again after Italy’s attack, and they went to Estonia, which was occupied soon after by the Soviets. Upon the German attack in 1941, the Blumenthals were evacuated to the east, but the train carrying them was bombarded by the Luftwaffe near the Estonian town of Narwa, where Professor Blumenthal lost his life. The fate of his wife and two daughters remains unclear. Many other refugee doctors are still remembered. Arthur Fritz Proskauer, born in Katowice, specialist surgeon and gynaecologist, moved from Poland to Vienna in 1934 due to growing anti-Semitism. After the Anschluss, Proskauer and his family were on the move again, this time to Zagreb, as with so many Viennese Jews. By 1940, he was the chief of Brčko hospital. During the war, Proskauer converted to Islam to escape the Ustaša terror. Eventually, Proskauer joined the Partisans, saving many lives before he was captured and shot in 1944. A monument to Proskauer was erected on the spot on which he was murdered.152 Another doctor to arrive in Yugoslavia from Berlin was Vladimir Springer, who was assigned to a village, Banja, near Arandjelovac in Serbia, where he set up a small clinic. He was murdered in 1943 as a Partisan sympathizer. Seventy years after his tragic death in the country of his exile, the villagers erected a monument to him.153 Berlin paediatrician Gertrud Bertha Kallner (born Graf) spent two years in Yugoslavia, before getting papers to emigrate to Palestine, where she became a leading doctor in Israel and later a World Health Organization p. 240. For a detailed study on how Britain refused entry to most Jewish refugee dentists, see John Zamet, ‘German and Austrian Refugee Dentists: The Response of the British Authorities 1933–1945’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford Brookes University, 2007). See Ismet Dedeić, ‘Jevreji u Brčkom: Zločin nestanka i grijeh sjećanja’, in Migracije i Brčko (Tuzla: Centar za istraživanje moderne i savremene historije, 2020), pp. 299–323. Nebojša Radišić, ‘Meštani šumadijskog sela podigli spomenik Jevrejinu koji ih je lečio’, Blic, 30 September 2013.

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expert. Another Berlin doctor, Ernst Blumenthal (no relation to Ferdinand), with his wife Dorothea (also his medical assistant) and their children fled to Zagreb in 1933 and practised until 1938, when they managed to emigrate to the US.154 Austrian doctors followed in 1938, as the University of Vienna dismissed more than 75 per cent of their world-renowned medical faculty, including those who were born and raised Christian, but were of Jewish background.155 The Professor of Internal Medicine at the Vienna University Medical School, Elias Herbert, fled with his wife Dr Ada and their children, Hanna and Kurt, who were also expelled as medical students. They stayed with the family of Pavle Vinterštajn (Winterstein), renowned lawyer and leading member of the Belgrade B’nai B’rith, who secured them residence permits until their immigration visas for the US arrived.156 Robert Joachimovitz, a gynaecologist and another professor at the Vienna Medical School, fled to Yugoslavia and took refuge in the bay of Kotor on the Montenegrin coast, where he remained until 1945, practising at Meljine and Budva hospitals in the most difficult of war circumstances.157 Many other doctors and medical students, such as Professor of Dentistry Franz Peter, used the opportunity to escape to Yugoslavia, but later found refuge in the Netherlands, while Professor of the History of Medicine Max Neuburger ended up in London.158 The most famous of all the expellees from German universities to come to Yugoslavia, and the one whose legacy would be the most impactful, was not Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Case No. CV96-4849 [accessed 5 December 2021]. K. Mühlberger, ‘Dokumentation Vertriebene Intelligenz 1938’: der Verlust geistiger und menschlicher Potenz an der Universität Wien von 1938 bis 1945 (Vienna: Archiv der Universität Wien, 1990). Nada Neuman, ‘This is What I Remember’, in We Survived …2, ed. by Aleksandar Gaon (Belgrade: The Jewish Historical Museum, 2006), p.  268. Several members of the Vinterštajn family were killed in Belgrade, as they thought that whatever happened to Jews in Austria would never happen in Yugoslavia. Biography of Dr Joachimovits, University of Vienna [accessed 5  December 2021]. More information on Franz Peter: [accessed 5  December  2021] and Max Neuburger: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/neuburger-max> [accessed 5 December 2021]. Among the medical students was a well-known ophthalmologist and later professor at Stanford University, Rudolf H. Bock from Wiener Neustadt. After fleeing to Zagreb, Rudolf secured Japanese immigration documents and travelled via Trieste to Shanghai, where other family members joined him later. Rudolf H. Bock, ‘In God’s Hands: An Autobiography’, held at Yad Vashem, was published as Gratefully Looking Back: A Doctor’s Special Journey (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2002).

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a medic but a Byzantologist, George Ostrogorsky (Georgije Aleksandrovič Ostrogorski 1902–1976). Russian born, Ostrogorsky obtained his doctorate in Byzantine economic history in 1927 at Heidelberg, and became a lecturer at the Friedrich Wilhelms University of Breslau in German Silesia (today, Wroclaw in Poland).159 On 7 April 1933, his university, like all the others, was struck with the decree of reintroducing appointments, whereby 45 already appointed professors and lecturers were fired.160 Ostrogorsky’s faculty appealed, insisting on his ‘prominent anti-Bolshevik sentiment’ and professional indispensability ‘in the great intellectual defence against the East’. The Ministry in Berlin answered briefly that they could not keep a Russian of the ‘Jewish tribe’, while young Germans were out of work.161 Ostrogorsky had no choice but to leave, coming via Prague to Belgrade. Unlike most other refugees, Ostrogorsky remained in Belgrade, where he became one of the most well-known professors and a world authority in Byzantine studies.162 Somewhat similar is the story of the greatest German Ottomanist and Balkanologist, Dr Franz Babinger, who was forced out of the Humboldt University in Berlin and landed in Bucharest at the invitation of the great Romanian historian, Nicolae Iorga.163 Another Jewish professor invited to Belgrade University’s Faculty of Philosophy was Arthur Liebert (born Arthur Levy, 1878–1946), philosophy professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin, one of the leading neo-Kantians and secretary of the Kant Society.164 In 1933, Liebert was For the detailed information about Professor Ostrogorsky, I thank Professor Eduard Mühle, who shared it with me from his work Für Volk und Deutschen Osten: Der Historiker Hermann Aubin und die deutsche Ostforschung (Düsseldorf: Schriftenreihe des Bundesarchivs, Bd.  65, 2005). Brief information is also available [accessed 5 December 2021]. GStA Berlin, HA I, Rep.  76, Nr.  457, Bl.  11; On the reactions of students, see Michael Grüttner, Studenten im Dritten Reich (Munich: Schöningh, 1995), pp. 69–70; Walter Tausk, Breslauer Tagebuch 1933–1940 (Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 1975), p. 70, where under the entry for 3 May 1933, one reads that in Breslau some professors were interrupted during the examinations to be told that they were fired. Herbert Hunger, ‘Georg Ostrogorsky, Nachruf’, Almanach der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 127 (1977), 538–44. Ostrogorsky was investigated by the Gestapo when the Nazis occupied Yugoslavia, but was never arrested as he was not Jewish according to the Nuremberg racial laws. His most famous book, the standard History of the Byzantine State (in German as Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates), was first published in Munich in 1940, before editions in the English language (UK: 1st ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 1956; USA: 2nd ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), and translations into many other languages. Utz Maas, Verfolgung und Auswanderung deutschsprachiger Sprachforscher 1933–1945 (Osnabrück: Secolo Verlag, 1996), pp. 48–50. Günther Wirth, Auf dem “Turnierplatz” der geistigen Auseinandersetzungen: Arthur Liebert und die Kantgesellschaft (1918–1948/1949) (Ludwigsfelde: Ludwigsfelder Verlag-Haus, 2004).

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forcefully retired because of his Jewish origins, even though he had converted to Protestantism in 1901. Besides teaching, Liebert established a journal called Philosophia in Belgrade, and in 1935 he published a book on the philosophy of teaching.165 In 1939, Liebert moved to Birmingham, where he led the German school, returning to Berlin after the war to become a professor at the Humboldt University and Dean of its Pedagogical Faculty. In 1933, Belgrade University also hired Dr Jolán Heumann (Jolanda Hojman), a chemist from Göttingen University. She held a post in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry, probably as the first woman ever hired outside the Philosophy Department.166 Among the prominent leftist intellectuals and artists who reached Yugoslavia in the 1930s, the most notable and most often mentioned was Austrian (and later French) author and philosopher Manès Sperber (1905–1984), whose two major works also reflected on Yugoslavia’s social and political reality.167 Born in a Hassidic shtetl in East Galicia, Sperber moved to Vienna, where he met Alfred Adler, and became his student and co-worker. The cooperation was broken in 1932, when Sperber became an active Communist.168 Sperber had already begun visiting Zagreb in the late 1920s, eventually ending up in a Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi, p. 201. Heumann survived Dachau and Bergen-Belzen and continued her scientific career after the war in Belgrade. She died in Zagreb in 1978. See Anikó Szabó, Vertreibung, Rückkehr, Wiedergutmachung: Göttinger Hochschullehrer im Schatten des Nazionalsozialismus (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2000), p.  58; Margareta Bašaragin, Znamenite Jevrejke Subotice (Subotica: Futura, 2020), pp. 23–26. A novel trilogy, Like a Tear in the Ocean: A Trilogy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1951), was originally published in 1948 to wide acclaim, and later translated all over the world as a major work of fiction chronicling the lives of some exceptional men and women, devoted to justice, liberty, and ethics, who were trapped and crushed by Nazism and Stalinism in the period between the two world wars. His autobiographical trilogy, All our Yesterdays (especially Volume 3, entitled Until My Eyes are Closed With Shards) (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991–94), was celebrated as one of the most vivid and evocative of the century, which besides Yugoslav circumstances presents intriguing portraits of his numerous friends, the grand figures of the European left. For his perception of Yugoslavia, see Tomislav Bekić, ‘Zur jugoslawischen Thematik im Werk Manès Sperber’, in Jugoslawien Österreich: Literarische Nachbarschaft, ed. by Johann Holzner and Wolfgang Wiesmüller (Innsbruck: Institut für Germanistik, Universität Innsbruck, 1986), pp.  83–89; Mirjana Stančić, ‘Manès Sperber Jugoslawienbild: über die ästhetische Legitimierung der Historie’, in World War II and the Exiles: A Literary Response, ed. by Helmut  F.  Pfanner (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1991), pp.  133–39; Alma Kalinski, ‘Das Kroatienbild bei Manès Sperber’, Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge Beihefte, 6 (2001), 109–31; Mirjana Stančić, Verschüttete Literatur: Die deuschprachige Dichtung auf dem Gebiet des ehemaligen Jugoslawiens von 1800–1945 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2013), pp. 234–38. For more, see Olivier Mannoni, Manès Sperber – L’espoir tragique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004); Rudolf Isler, Manès Sperber: Zeuge des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Lebensgeschichte, Preface by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Aarau: Bildung Sauerländer, 2003); Mirjana Stancic, Manès Sperber – Leben und Werk (Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld Verlag, 2003).

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longer exile in Yugoslavia with his wife Mirjam, after his short arrest in Berlin in 1933. His choice of Zagreb, and later the island of Korčula, set a precedent for many other Jewish refugees and political exiles, detailed in the chapter on the Korčula exile. Even after he moved to Paris, Sperber maintained his Zagreb and Korčula circle, regularly visiting until it was impossible, warning about the rise of Nazism and eliciting Jewish reactions.169 Zagreb’s foremost intellectuals – Miroslav Krleža, August Cesarec, Zvonimir Richtmann, Dr Beno Stein, his wife Vera Ehrlich, and her sister Ina, as well as prominent Communist activists, brothers Đuro and Stjepan Cvijić – all counted as Sperber’s close friends, or, as he described them, bratstvo, the Slavic word for brotherhood.170 Sperber also exerted pivotal influence on the Yugoslav Communist leadership as the closest adviser to its leader, Milan Gorkić, until the latter perished in Stalinist purges and was replaced by Josip Broz Tito, the future Partisan leader. Sperber’s supporters continued their informal group, and Beno Stein, who previously hosted Sperber, hosted Tito during his stays in Zagreb just before the war.171 Yugoslav police described Sperber as a ‘Jew, refugee, man with a dubious past that presents himself as professor of Individual psychology […] Should be kept under strong surveillance; his contacts and correspondence to be controlled and reported.’172 In the same circle of proponents of Adler’s individual psychology was Annemarie Richter, later Wolff (Breslau, 1900–Jasenovac, 1945), who in 1927 had opened the first institution for children with special educational needs in Berlin. Her methods also attracted healthy children from intellectual, mostly Jewish, parents. After a series of arrests and bans for educating children in a Judeo-Communist spirit, Richter-Wolff fled with her daughter and several other children to the Yugoslav coast in April 1937 and settled near Dubrovnik. As the number of children in her care grew, and the currency transfer from Germany, which was necessary for survival became more difficult, they had to leave the Adriatic idyll. With her Jewish partner, Erwin Süssmann, Annemarie investigated Palestine and other possible destinations, but without the necessary means, and with children of mixed Jewish and Gentile background, they Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, p. 98. Sperber was from the same Galician village as Mavro Kandel, who he was visiting in Zagreb. Also, Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 9. Sperber, Until My Eyes are Closed with Shards, p. 23. Beno Stein was mobilized as a doctor upon the German attack on Yugoslavia. When taken prisoner, Stein committed suicide. For Stein and Sperber’s relationship to Yugoslav Communists, see Ivan Očak, Gorkić: život, rad i pogibija (Zagreb: Globus, 1988), pp. 319–21; Ivo Goldstein, ‘Restoring Jewish life in Communist Yugoslavia, 1945–1967’, East European Jewish Affairs, 34/1 (2004), 58–71 (p. 65). Marcus G. Patka and Mirjana Stančić, Die Analyse der Tyrannis: Manés Sperber 1905–1984 (Vienna: Holzhausen, 2005), p. 73 (archival report translated by Mirjana Stančić).

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eventually decided to settle in an urban environment, with Zagreb as the most natural option. Zagreb’s children’s home was supported by Vera Stein-Ehrlich and Beno Stein. Legal registration was undertaken by Zagreb lawyer Joel Rosenberger, whose wife, Dr Alice, a psychologist, became Annemarie’s partner in raising the children. Vera’s sister Ina taught the children gymnastics, while architect Heinz Pscherhof/Pšerhof procured some work for the older children. Among the children who spent time in Annemarie’s care were Peter, the son of the author Dinah Nelken; Vladimir (Vladim), the son of Manès Sperber; and the daughter of Alexander Sacher-Masoch, Barbara, of whom more later.173 Belgrade also profited enormously from the creativity and artistry of refugees such as Erich He(t)zel (1901–1944), who in 1933 became Belgrade’s first professional opera director. Hetzel introduced modern German directing style, and staged ten operas, among them works by Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Shostakovich, resuscitating the Belgrade opera ensemble with talent, erudition, and management in what was described as ‘German pedantry and acribia’. The delight of public and colleagues resulted in the demand that Hetzel also take over directing drama at the Belgrade National Theatre, where he staged numerous plays, most famously Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and The Tempest, Schiller’s Don Carlos, Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, and many more. During the war, Belgrade actors, singers, and ballet dancers successfully hid Hetzel in their homes, where he continued to train them, and to prepare Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for opening after the liberation. Tragically, Hetzel did not survive to see it happen. He was killed in the Allied bombing in 1944, just months before the liberation.174 In addition, Belgrade Opera and Ballet got two conductors among the refugees. Frankfurt-born Julius Ehrlich conducted in 1936 and 1937, before emigrating to the United States, where he had a very prolific career specializing in Shostakovich and other Russian composers. After the Anschluss came Josef Krips (1902–1974), professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and See Mit dem Kinderheim auf der Flucht: Annemarie Wolff-Richter (1900–1945), Heilpädagogin im Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Biografie, ed. by Ludwig  T.  Heuss and Marina Sindram (Berlin: Schwabe, 2020), pp. 119–63. Vesnić, ‘Jevreji na srpskoj pozorišnoj sceni tokom 19. i 20. Veka’, 217–18; Ranka Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi, pp. 203–04 cites the enthusiasm of both opera critics and the general public for Hetzel’s talent and productions; Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p.  317. Among other victims of the Holocaust in Belgrade were Hetzel’s colleagues, Sarajevo-born composer and conductor of the Belgrade Opera, Afred Pordes (1907–1941); Slavko Leitner (1940–1943), actor and director, and disciple of Max Reinhardt, active in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Osijek, where the Ustaša murdered him; Rikard (Dundek) Schwartz (1897– 1942?), who conducted in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Osijek, escaping to his hometown of Zagreb when the war started, and later murdered in Jasenovac.

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conductor first at the Vienna Volksoper, and then at the Staatsoper. Raised a Roman Catholic, Krips was nevertheless excluded from work because his father was born Jewish. Until the Nazi attack on Belgrade in 1941, Krips conducted the Belgrade Opera and Philharmonic, modernizing it and raising it to European level, as contemporaries and critics recorded. Especially remembered were his performances of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.175 Viola soloist Leon Bistinger also found refuge in Belgrade, where he revolutionized the orchestra and raised its artistic performance.176 The Belgrade Jewish Community in 1934 hired a German refugee, conductor Mario Menaše Bronca, who established the Jewish Academic Choir and greatly improved both religious services and the secular repertoire of the Serbian-Jewish Singing Society into one of the most prestigious choral societies.177 Yet these successes were short-lived, as in 1939 Bronca left Yugoslavia, and two years later the choirs he had transformed were destroyed. Several Jewish visual artists, protagonists of modernism and Bauhaus during the Weimar Republic, also found shelter in Yugoslavia. Arthur Korn, one of the leading Berlin modernist architects and bearer of the Iron Cross for his bravery fighting in the First World War, was expelled from the Reich’s Association of Arts and fled to Zagreb, where he successfully worked in tandem with Vladimir Antolić.178 In 1937, he emigrated from Yugoslavia to England, where he was interned for eighteen months because of his Communist views, but eventually made a brilliant teaching career, first at Oxford and then at the London Architectural Association. Professor Otto Schöntal, one of the closest students and associates of Otto Wagner, and President of the Austrian Association of Architects from 1930 to 1932, also escaped to Yugoslavia and survived the war in Dalmatia.179 Among painters, Margret Knoop-Schellbach and Willy Knoop from Hamburg, designated as degenerate artists, also survived thanks to emigrating to Yugoslavia.180 Rudolf Gerhart Bunk  (Berlin, 1908–Hamburg, 1974), Krips returned to Vienna in 1941 and survived the war in hiding. After the war, he had a brilliant career at the helm of the Vienna Philharmonic, and other major symphony orchestras. His memories are published as Ohne Liebe kann man keine Musik Machen … Errinerungen, ed. by Josef Krips and Harrietta Krips (Vienna: Böhlau, 1994). Just before the outbreak of the war, Bistinger fled to Italy. For Krips and Bistinger’s work in Belgrade, see Vesnić, ‘Jevreji na srpskoj pozorišnoj sceni tokom 19. i 20. Veka’, 222. Ivan Hofman, Srpsko-jevrejsko pevačko društvo (Hor “Braća Baruh”), 125 godina trajanja (Belgrade: Hor ‘Braća Baruh’, 2004). Two of Korn’s projects in Zagreb won prizes. See Dennis Sharp, ‘Gropius und Korn: Zwei erfolgreiche Architekten im Exil’, in Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien, 1933–1945 (Berlin: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1986), pp. 203–08. Ian Boyd Whyte, Emil Hoppe, Marcel Kammerer, Otto Schönthal: Three Architects from the Master Class of Otto Wagner (Berlin: Wiley VCH, 1989). ‘Knoop traute sich nicht’, Der Spiegel, 24 August 1950.

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painter and scenographer, came in 1938 with his family to the island of Koločep near Dubrovnik, for a long time the residence of German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz. After a short internment following the occupation of Yugoslavia, the Bunks fled to Italian-held Trogir, and then to the island of Hvar, before being evacuated by the Partisans in 1943, along with thirty thousand Dalmatians to El Shatt in Egypt. After the war, Bunk and his family returned and lived in Split, where Bunk was invited to work as director and scenographer for its National Theatre, achieving a prolific theatre, opera, and ballet career for a couple of decades.181 Others were less fortunate. Rudolf Levy, another German Expressionist painter and a First World War volunteer awarded with the Iron Cross, initially fled with Oskar Kokoschka to Rapallo, moving to New York after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. His dislike of America brought him back to Europe, settling in the small village of Zaton near Dubrovnik. After the invasion of Yugoslavia, Rudolf Levy escaped again to Italy, first to Ischia and eventually to Florence, where in 1944 he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. It is still unclear whether he died on the transport or upon reaching the camp.182 Franz Schaffgotsch, Austrian painter, graphic artist, and stage designer, also tragically died in his Dubrovnik exile. Born in 1902, as Count Schaffgotsch Semperfrei from Kynast and Greiffenstein, one of the oldest and richest German aristocratic families from Silesia, he was already a prolific artist when he actively took part against the Austrian Nazi coup attempt in 1934. His marriage to a Jew, Hedwig, who was also an artist working for Max Reinhardt theatre productions, brought even more danger. After the Anschluss, they moved to Zagreb, and Franz earned his living with church restorations. In their house on the island of Šipan near Dubrovnik, the Schaffgotsches entertained other exiles, such as the actress Tilla Durieux and her husband, about whom more in the next chapter. The Schaffgotsches were arrested by the Ustaša in 1941. Franz died after being released from Dubrovnik prison under unclear circumstances in December 1942, but Hedwig survived to tell the story.183

Rudolf  G.  Bunk, 1908–1974, ed. by Bojana Bunk-Denegri (Hamburg: Edition Fliehkraft, 1997); Bojana Denegri, Bildersuche: Auf den Spuren meines Vaters Rudolf Bunk (Hamburg: Grönewold, 2006). Susanne Thesing, Manfred Rothenberger, and Heinz Neidel, Rudolf Levy (1875–1944): Leben und Werk (Nuremberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 1990). Hedwig Gräfin Schaffgotsch, Die Liebenden sind alle von einer Nation: Ein Frauenschicksal (Munich: Verlag Franz Ehrenwirth, 1949); Nikolaus Schaffer, ‘Nachruf nach fünfzig Jahren: Zwei Künstlerschicksale während der NS-Herrschaft in Salzburg. Helene von Taussig und Franz Schaffgotsch’ in Das Salzburger Jahr 1988/89 (Salzburg: Eigenverlag der Salzburger Landesregierung, 1988).

Chapter 2

After the Anschluss ‘We went [to Yugoslavia] because we couldn’t go anywhere else, and that was just a lucky thing.’1

As German troops annexed Austria on 11  March  1938, in the so-called Anschluss, the lives of Austrian Jews and anti-fascists turned into a survival struggle almost overnight. The long-held anti-Semitic prejudice, along with the new rules, brought out the worst in many Austrian inhabitants, who turned to torture, humiliation, and hunting their neighbours, colleagues, and acquaintances. The immediate repression, much more acute than anything previously recorded in Germany, caused widespread panic, desperation, and many suicides. The aim of the anti-Semitic measures was clearly targeted at driving the Jews out, with forty-five thousand leaving the same year, and another two hundred thousand in the next couple of years. At the same time, the possibilities and avenues for immigration drastically diminished. Upon the initiative of the US President Franklin Roosevelt, a conference to tackle the issue of Jewish exodus from Germany and Austria was convened in the summer of that year, in the French spa town of Évian, attended by representatives from thirtytwo countries.2 Nevertheless, aside from the Dominican Republic, delegations from other participating nations failed to agree and accept those fleeing the enlarged Nazi Third Reich. Yugoslavia, which did not even participate in the conference, bordering Austria, emerged as one of the primary destinations of those fleeing. From 1938, escape became the most important individual survival strategy adopted by persecuted Jews and others. The mass pogroms of Jews on Kristallnacht later that year persuaded even the most optimistic, or conformist, to flee. The year after, they were joined by the Jews of Czechoslovakia and Poland, following the Nazi occupation and attacks against their countries. Every subsequent wave of refugees was more and more desperate, with most crossing into Yugoslavia illegally, before some of them proceeded to Greece, Albania, and elsewhere. This chapter will illuminate strategies of flight in radically deteriorating circumstances, only sporadically interspersed by comments of contemporaries Interview with Ida Rudley, p. 1-1-7, USHMM The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. Paul R. Bartrop, The Evian Conference of 1938 and the Jewish Refugee Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_003

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such as Ludwig Biró, a lawyer from Graz, whose recordings compiled by 1942 represent the most detailed personal contemporary account of Jewish refugee flight to Yugoslavia. In addition, individual stories of illegal border crossings, counterfeit documents, and struggles for visas and residence status through bribes, conversion, or fake marriages, accompanied by humiliation and despair, as well as wit, candour, and solidarity experiences are gathered to bring alive the existing and new historical research based on the archive holdings of Yugoslav immigration and frontier protection authorities. Towards the end, the chapter will also shed more light on the emergent refugee networks and anti-fascist resistance, as well as on dramatic last-minute escapes before Yugoslavia and Greece were overrun by the Nazi invasion in spring 1941.

The Vienna Exodus Much has been written about the once powerful Viennese Jewish community, the humiliation and terror it experienced after the Anschluss, and the mass exodus of almost two thirds or over a hundred thousand Viennese Jews that followed. The Viennese made up the greatest share of refugees in the Balkans, followed by the second largest Austrian Jewish community based in Graz, which was victimized even more, as the terror struck the provinces more intensely than the capital.3 Where to go became the most existential question. With affidavits from America, there was an eight-year waiting period under Austrian and a ten-year waiting period under Polish quota, with Polish or stateless Jews the most threatened, as seen previously in Germany.4 Young people and those with special skills could emigrate to Britain on limited schemes. The British Home Office was among the first to impose visas to check and stop the flow of refugees coming from Germany and annexed Austria. According to Louise London, what qualified people for entry into Britain was not the sympathy for the persecution, but what the émigrés could bring into the country with them, such as their capital assets, expertise, or learning, or simply their youth.5 With the preferred destinations of the US and Britain imposing strict obstacles, Austrian Jews, exposed to daily harassment and arrests, had to look elsewhere. It became pressing when, following the Anschluss, thousands of Jewish men Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 130–40. Fritzi Owens. ‘Segment 56’ Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1996. Louise London, ‘British Immigration Control Procedures and Jewish Refugees 1933–1939’, in Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the UK, ed. by Werner E. Mosse (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1991), pp. 485–518.

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were beaten, arrested, and sent to Dachau. Obtaining a visa to emigrate was their only release option. Their wives and relatives cried and begged the foreign consuls, but, as Biró contemplated, after the experience of the Spanish Civil War and previous failures in Abyssinia, China, and Finland, there was little hope for a humanist approach for Jews from allegedly democratic countries.6 The Israelitische Kultus Gemeinde (IKG) in Vienna was officially charged with organizing and managing emigration. It took over the work of the Zionist organizations, who for years organized Hashcharas as training centres for the few dedicated youths willing to go to Palestine. In 1938, it was flooded by demands from thousands of parents when Palestine and the so-called kindertransport to England became the last resorts to save their children from Nazi terror. At the same time, the Jewish community was still divided, with most rabbis trying to prevent people from emigrating.7 In addition, there was a huge generational gap, with the elderly generally rejecting the idea of leaving Austria. Others did not or could not wait for emigration arrangements to be made by the IKG, whose functionaries became the target of much criticism. Biró accuses them, along with other Jewish organizations, of being run by ‘clans’, privileging their family members in obtaining emigration certificates.8 As the British Mandate Palestine Authority provided only limited entry certificates, many looked for other solutions – buying visas to anywhere possible, and increasingly to illegal emigration. Many of the so-called illegal Aliyahs were organized by the Zionist Betar movement, like the train journey on 8 (or 9) June 1938 undertaken by Meir Neeman as a teenager.9 Neeman and his friends gathered at Vienna South railway station, and even sang Hatikva to the astonishment of their family and friends, as well as patrolling SS troopers. More than three hundred young men were then hustled on to a special train that travelled through Yugoslavia. In Zagreb, an astonishing sight presented itself to Neeman, as hundreds of local Jews were awaiting the train: They rushed to the windows, crying, rejoicing, and shouting Shalom! They forced bread, cheese, sardines, salamis, and bottles of wine on the travellers. Some tried

Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 228. ‘Herman Herskowitz’, Voices from the Holocaust, ed. by Sylvia Rothschild (New York: New American Library, 1981), pp. 114–21 (p. 115). Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 224 and pp. 254–55. Victoria Kumar writes that 380 Betharim departed singing Hatikva on 9  June  1938, in her ‘“Kampf an vier Fronten”: Die “Alija-Beth”-Arbeit der österreichischen “revisionistischen” Zionisten in den 1930er Jahren’, in Schleppen, Schleusen, Helfen: Flucht zwischen Rettung und Ausbeutung, ed. by Gabriele Anderl and Simon Usaty (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2016), pp. 259–71 (p. 266).

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to catch outstretched hands. Some knelt, kissed the rails, and blessed the group for going to the Holy Land.10

Yugoslav authorities tried everything to prevent a repetition of the scene, but, despite their efforts, the same occurred in Belgrade. The train continued to Greece, where the authorities were no happier to see them than the Yugoslav ones. They disembarked in Athens and were bused to a camp to wait for ships carrying them to Palestine. After a week, cramped into a few vessels resembling a ship, their long journey began. They came close to Palestine, and twice had to turn back and drift in the sea for fear of British warships. Eventually, the Greek ships smuggled the boys into Haifa. But only a very few considered going to, and eventually ended up in, Palestine.11 Most Jews in Vienna were exploring other options. Fischer described the dark interior of the Café Mozart in Vienna as a scene of a stock market of bribes, where the price of a visa – or, as he described it, the value of freedom stock in summer 1938 – rose from day to day.12 Fred Schwarz recorded the exodus of Viennese Jews in all directions: ‘Medaks are in Cochabamba, Schorschi on their way to Schanghai, Blumkas just got an American visa and Ujhelys are hoping for one from any South American country.’13 A few months later, most of these options would disappear. In a letter to his cousin Wilhelm on 21 October 1938, Paul Weisz recorded Shanghai and Abyssinia as remaining destinations: For the first, visas can be obtained only by doctors, dentists, pharmacists, engineers, and chemists. Those with other professions must go there illegally. Many do just that, and ship tickets are sold out till March.14

Fritz Lunzer, professor of solo singing at the New Vienna Conservatory, landed in Zagreb only when all his attempts to get US, British, Turkish, or Icelandic visas failed.15 As panic raged, Hans Reichmann recalled:

‘The Promised Land: From an Account by Meir Neeman’, in The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy. Voices of Those Who Escaped Before the ‘Final Solution’, ed. by Dorit Bader Whiteman (New York: Insight books, 1993), pp. 119–29 (p. 128). Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 223. Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, p. 35. Fred Schwarz, Züge auf falschem Gleis (Vienna: Verlag Der Apfel, 1996), p. 22. Paul  B.  Weisz, Family in War: A Personal Chronicle (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), p. 12. The rest of his family stayed behind in Vienna and ended tragically. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, pp. 266–67.

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Chapter 2 Hundreds of Jews escaped to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Switzerland. They swam across border rivers, climbed over the mountains. All South American visas were sold out; the US Consulate was stormed. Some flew to England and Holland, others travelled on steamboats to Romania and hundreds fled to – Germany, where they hid or hoped to cross into the safety of Finland. Some were stuck in no one’s land on an island in the Danube. Prague and Budapest refused them entry. Without food and cover the SS left them to die, whereas the border police of other countries could not help for ‘higher reasons’.16

Following Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Switzerland, the other countries bordering Austria, Yugoslavia clumsily followed with restrictions and obstacles for Jewish refugees. Initially, Yugoslav consulates abroad were directed not to issue visas to Jews, and border checks were to be hardened.17 On 28 January 1938, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry ordered its border and police authorities for the first time to stop allowing entry to German Jews without valid transit or end destination visas, followed by several orders in March and April, this time concerning the Austrian Jews, denying them entry regardless of their citizenship.18 More importantly, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry took over the responsibility for granting immigration and residency permits from the local authorities. By autumn 1938, the Foreign Ministry also centralized its visa policy for Jews, limiting the room to manoeuvre for the consulates, imposing further bureaucratic hurdles, and extending waiting times.19 While these measures targeted Jews from Austria and Germany, they would later be extended to Jews from Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Nevertheless, these measures proved not easy to enforce, and contained many loopholes, and, as we learn from many testimonies, the Yugoslav authorities and officials were not eager to implement them. In the beginning, many were still able to get Yugoslav visas through travel agencies, although it is not clear whether this involved additional bribes. Soon after the Anschluss, the Brodheim family travelled in this way to Belgrade, flying via Budapest and taking their belongings with them – a comfortable escape compared to the challenges, risks, and trauma experienced by others, who soon had to run across the border with literally nothing.20 Shipping one’s possessions Hans Reichmann, Deutscher Bürger und verfolgter Jude: Novemberpogrom und KZ Sachsenhausen 1937–1939 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), p. 61. Ristović, ‘“Unsere” und “fremde” Juden’, p.  195, and in his U potrazi za utočištem. Jugoslovenski Jevreji u bekstvu od Holocausta (Belgrade: Službeni list, 1998), p. 31. Stulli, Židovi u Dubrovniku, p.  81 lists several of these orders which were transmitted through Banovina (Province) administration to local border police commissariats. Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 218. Adolph Brodheim, ‘Segment  45–53’. Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1998.

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or transferring money involved by default bribing Austrian (German) officials, as we learn from many accounts.21 All seventeen members of the extended Weiss family got their Yugoslav visas through bribes, and entered Yugoslavia on the train from Vienna during summer and autumn 1938.22 Their connection at the Yugoslav Consulate is named as Alexander Stojka (name misspelled, so difficult to identify). Stojka secured Yugoslav visas for further relatives and contacts of the Weisses until well into 1940, and was described as very expensive.23 Others looked for connections, because in Yugoslavia, connections often worked better than bribes, as recalled by Sperber, who was able to rescue his wife and child from Vienna with the help of his friends in Zagreb, who intervened for visas.24 The Rosenthals from Vienna bribed clerks in the town of Kikinda to issue them a document of origin (‘right of citizenship’) that could secure a Yugoslav passport.25 The post-1918 treaties, which regulated the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, based nationality on the possession of ‘right of domicile’ (Heimatrecht, pertinenza), previously conferred by the municipalities of the Monarchy. As a rule, inhabitants became nationals of the State, which had acquired the territory in which they possessed ‘right of domicile’. However, the process was often disputed. When payments did not work, forging ‘rights of domicile’ became common, although the fraudsters were frequently found out, and, similarly to forged baptism certificates, visas were refused.26 Having been arrested and maltreated three times by the Gestapo in Graz before being allowed to emigrate, Ludwig Biró obtained Yugoslav visas for himself and his family with the help of Graz philosophy professor Konstantin Radaković and Dr Fero Müller, a Maribor businessman and politician close to the Yugoslav authorities.27 Some Jews placed certificates Polić, Imao sam sreće, p. 337. Weiss, Out of Vienna, pp. 45–49. Ibid., pp. 125–30. Sperber, Until My Eyes are Closed with Shards, p. 147. The life-story of Geza Breider is told by his grandson in a bilingual German/Serbian book collection of documents by Goran Babić, DJED GEZA, Čovjek ili Jevrej (zbornik dokumenata iz nevremena) (Belgrade: Foundation Heinrich Böll, 2007), p. 87. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 229. Biró left a moving portrait of Konstantin Konny Radaković, a scion of a distinguished family of Serbian background, who, along his father and brother, switched a military career for scholarship. An outspoken anti-fascist, Radaković was ejected from Graz University and spent the war years on his family estate in Kostajnica, Croatia. After the war, both Biró and Radaković returned to Graz and assumed their positions of lawyer and university professor in philosophy, with Biró heading what remained of Graz Jewish community for many years. Fero Müller assisted the two men to flee and transfer their capital, which he invested in his chocolate factory Sana in Hoča near Maribor. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 233–37.

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issued by Yugoslav consuls on their doors as a shield against frequent antiSemitic attacks and looting in Vienna.28 The Greek consul in Vienna was similarly disposed to issue visas and to help with transit through Yugoslavia.29 Another loophole was allowing people who still had old Austrian passports without indication that they were Jewish to enter. The Kirsch family from Vienna were able to cross into Yugoslavia without problems, according to the daughter Susan, driving in their own car, with the Yugoslav border guards only requesting that they remove the Nazi flags which they placed on their car believing it would disguise them. Once in Yugoslavia, they travelled from Zagreb to Sarajevo to obtain new German passports, which was possible from a local German consul, who was allegedly anti-Nazi. First, however, they had to have baptismal records, which they obtained from an Orthodox priest who also antedated them.30 Old Hungarian passports could also help, as experienced by Imre Rochlitz, who entered Yugoslavia on a train transporting Hungarian tourists to the Adriatic coast.31 Seeking conversion, or rather conversion papers, to obtain a Yugoslav visa became very common. By demanding baptism certificates dated no later than 1936, Yugoslav consulates acted like all other European countries before them, formally accepting (the logic of) Nuremberg racial laws. The US and UK did not introduce the requirement, but their quota system and other restrictions on entry had the same effect.32 Doris Orgel tells how a certain Father Ludwig (the Catholic priest) was willing to fudge the date on her family’s certificate, but not to spare them the ritual.33 Ruth Gutman chose the Anglican church, describing her experience with the vicar: ‘I tried very hard to convince him of my willingness to believe, and he tried equally as hard to believe that I really believed.’34 In this way, Anglican vicar Hugh Grimes, followed by his successor, Frederick Collard, jointly secured temporary respite and visas, and eased the escape for over eighteen hundred Viennese Jews.35 Among those who obtained ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices From the Holocaust, ed. by Rothschild, pp. 104–12 (p. 105). Rudolf Rosenbaum, The Diaries 1938–1946 (New York: Silver Press, 2017), p. 45. Interview with Susi Friedmann. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 29. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 223. Doris Orgel, The Devil in Vienna (New York: Penguin USA, 1978), p. 120. The book, about her time in Vienna, where she was born as Doris Adelberg in 1929, before and after the Anschluss, was named as a Phoenix Award Honor Book in 1998. Ruth Gutman, ‘Through Hell With a Guardian Angel’, p. 5. For more on the work of the Anglican Church in Vienna and its ministers, see Giles MacDonogh, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York: Basic Books, 2009), and Tim Dowley, Defying the Holocaust: Ten Courageous Christians Who Supported Jews (London: SPCK Publishing, 2020).

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a pre-dated Catholic birth certificate for a Yugoslav visa was Paul Muller, who recalled that on his plane to Belgrade in September 1938, there were so many Jews with similar conversion certificates that it alarmed the Yugoslav authorities. Subsequently, Muller was ordered to leave Belgrade, so he headed to Zagreb, where he received help from the Jewish Refugee Committee for three months before proceeding further to Belgium. Once settled, he sent his passport to his brother, who used it to get out of Vienna in the same way.36 After stricter rules were enforced in Catholic churches, most Jews turned to smaller Protestant communities, such as the Hussites, whose certificates were also easier to forge. The mass advent of converted refugees coincided, if not spurred, a drastic increase in conversion of Yugoslav Jews, especially among the wellintegrated ones, as described by one of them, the most thorough chronicler of Zagreb Jewish life, Branko Polić.37 From several tens in an average year, there was an increase to 821 Jews leaving their faith in 1938, among whom there were 580 Yugoslav and 241 foreign Jews or refugees. The greatest proportion was in Zagreb, which accounted for almost 80 per cent of the figure above, with more conversions in one year than for a quarter of a century before.38 Another very worrying sign of Zagreb conversions was that, while they accounted for only 3 per cent of its Jewish population, the converts used to provide one-third of its Community’s tax income.39 Sarah Raisky recorded her consternation in Zagreb, when her richest friends converted in 1938, although she claimed that there was neither an advantage in doing so, nor any signs of impending disaster.40 A formality in most cases, the conversions nevertheless caused much bad blood and frequent disputes among the refugees, as recorded by Pollatschek, with many blaming the converts for the misery happening to Jews, and attacking them.41 Whether genuine or out of desperation, or just one of the practicalities to get away, the conversions to Christianity later had little if any effect on one’s destiny. Bruno and Barbara Levi from Graz fled to the Yugoslav winter resort of Bled in 1938, where they were later joined by Ernst Simson, honorary Spanish consul in Graz and his family. They had all been members of the Graz Lutheran (Evangelische) community for decades, but this did not save them from the onus of the Nuremberg racial laws, once the German troops invaded Yugoslavia Interview with Paul Muller, USHMM The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, pp. 93–96 and pp. 308–38. Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu, p. 484. Schneiderman, Harry, ‘Yugoslavia’, The American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 41, pp. 325–26. Raisky, La Matassa, p. 51. Pollatschek, Ernst, Die Kunst des Überlebens: Erinnerungen eines Wiener Juden 1938–1945 (Verlag: Donat Verlag, Bremen, 1996), p. 72.

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in 1941.42 More tragic was the fate of the Pressburgers from Vienna, baptized Catholics from the early 1930s, as told by Gertrude, one of their three children, and the only one to eventually survive. They were able to come to Zagreb in September  1938, where they were supported by informal Catholic networks, working on the upkeep and restoration of churches. The following year, they travelled to Italy, in the hope of reaching France, but they failed, and had to return to Yugoslavia in spring 1940. Again, the nuns helped smuggle the children, but the parents were held by the border police, and only released upon the intervention of the Ljubljana bishop, who then provided permits allowing the father to work and the children to attend school in a Ljubljana suburb. Along with other Jews from Ljubljana, they were transferred to the safety of Italy proper in 1941, being placed in confino libero in Caprino Veronese, which Gertrude described as a welcoming stay until 1944, when they were deported to Auschwitz.43 For Jews in Graz and Burgenland, neighbouring Yugoslavia was the most obvious escape option. In 1938, there were a 125 Jews living in Rechnitz in the border area of Burgenland. After their dispossession and attacks, many fled to Vienna.44 In June, the remaining forty-three were expelled to the Yugoslav border near the town of Murska Sobota. Stuck in no man’s land, they spent days nagging Yugoslav border officials.45 In the first big test for the Zagreb Refugee Committee, its secretary, Aleksandar Klein, went to Murska Sobota, finding them in the storage area of the custom house, where they hid from the rain. Klein could see German (Austrian) border guards yelling that they would not allow them back or would send them directly to Dachau. Nearby Yugoslav Jewish communities brought food. Klein called Šime Spitzer, the new General Secretary of the Union of Yugoslav Jewish Communities, who immediately intervened with the Interior Ministry, but was told that the Minister, Dr Ante Korošec, was away in Slovenia. Makso Pšerhof/Pscherhof, the The Levis were arrested immediately and deported to a camp in Klagenfurt. It was only thanks to interventions from Spain and the US that the two families were eventually released. Heimo Halbrainer and Gerald Lamprecht, ‘Evangelisch getauft und als Juden verfolgt. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte einer “vergessenen” Opfergruppe des Nationalsozialismus’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Jahrbuch 2011, pp. 167–84 (p. 176). Gertrude Pressburger, Gelebt, erlebt, überlebt (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2018), pp. 47–73. A few Rechnitzer Jews in Vienna managed to escape to Palestine, China, or South America, while others were later deported and killed in the East. Aleksa Arnon, ‘Da se otme zaboravu – Povodom 25. godišnjice smeštaja prvih jevrejskih izbjeglica iz Austrije u Jugoslaviji’, Bilten Udruženja Jevreja iz Jugoslavije u Izraelu, 4–5 (1963), pp. 13–14; and 6–7, pp. 19–22.

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vice-president of the Zagreb Community and head of its Refugee Committee, then drove all over in search of Korošec. Eventually, Korošec only gave permission to host them for eight days until another solution was found. Then, the Jewish Community turned to Princess Olga, the wife of the Yugoslav Prince Regent, Paul, whose sister was the wife of the Duke of Kent, the youngest son of King George  V.  Sir  Neill Malcolm, League of Nations High Commissioner for German Refugees also intervened, and eventually, the Rechnitz refugees were allowed to remain for three months.46 The Zagreb Jewish Refugee Committee tried to send the destitute Burgenland Jews abroad via HICEM and HIAS (Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America), but to no avail. HICEM suggested marrying single refugees off with one another in order to enable their emigration as couples, but that turned out to be unfeasible, given that the newly married women would bear a new name and would thus require new passports. HICEM was not capable of securing further emigration, as affidavits were scarce and the Jewish Community in Vienna was not capable of issuing them with certificates of good conduct.47 After three months, their stay was extended, while their accommodation in the border town of Podravska Slatina continued to fill up with new refugees when any of the initial group managed to emigrate further. This was the first collective internment of refugees in Yugoslavia, a year before it became an official policy for destitute refugees. The Rechnitz(er) Jews who remained in Podravska Slatina were all murdered following the Nazi occupation in 1941, except for one family.48 Based on the exploration of HICEM archives, Vulesica concluded that the emergency of Burgenland Jews, and those released from Nazi camps under the condition of immediate emigration, led to a change in understanding of the refugee situation, and to a modified self-perception of the aid-givers. The Zionist organizations realized that they could no longer provide aid with the conditional demand that refugees only go to Palestine. From summer 1938, travel to North and South America was also supported.49 From 1939, HICEM not only advised about and funded visas, transportation routes, and tickets, but also offered help with lodging, food, and medical care, which were granted based on need and merit. HICEM also searched for refugees’ family members overseas to obtain affidavits or support to finance their journeys. In one or the Schneiderman, Harry, ‘Yugoslavia’, The American Jewish Year Book, Vol.  40, pp.  308–09. The incident is thoroughly analysed in Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’. Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 214. For the whole story, see Vertrieben. Erinnerungen burgenländischer Juden und Jüdinnen, ed. by Alfred Lang, Barbara Tobler, and Gert Tschögl (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2004). Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 201.

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other way, HICEM supported over a thousand families and individuals, mostly in Zagreb.50 This coincided with the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry’s refusal (from 1 January 1939) to further cooperate with the London-based Commission for German Jewish Refugees because it did not want to encourage Jewish migration to Yugoslavia and threaten its relationship with Germany. Subsequently, it refused to host Sir Neill Malcolm in Belgrade, where he wanted to visit and intervene further on behalf of German Jewish refugees.51 The Kristallnacht pogrom saw murders, beatings, arrests, and mass destruction of Jewish property throughout Germany, inevitably causing many more Jews to try to find a way out. At the same time, English, French, and American authorities, instead of sympathy and compassion, stiffened further their immigration policies. In addition, Nazi Germany made it almost impossible for Jewish emigrants to transfer any of their remaining assets abroad, making most new refugees virtually penniless. Following Kristallnacht, Ludwig Biró travelled immediately from Maribor to Zagreb to intervene with people in B’nai B’rith and foreign consuls to rescue his friends, who were imprisoned in Dachau and elsewhere. Some visas had to be bought, others forged, he admits, all under conditions and his personal guarantees that they would only be used to escape to Yugoslavia, rather than for their destination.52 According to Werner Reich, all consulates of South American countries, and even the US consulate in Zagreb, charged exorbitant sums or bribes for their visas.53 To make things worse, in late 1938, the Yugoslav authorities threatened to deport foreign Jews, especially if politically active or suspicious, and without long-term residence status. The panic and pressure to emigrate anywhere set in, as described by Kroch. Along with his other German Jewish friends from Golenić Hachshara, who did not want to go to Palestine, Kroch bought a visa from the Paraguayan consul in Zagreb with money wired from cousins overseas. HICEM paid for their tickets and gave them some pocket money. They travelled by train to Marseille and departed to safety on the Alsina in December 1938.54

Besides individual recipients scattered around the country, HICEM engaged with internment centres, corresponded with Jewish organizations and communities around the world, and dealt with abuse of funds. USHMM, Fond 1430 (1933–1941). AJ, MIP 334-33-95, 96. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 293–97. Rauscher, The Death Camp Magicians, p. 60. Kroch, Exil in der Heimat – Heim ins Exil, p. 84.

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At the Height of Refugee Pressure On 5 January 1939, the Foreign Ministry of Yugoslavia allowed Jews from countries other than Germany to apply for transit and twenty-one-day tourist visas. In February the same year, the new Prime Minister, Dragiša Cvetković, took over the portfolio of the Interior Ministry from anti-Semitic Korošec, which meant that more room for manoeuvre opened up. Allowing Burgenland Jews to remain in Yugoslavia was part of that U-turn from early 1939. The Government had similarly cancelled deportation orders against Jews who had been in the country for more than four years.55 This was immediately used by the delegation of the Union of Yugoslav Jewish Communities, which paid Cvetković a visit, resulting in a marked easing of refugee restrictions, singled out as unique in Europe at the time.56 Residence permits were extended; others were granted new transit visas, and even expulsion orders for those who had previously breached their statuses were abrogated, provided their expenses were covered by the Yugoslav Jewish community. The Ministry of Finance approved a Palestine arrangement under which potential emigrants could transfer their capital by means of Yugoslav–Palestinian trade. International Jewish organizations from that period praised the fact the refugees in Yugoslavia were given one-year residence permits, but extensions were still difficult, and were often under strict deadline.57 It was an important interlude that saved the lives of thousands that crossed through or stayed in Yugoslavia as the refugee pressure peaked. Nevertheless, the precedents for new strategies for dealing with refugee pressure were clear. Hachsharas turned into a precedent for collective housing of refugees, especially as after 1938 joining one became the only way out of Germany for many. A glimpse of life on the farm is provided in the memoir of Ilse Strauss (née Lewin) from Halle (an der Saale), who stayed there with her husband Walter.58 They came to Yugoslavia at the end of 1938, after the Moses Moskowitz, ‘Yugoslavia’, The American Jewish Year Book Vol.  41 1939–1940/5700, pp. 325–27. Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 219. Wilk’s Memorandum on the refugee situation in Yugoslavia is reproduced in Grossmann, Emigration, pp. 21–22. Ilse Strauss, ‘My Life and Times’, Unpublished Memoir 4413, The Wiener Library. An active Zionist and a daughter of a shopkeeper, Ilse had already been attacked on 1 April 1933, which the Nazis declared to be ‘The Jewish Boycott Day’. Despite daily worsening of conditions, her father was determined to stay in Germany, and it was only in 1937 that she decided to leave with her boyfriend, Walter. First, they came to Berlin to join HeChalutz, which placed them in a Hachshara, preparing to leave Germany, although her father and family did everything to prevent her marrying and leaving Germany.

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Dutch authorities refused to let them enter/transit the country on their way to Palestine because they were recently married and thus could have children (who would automatically become Dutch, also giving the parents the right to remain, which Holland sought to avoid). Ilse and Walter, like other refugee youths of bourgeois background, were shocked by their first encounter with the countryside and peasants. After a long journey through Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Ilse Strauss first stayed in a nearby village among the locals: ‘It was incredible just how primitively the Yugoslavian peasants lived […] I had never seen, or even imagined, that people could live under such miserable conditions, and if nothing else, it opened my eyes to what being poor really meant.’ Yet, this observation was immediately followed by another one: ‘But they were very kind and offered to share the one and only room with us for the night.’59 In Golenić, Walter had to look after pigs, and Ilse did sewing and ironing. They had Hebrew lessons, and a couple came from Palestine to explain what lay ahead. Like Ernst Kroch, Ilse and Walter Strauss, despite their Zionist background, felt uncomfortable, and they opted to go to Europe instead.60 Following Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries, Italy also passed racial laws on 17 November 1938, restricting the civil rights of Jews, spanning family, work, and property legislation, and excluding Jews from public office. Further, it envisaged disallowing foreign Jews from obtaining residence in Italy and started the process of revocation of citizenships acquired after 1919. The measures were continuously expanded and updated until 1942, including provisions for the internment of Jewish refugees.61 Up to this point, Italy was a favourite destination for wealthy German and other Jews fleeing their home countries, who only had to deposit enough money in an Italian bank as a guarantee that they would not be a burden to the Italian state. In addition, Italy was a major transit country, with at least fifty thousand Jews emigrating mostly to the New World via Trieste Port between 1920 and 1935, and another fifty-seven thousand in only the two years between 1935 and Strauss, ‘My Life and Times’, p. 20. According to Ilse, they were told ‘they had nothing to learn, except how to shoot! Shoot Arabs of course. We did not like this advice …’, Strauss, ‘My Life and Times’, p. 21. Ilse and Walter Strauss managed to get to England just days before the war started, thanks to the guarantee of Walter’s relatives. When Italy entered the war on the side of Germany in June 1940, it banned the entry of Jews from Germany and its allies, but the ban would never be implemented. However, like Yugoslavia, and many other countries before, it began the internment of foreign (refugee) Jews, first in the so-called Il soggiorno obbligato, and later in the camps, with Ferramonti in Calabria being the largest. For more, see Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2006), p. 187.

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1937.62 The latter wave was assisted by L’Ufficio palestinese di Trieste, established and led by Trieste Zionist Carlo Morpurgo. The new legislation undermined the Trieste route, and it was followed by an anti-Semitic campaign, targeting Trieste and Rijeka/Fiume, two (formerly Austro-Hungarian) towns bordering Yugoslavia with a relatively higher proportion of Jewish population. The Italian press echoed German anti-Semitism, while the issue of Jewish refugees played a prominent role. The population census organized to coincide with new legislation recorded 1075 Jewish citizens in Fiume, plus seventy-six Polish Jews with temporary residence, another 117 foreign Jews, fifty-nine with alleged residence, and another forty-five Jews (mostly former Austrian citizens) deemed politically problematic.63 In nearby Opatija/Abbazia, out of 270 registered Jews, only eighty-five were found to possess Italian citizenship. According to its Jewish Community, between 1935 and 1938, seventeen German Jewish families with thirty-eight members bought property or businesses and settled there. Others were dependent on community for survival, especially eighty-six recent migrants from Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.64 Despite the unpopularity of the racial laws with Italians, and their limited implementation, the vulnerable among the refugees felt threatened. They too made their way to Yugoslavia, like Hamburg-born Werner-Joachim Jacobson, who, in 1938, after an unsuccessful attempt to enter France, travelled to Trieste and crossed illegally the Rijeka-Sušak border, eventually ending up in Zagreb.65 After Zagreb and Belgrade, the new wave of refugees coming from Italy now began to flock along the Adriatic coast, overwhelming the Dubrovnik Jewish Community.66 Jews from Czechoslovakia filled the next contingent of refugees. Jaroslav Beneš, a physician in Prague for over thirty years, became increasingly concerned about losing his medical license and suffering other forms of persecution, after the Nazi occupation in March  1939. With his wife and their seven-year-old daughter, Beneš came to Zagreb at the end of 1939, and settled in a nearby spa town, Stubičke Toplice, in a very typical pattern. They were allowed to stay until January 1941, when they finally got their permissions to Tullia Catalan, ‘L’emigrazione ebraica in Palestina attraverso il porto di Trieste (1908– 1938)’, Qualestoria 2–3 (1991), 58–108 (p. 107). Sanja Simper, Židovi u Rijeci i Liburnijskoj Istri u svjetlu fašističkog antisemitizma (1938– 1943) (Zagreb: Židovska vjerska zajednica BET Israel, 2018), p. 183. Simper, Židovi u Rijeci, p. 120 and p. 187. Jacobson first stayed in Zagreb Synagogue, but after being arrested without valid residence in 1939, he was interned with a large group of Jewish refugees in nearby Samobor. Interview with Werner-Joachim Jacobson, ‘Segment 2’. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1999. Stulli, Židovi u Dubrovniku, p. 81.

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emigrate to Palestine.67 Opening one’s own business was another possibility for legalizing one’s stay. Gertrude Kaiser, a hat maker, opened a shop in Zagreb.68 Another Viennese entrepreneur, Robert Weiss, opened a successful shoe business in Zagreb in April 1939, trading with Italian shoe manufacturers that he knew from before, when he was running a shoe factory in Vienna.69 Alkalay was also able to renew his business connections with Italy.70 British Ambassador Rendel, who travelled up and down Yugoslavia with his entourage, was rather impressed to discover in Višegrad in Bosnia an inn kept by German refugee Jews, and in Makarska, on the Adriatic coast, the diplomats reported staying in an excellent hotel run by refugee Polish Jews.71 As before, the wealthy investors continued to obtain residence, like Fritz Fred Reisner from Vienna, who entered a commercial partnership with the first Yugoslav wagon and railroad manufacturing plant in Slavonski Brod, or Josef Deutsch, from Mattersdorf, who owned a weights factory, and was naturalized along with his family.72 Work permits were still issued, such as to Lavoslav Rothstein’s textile factory in Samobor in 1940 to employ a refugee from Czechoslovakia, Mika L. Daniel, while Louise Hafner and her son Alexander from Vienna were the last to enter the country legally, with a thirty-day visa on 22 March 1941.73 Claims Resolution Tribunal re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Case No. CV96-4849 [accessed 6 April 2022]. ‘Kaiser, Gertruda’, in Židovski leksikon. Three years later, she would be apprehended with Banat and Serbian Jews and subsequently murdered. Weiss, Out of Vienna, pp. 126–27. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, ed. by Rothschild, p. 105. Sir George Rendel, The Sword and the Olive: Recollection of Diplomacy and the Foreign Service 1913–1954 (London: John Murray, 1957), p. 162. At the time, Rendel was a British Ambassador to Bulgaria; he was appointed to the Yugoslav government two years later. In just two years from 1939 to 1941, Reisners were integrated in Yugoslavia, with the children going to school and the father running a business, for which he last sought permit extension on 21 March 1941, as registered in AJ, BH-KB 93–155, 21878-41 and Interview with Dorrit Liami Ostberg, USHMM, conducted by Gail Schwartz on 29  July  2000, in Bethesda, Maryland. The entire manuscript is available at [accessed 6 April 2022]. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, Dorrit and her family moved to the coastal town of Crikvenica, where they stayed in a rented villa, before being interned on the island of Rab with all other Jews from the Italian-controlled area. After the capitulation of Italy, her family paid local fishermen to take them to the island of Vis, and then to Allied-controlled Southern Italy. According to Dorrit’s testimony, they were paying their way through to safety, including two conversions, many fake documents, and the fishermen. Eventually, they arrived in America with the first large group of Yugoslav Jews and stayed in Oswego. Josef Deutsch was murdered in Jasenovac in 1941. HDA (Croatia’s State Archive), BH (Banovina Hrvatska)-KB 28–155, 28743-40 and 93–155, 24794-41.

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Yet personal wealth and different opportunities often created a chasm among the refugees, or between them and the locals, colouring some of their perceptions along the way. Eighteen-year-old Susan Tolman, née Weil, from an assimilated family converted to Protestantism, fled Vienna in May 1938 to the provincial town of Donji Miholjac near the Yugoslav-Hungarian border, where her family’s friends arranged her a job as a nanny for the three children of the Schlesingers. Viennese born, Dora, and Adolf (Arthur) Schlesinger, along with his bachelor brother, Philipp, succeeded the Gutmanns in the exploitation of the Slavonian oak forest, and lived in Miholjac castle, built in the style of an imposing English country house.74 They entertained British Ambassador Sir Neville Henderson for shooting parties in the grounds, where Franz Ferdinand had been recorded as killing over six hundred animals just before his final fatal trip to Sarajevo.75 On her train ride to Donji Miholjac, Susan was shocked by people travelling with baskets with chickens and geese. But the Schlesingers’ estate was a paradise, where the children were spoken to exclusively in German, and everything was made perfect by a multitude of servants and employees on the estate.76 The Chekhovian atmosphere of boredom, formal meals, bridge games, horse riding, and hunting was interspersed with family visits to and from Budapest. But just outside the castle lay the village, whose only street was covered in a good two inches of solid dust, and where geese roamed freely. This is where Ivan Ben-Amnon, a refugee from Prague, arrived with his mother and stayed with one of the managers of the Schlesinger estate. For Ben-Amnon too, Yugoslavia in 1940 was a paradise of peace and bounty, where peasants tilled the soil and soldiers carried no guns, and where he and his mother were welcomed warmheartedly.77 Remarkably, refugees from Prague, and later Poland, did not perceive Yugoslavia as Oriental, did not consider it backward, See ‘Dvorac Mailáth-Prandau u Donjem Miholjcu’ [accessed 6  April  2022], and ‘Schlesinger, Adolf’ in Židovski leksikon. The Schlesingers and Gutmanns were also primary suspects in the biggest financial scandal of interwar Yugoslavia, but they had their sentences commuted before Tolman arrived. See Hrvoje Volner, Od industrijalaca do kažnjenika. Susan Tolman, Scenes from Yesterday (Lewes: Book Guild, 2002), pp.  152–72 (p.  163). Tolman was able to emigrate to Switzerland, where she joined her parents, who came via Prague. They all ended up in England, where her younger sister had already arrived as a child visitor. Ivan Ben-Amnon described the period 1940–41, spent as a refugee in Osijek and Donji Miholjac, as the best time of his life, in ‘Wurzel aus dürrem Erdreich’, a manuscript written in 1986. Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection (ME 987), pp. 21–22. Ben-Amnon stayed on the Schlesinger estate with his mother as a guest of the chief engineer, Ferdinand Hirsch.

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and never contemplated any sense of superiority. What certainly helped were the linguistic similarities between Serbian/Croatian and Czech or Polish, with refugees from these two countries reporting connecting quickly and embracing the country.78 Among German-speaking refugees, there were exceptions too, like Ludwig Biró, who, with his Hungarian origins and knowledge of Yugoslavia, never Orientalized the Balkans, and only praised the hospitality offered to refugees/guests, and even took it for granted.79 Biró immersed himself in the Jewish community of Zagreb, which he perceived as an austricized Balkan town, and enjoyed their exuberant celebrations and lifestyle, where ‘old Austrian cultural tradition, Hungarian temperament and Balkan coarseness mix in a strange way’.80 Some wealthy Viennese refugees, on the other hand, like the ones renting the villas in Zagreb’s leafy Tuškanac, became the focus of satire for having plenty of time at their disposal to read Spengler idly, discuss the selling of Prague and, more troublingly, about Kristallnacht, and to engage in futile arguments about whether it was the fault of the right or left that brought Hitler to power.81 Biró was outraged with a widespread condemnation of Grynszpan among some fellow Jewish refugees in Zagreb. Claiming Grynszpan had caused the pogroms, these ‘reason and moral apostles’ were showing their cowardice, driven by fear and survival instinct. Their egocentrism and naivety, however, were products of the bourgeois illusion that their wealth and the capitalist economic system would defend and eventually save them.82 Reich, too, lamented his co-nationals’ popular pastimes making countless silly jokes about Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring.83 Fischer reserves his sharpest ridicule for the wealthy Viennese burghers, who could not refrain from packing their opera glasses as part of their luggage: [i]t only gradually dawned upon them that evenings where the lustful Count pursues his Susannah amid the quavers and the semi-tones, or a trousered Leonora shoots a path to freedom for her lover and herself from out of the downtrodden chorus, are pretty thin on the ground in exile, if indeed they survive at all. Opera-glasses dangling from the neck of a stowaway trying to get to Venezuela on a banana boat …84

Apart from Jewish refugees, an unknown number of Gentile Poles, also fled to or through Yugoslavia, such as anti-Nazi journalist and writer Antoni Sobanski, best known for his reports from Berlin: Nachrichten aus Berlin 1933–36 (Berlin: Parthas Verlag, 2007). Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 323–24. Ibid., p. 330. Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, p. 127. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 299. Interview with Werner Reich. Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, p. 260.

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Eventually, they had to flog their glasses to the people of Zagreb, with prices falling as the war was approaching, not to mention the utter humiliation of trying to sell them off. Fischer’s impression was that the staid citizens of Zagreb could not keep track of refugees for long, even with all those opera glasses they picked up so cheaply from them. In Sarajevo, the police accused refugees Josefa Kalke, a Czech citizen born in Innsbruck, her partner Marko Weiss, and host Salina Gross of espionage because their lifestyle was deemed extremely luxurious.85 Branko Polić could not find any sympathy for wealthy exiles either, as he saw them often arrogantly loathing Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and what they perceived as their impotent government in Belgrade.86 At the same time, the huge influx of refugees coincided with, and contributed to, intense wrangling between Yugoslavia’s two biggest Jewish communities over primacy in leadership, and especially in relation to the care of the growing number of the destitute. Appointing Šime Spitzer from Zagreb as the General Secretary of the Union of Yugoslav Jewish Communities in 1937 caused much stir and rejection among Sarajevo and Belgrade Sephardi Communities, as already indicated. Eventually, despite some objections to his leadership, Spitzer headed the Refugee Relief Committee based in Belgrade. The refugee influx had the effect of diminishing the previous conflicts between Ashkenazis and Sephardis, between locals and newcomers, and between religious and liberal Jews, according to Zagreb B’nai B’rith President Mavro Kandel.87 By 1939, according to community figures, Spitzer and his men had to care for more than nine thousand refugees all over the country, plus two thousand six hundred refugees on various boats.88 In April  1939, the Congress of all Jewish Communities decided to launch a special Social Fund, with all communities asked to contribute proportionally.89 In that year alone, three thousand five hundred Jewish refugees were deemed fully dependent on that Fund. The following year, the Union of Jewish Communities organized additional winter aid actions, collecting warm clothes and firewood, and entrusting individual communities to support specific internment centres, of which more later.90 Destitute Polish refugees arriving mostly via Romania and Hungary to Serbia AJ, MUP 14-33-1034/1940. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, pp. 90–92. Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, p. 97. Ristović, ‘“Unsere” und “fremde” Juden’, p. 194. Dubrovnik Community’s share of the contribution was 10,500 dinars, or approximately $230, which was a large sum, more than double the average annual wage. Stulli, Židovi u Dubrovniku, p. 81. For example, Osijek Community was entrusted with providing for the refugees interned in Brčko. The surplus of aid was was then shared among the Osijek poor. See Živaković-Kerže, Židovi u Osijeku (1918–1941), p. 89.

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were sent to join the Kladovo transport group, which in 1940 moved to Šabac. The sheer number of refugees, and their continuous arrival, pushed various Yugoslav Jewish youth and women’s groups to intensify their caritative work. Some refugees were even accommodated on the premises of women’s associations.91 The situation woke Jewishness too, with many wealthy Yugoslav Jews collecting money, clothes, and other goods independently, and donating them directly to refugees.92 Pollatschek described how well he was received in the Zagreb Jewish community, which was very welcoming to those with an academic background. Every registered refugee received one hundred dinars every week (about ten dollars monthly) and two restaurant vouchers. In addition, there were clothes, bedding, and other goods for the needy. With rooms priced at one hundred and fifty dinars a month, and a good restaurant meal at ten to fifteen dinars, the aid only covered half of someone’s costs. For the rest, many refugees headed to the offices of the Zagreb Jewish Community, or to one of the city’s four prayer houses (Neolog, Orthodox, Polish, and Sephardi) to meet locals, who invited them for dinners, parties, and other events organized by the community, where one might find opportunity for some work, tutoring, or maybe helping with further emigration.93 According to testimonies, it was similar in Sarajevo and Belgrade, with thousands of refugees converging on these cities with large Jewish communities with opportunities to be housed in local homes and avoid placement in the internment camps being set up from 1939 onwards.94 Other provincial towns and villages, such as Koprivnica, also became havens for refugees. Local Jews helped as much as they could to provide them with housing and food, but there was no work available, so most refugees spent long days roaming around and talking with other refugees.95 Despite the presence and visibility of refugees, the attitude of locals regarding the looming Nazi threat barely changed. Haim Baruhović, originally from Kosovo but stationed in Zagreb as an officer of the Yugoslav Army, accommodated an elderly couple from Austria in his home. The couple kept warning the Baruhovićs and other Zagreb Jews, who nevertheless felt safe in Yugoslavia.96 Pauline Albala, Yugoslav Women Fight for Freedom (New York City: The Yugoslav Information Center, 1943), p. 21. Pauline was a university professor and activist. Her husband, David Albala, the president of the Belgrade Sephardi community, was a confidant of Yugoslavia’s Regent, Prince Paul. Interview with Francis and Eili Ofner. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 19. Interview with Francis and Eili Ofner; Weiss, Out of Vienna, p. 154. Weiss, Out of Vienna, p. 118. Jozef Baruhović, ‘Under the Same Roof as the Germans’, Mi smo preživeli  …: Jevreji o Holokaustu. 3 (Belgrade: The Jewish Historical Museum, 2009), pp. 425–36 (p. 426).

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Branko Polić in his memoir recalls that almost every day his family had Viennese refugee Jews from Vienna for lunch, with almost all eventually managing to get to the US, while the Polićs stayed back.97 Biró wrote ‘Life in this fairytale-like country, in this thriving, pleasure-seeking city, was so beautiful, business was so good that one didn’t want to see the signs on the wall.’98 In 1940, refugees from Poland overtook those from Austria, spreading much more horrific stories about the fate of the Jews in Poland, but still not changing the attitude of Yugoslav Jews.99 At the same time, spurred by its rise in Germany and all over Europe, anti-Semitism was raising its head in Yugoslavia too, most evidently among its German minority and in the rise of fascist parties, such as the Ustaša (then called Frankovci) and Zbor.100 While Rabbi Steckel from Osijek claimed that anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia hardly existed before the war, World Jewish Congress Reports from this period noted no legal changes, but signalled a rise in anti-Semitism in both Yugoslavia and Greece, as a result of strengthening economic and political ties with Germany and the influx of German propaganda.101 Yugoslavia employed four hundred Jewish officials, but no new ones were hired after 1938. There was a shift in state fiscal policies toward Jewish-owned enterprises, and especially regarding state subventions and monopolies. Informal anti-Semitism can be traced in data demonstrating availability of credit, and employment of Jews in banks, which was in steady decline. Another report highlights the fact that there was only one Jewish university law professor, even though more than 10 per cent of the country’s lawyers were Jewish. At the same time, refugees enrolled in Yugoslav schools and universities describe them as devoid of anti-Semitism.102 One quarter of all female students in Yugoslavia were Jewish, although their share in population was well below 1 per cent. Furthermore, Yugoslavia continued to attract Jewish students from countries which introduced Numerus Clausus.103 When reporting about mass Among them, brothers Georg and Martin Altmann, Hans Almoslino and Danica Deutsch, who became a foremost representative of individual psychology as the head of the Adler Institute in New York, Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 324–25. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 428; Estera Stela Margalit, ‘Život sa tek po kojom radošću’, in Mi smo preživeli …: Jevreji o Holokaustu. 5 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2009), pp. 283–303 (p. 287). Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam, pp.  377–83; Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 86–100. Charles W. Steckel, Destruction and Survival (Los Angeles: Delmar, 1973), p. 43. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 43. Marija Vulešica, ‘“Von Antisemitismus and der Universität kann keine Rede sein”: Judenfeindlichkeit an den jugoslawischen Universitäten 1918–1941’, in Alma Mater Antisemitica. Akademisches Milieu, Juden und Antisemitismus an den Universitäten

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Jewish exodus and problems in other countries, the Yugoslav press made no attempts to connect them or use them against Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia.104 In 1940, streets were named after Jews in Belgrade. The Court of Split ordered Yugoslav debtors of Jewish firms, expropriated by the Reich, to continue to pay their debts to the Jewish owners, who might be refugees abroad, refusing to recognize the Nazi commissar in Vienna as an institution appointed on racial grounds. The Belgrade Court fined the German anti-Semitic paper Erwache for libel upon the complaint of the Union of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia. Volksruf, another German-language newspaper, had to admit: ‘In view of the fact that the State is not pursuing any antisemitic course, and the population is friendly towards Jews, the Yugoslav Germans see no point in carrying on a boycott against them.’105 More than anything else, suspicion and fear dominated the political outlook of the Yugoslav authorities, threatened by revisionist neighbours, internal conflicts, and the rising popularity of Communist ideas, which were associated with Jews, as in the rest of Europe. After the violent anti-Semitic attacks of the early 1930s, the Greek government was similarly praised for the lack of anti-Semitic measures in 1940. Five thousand copies of twelve new textbooks were reported as being distributed to Jewish community schools without charge. An Italian company was punished by the court in the seaport of Kavalla for dismissing its Jewish employee, under Italy’s anti-Semitic legislation, following a previous similar decision in Yugoslavia.106 Yugoslav Prince Paul and his government officials, as well as Greek government officials under the dictatorship of General Metaxas, repeatedly assured the Jewish representatives of their intentions not to succumb to the wave of anti-Semitic discrimination and persecution that was spreading through the continent. Most Greek Jews embraced the right-wing Metaxas, and viewed him more positively than previous democratic governments led by Elefterios Venizelos.107 During his rule, in 1940 alone, more than five thousand Jewish refugees are thought to have passed through Greece on their way to Palestine. Being able to transit both Yugoslavia and Greece, they were fortunate to succeed in leaving the continent on fire. Some were helped by the American Joint, although most travelled on their own.108

Europas zwischen 1918 und 1939, ed. by Regina Fritz, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, and Jana Starek (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2016), pp. 161–80. Milosavljević, Savremenici Fašizma, pp. 273–81. Moscowitz, Moses, ‘Yugoslavia’, The American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 42, pp. 411–12. Moscowitz, Moses, ‘Greece’, The American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 42, pp. 409–10. Fleming, Greece, pp. 100–02. Ibid., p. 105.

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In Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania, Jewish communities maintained close and warm links with royal families, along with other key ministers, army officers, and civilian officials. Time and again, they intervened for one or another group, or in single cases of refugees, mostly to extend their stay while waiting for Palestine certificates or something else. Sometimes these interventions took place through official channels, but more often it was through intermediaries. Important people mattered, like the later famous agent Duško Popov, whose Second World War exploits inspired Ian Fleming, and who is recorded as intervening on behalf of German Jews.109 Lavoslav Šik, despite his Zionist opposition to Jewish refugees coming to Yugoslavia, intervened in several cases, using his position as one of Zagreb’s leading lawyers, but he was too late to save himself and his family once the Ustaša regime was established.110 For German and Austrian refugees, this approach was odd, and difficult to adjust to, as testified by Biró, despite his praise for Maribor as providing the best period of his family’s exile: [O]f course, the word ‘impossible’ does not exist at all in political life in the Balkans; with the right attitudes and money, one can achieve even that ‘what cannot be’. But you must get used to that first. It is a destructive feeling to be dependent on the mood and the degree of corruption of some – often all subordinate – officials and to wander around in a country, with no certainty at all.111

As we have seen, connections and bribes were not only essential to deal with ‘Balkan’ officials, but also for obtaining foreign visas, the most sought-after items for the refugees. One fortunate refugee described the Swiss consulate building in Zagreb as a ‘dispenser of happiness with so many completely silent human beings squeezed inside.’112 Connections and bribes also went along with the most common strategy used to further emigration or to gain residence throughout the world – marriage with locals.113

Interview with Francis and Eili Ofner, USHMM Collection, tape 1. The most recent account on Duško Popov is Larry Loftis, Into the Lion’s Mouth: The True Story of Duško Popov (New York: Penguin, 2016). Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 326–27; Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, pp. 34–36. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 290. Tolman, Scenes from Yesterday, p. 171. For a wider context of this practice, see Irene Messinger, ‘Eheschließungen von Wiener Jüdinnen mit Ausländern 1938’, Forschungen zu Vertreibung und Holocaust: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes Jahrbuch 2018, pp. 142–58.

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Fictive Marriages The practice of fictive marriages in order to obtain residence in Yugoslavia was so widespread that already in September 1938, Yugoslavia’s Interior Minister raised it with the leadership of Yugoslavia’s Jewish community, stating the rising number of unions between Jewish refugees and Yugoslavia’s Jewish citizens.114 Yet there seems to have been no follow up or evidence that it was ever discussed again or what measures were taken, if any. Meanwhile, fictive marriages continued unabated, and rose in number as all other options diminished.115 Izidor Pollak in Murska Sobota married Pauline escaping Germany in 1938.116 Greta Reisman’s grandmother, despite her old age, had to marry a man she had never even met to get residence in Sombor.117 Imre Rochlitz’s aunt and cousin both contracted fictitious marriages with local men in Zagreb to obtain residence papers, divorcing shortly afterwards.118 Viennese doctor Ruth Gutman had to marry her remote cousin in Ilok, a small town on the Danube, for the same reason. In fact, the bookkeeper of the local Jewish community just wrote their names in a book. Her cousin Clarica married a Serbian peasant instead. As Gutman recounts, after the wedding, the peasant simply returned to his farm, although he was awarded with a cash sum for his service.119 Once married to a Yugoslav, Ruth Gutman was able to get Yugoslav citizenship in a year. The Yugoslav medical board also endorsed her medical diploma from Vienna, which allowed her to start working as an intern in 1939 in a Zagreb hospital with three other newly arrived Jewish doctors.120 Gutman was amazed that at the peak of anti-Semitism in 1939, no one ever doubted her loyalty to Yugoslavia, although she was clearly fast tracked for citizenship and medical certification because of a dire need for doctors. Stella Man, a ballerina from Vienna, was subjected to brutal humiliation by the caretaker of the house she lived in Vienna, who forced her to scrub the floor, calling her ‘Saujud’ (dirty Jew). In desperation, Stella tried to get a visa for New Zealand or Australia, an entry permit to Palestine, or escape into Switzerland, but all of these failed, so Ristović, ‘“Unsere” und “fremde” Juden’, p. 195. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, pp. 266–67. Bojan Zadravec, Vladek’s Voyage to the Unknown: A Chronicle of a Jewish Family from Murska Sobota (Ljubljana: Salve, 2017), p. 74. Interview with Greta Reisman, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 37. Gutman, ‘Through Hell With a Guardian Angel’, pp. 4–7 and p. 63. Later on, Clara married a Jew in Sarajevo out of love, but he soon perished in the Holocaust. She eventually escaped to Italy, where she married an Italian. Gutman, ‘Through Hell with a Guardian Angel’, p. 13.

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she eventually bought a visa for Yugoslavia through her Yugoslav student boyfriend. She flew to Belgrade in August 1938 and stayed in Subotica, where she married a friend of her boyfriend out of convenience. Fortunately for Stella, she got a Yugoslav passport quickly and could emigrate to Belgium.121 Fictive marriages were also a policy used by Zionist activists organizing Aliyah to Palestine. In his recollection of the period spent in Golenić Hachshara, Emil Klajn named six Lithuanian Jewish girls, whose arrival was agreed between the Yugoslav and the Lithuanian Hashomer Hatzair. Given that the British Mandate Government of Palestine issued more immigration certificates for couples, and that in Lithuania there were more young women (haverot), whereas in Yugoslavia there were more young men (haverim), young Zionists strove to boost Aliyah through fictive marriages between their members.122 Lithuanian-born Miryam, Bilha, Haviva, Shoshana, Eta, and Shita married in various places in Yugoslavia, such as Ruma, Novi Sad, and Vinkovci, and eventually emigrated successfully to Palestine. According to Lili Armstrong, née Weiss, in Berlin in 1915, who was in Golenić in 1936, when ten certificates were procured, they organized a mass fake wedding of ten couples, who were simply paired to make the best use of the certificates.123 Lili, who was one of the brides to marry a Polish young man, recalls the surprise of a rabbi from a nearby town, who was invited to conduct the mass ceremony. But not all marriages conducted to obtain Palestine certificates were fictive, and some marriages between refugees in Yugoslav exile endured for decades after.124 Erich Nachheiser (Nachhäuser), a 22-year-old refugee from Vienna, and 20-year-old Mirjam Papo, originally from Sarajevo, were married on 1 September 1940 by Abraham Sojfer, vice-rabbi with refugees interned in Kladovo. Erich (later Ehud Nahir) was among those who were able to leave Yugoslavia in March 1941, Interview  6: Stella Mann, Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), Refugee Voices, 19 February 2003, London, pp. 9–15. Despite many tribulations, Stella survived the war in Belgium and made a successful career in England after the war, founding the Stella Mann College of Performing Arts in Hampstead. She is the author of A Dance of Life (London: Kamal, 2005). Emil Klajn, ‘Moja neostvarena Alija’, Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja 7 (1997), pp. 232–36. Armstrong, Lili. ‘Segment  111–116’. Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. One such lifelong marriage was that of Margarete Szkolny (1912–1992), daughter of a famous Munich numismatist Franz, who fled to Yugoslavia and married another Munich refugee, Siegfried Mendle (1910–1999), before they both emigrated to Haifa. See Charlotte Haas Schueller, ‘Tossed by the Storms of History: Experiences of a Survivor’, in Die Erfahrung des Exils, ed. by Andreas Heusler and Andrea Sinn (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), pp. 278–291 (p. 280).

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just before the invasion.125 Others were less fortunate, like Malvina Salzer. Born Schlesinger in Vienna in 1874, she escaped to Yugoslavia in 1939, and married in Čakovec in order to obtain Yugoslav residence. Once Yugoslavia was invaded and partitioned, Malvina was taken from Zagreb to the Ustaša concentration camp for women in Đakovo, where she died in 1942.126 Among those who needed to legalize their stay in Zagreb, and maintain her alternative children’s home, was the German reformist pedagogue Annemarie Wolff-Richter, who married a local Bosnian man (Meho Husadžić, an upholsterer from Bosanski Petrovac) for a small fee in Zagreb. In return, Annemarie, now Husadžić, obtained Yugoslav citizenship and more security for her work. In 1939, she rented a spacious house where she continued to care for children of Communists, Jews, and others who, when the war started, had to flee the city.127 By 1940, all the children in her care had to be baptized, which was a condition to gain support and protection from the Catholic Church. Zagreb Jewess and communist Eva Domany (later Grlić) had to undergo the whole process of catechism and baptism for herself too, so that she could leave her daughter Vesna, who became the youngest child in Wolff-Richter’s care.128

Illegal Migration and Border Crossings If fictive marriages are reminiscent of romanticized green card movies, Jewish refugee experience after 1938 entailed much more dramatic actions and frightening situations, common to contemporary, or any, refugee movements. Jews fleeing Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland under attack engaged in all possible illegal activities, from green border crossing, document forging, and bribing officials, to entire political operations, such as the so-called Aliyah bet or illegal Aliyah. This was simply because Jews and anti-fascists were in a desperate situation with nowhere to go. In Berlin, Peter Schwiefert was tantalized: America – I’ve been enrolled on their quota and perhaps I shall get there in a few years provided I obtain a good affidavit. I didn’t want Spain or Italy for obvious reasons. South and Central America are out of the question if one hasn’t got money or relations in those countries (the minimum demanded everywhere Yad Vashem holds the records for the wedding in O.10 – Yugoslavia Collection, File Number 232, ID 10782314. ‘Salzer, Malvina’, in Židovski leksikon. Heuss, Mit dem Kinderheim auf der Flucht, p. 161. In winter 1941, she took her back, as Wolff-Richter’s modern pedagogic methods included leaving windows open when temperatures dropped to minus twenty degrees Celsius. Eva Grlić, Sjećanja (Zagreb: Durieux, 2001), p. 65.

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is a guarantee of 500 dollars) … So only the Balkans remained. I could go to Yugoslavia …129

Peter eventually ended up in Greece. By that time, Greece had become an important centre for illegal immigration into Palestine, as reported by the British Foreign Office, which blamed ‘the connivance of highly placed Greek officials’, including in its Ministry of the Interior and Police, for the illegal Aliyah. The Foreign Office named specifically Moshe Krivoshein, who was chartering Greek vessels and transporting hundreds into Palestine. Upon the British pressure on the Greek Foreign Ministry, the organizers of illegal Aliyah transferred their activities to Romania.130 The British acknowledged that Greece was a poor country, and overwhelmed with its own refugees, but stressed that they could not offer any tangible assistance either.131 Yugoslavia also found itself the focus of the Aliyah operations of Betar Revisionists and their leader, Jabotinsky. Its paramilitary Irgun branch sent Reuben Hecht, their key financier, to assist efforts of clandestine immigration of those refugees stuck in Yugoslavia. The operation was boosted in early 1939, once Jews were officially allowed to enter Yugoslavia for transit again, that is with permits to go to third countries and/or tickets for boats from Fiume and Trieste. During these key two years, Hecht met Yugoslav Jewess Edith Zilzer (Cilcer), his future wife, who assisted in his operations.132 From August 1938 onwards, besides the Danube, illegal transports moved to the Yugoslav port of Sušak, next to Italian Fiume. Several unsafe, overloaded boats, mostly Greek, were hired by Mossad and were allowed to depart through the greasing of palms. Their passengers, mostly German and Polish Jews, entered Mandate Palestine illegally, or were captured by the British and interned. While the Aliyah bet operations are widely documented, many more refugees fleeing on their own managed to get to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, and find some, albeit temporary, safety.133 As already seen, in the Balkans, those in charge of border crossings or residence permits more often than not flexed the rules, either out of compassion or corruption – or for a myriad of other reasons that are difficult to grasp, find sources for, and adequately interpret Peter Schwiefert wrote this from Athens – where he eventually landed on only a temporary permit – to his mother, who escaped from Berlin to Bulgaria with her two daughters. The Bird Has No Wings, pp. 72–73. BL, FO Annual Report 1938, Greece, BL IOR/L/PS/12/156, pp. 24–25. For more, see Yitzchak Kerem, ‘Greece and Illegal Immigration, 1934–1947’, Pe’amim, 27 (1986), 77–109 [Hebrew]. See ‘Hecht, Edita’ in Židovski leksikon. Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 229.

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when researching and explaining the fate of the refugees.134 One of the reasons for lax border control was that Yugoslav borders with Austria and Italy were only fixed in the 1920s, and intentionally remained loose in order to cater for numerous hikers, mountaineers, and rally drivers, in a booming tourist industry in what is now Slovenia, nestled in the Alps.135 After a successful campaign by hoteliers in 1937, Italian and Austrian tourists were released from any entry conditions to Yugoslavia. Only one year afterwards, the mountains in the northwest of Yugoslavia became the areas where most of the Jewish refugees began to enter illegally. The new visa requirements for Jews in 1938 naturally provoked an outcry from the booming tourist industry, as in the case of the Association of Hoteliers in Bled, which intervened with the Prime Minister in 1939, demanding unrestricted travel at least for the Hungarian Jews, the most numerous tourist contingent. The interventions contributed to some easing of the regulations, as will be discussed later, such as allowing for collective visas, but Yugoslavia would have to wait another thirty years before its tourism bounced back.136 The semi-permissive borders of the Balkan countries stood in sharp contrast to other European countries such as Sweden (which sealed its frontiers in September  1938), or overseas countries such as the US, with their strict immigration procedures. Introducing stricter restrictions in the Balkans only led to more corruption and less rigorous law enforcement, while their borders remained porous. The Kirsch family from Vienna (Carl and Johanna, and daughter Susan) arrived in Yugoslavia in summer 1938, but, disillusioned with the lifestyle in Zagreb or Sarajevo, in 1939, decided to go to Prague instead, which was closer and more akin to their home city of Vienna. After only a few weeks, stunned by the occupation and division of Czechoslovakia, they had to drive back through Slovakia and Hungary, reaching Yugoslavia again in April 1940. This time, however, they had to pay much more for additional permits and bribes. Once back in Belgrade, they were reprimanded for breaking the immigration rules by entering on Austrian and leaving on German passports, and they were ordered to leave the country in seventy-two hours. They got out of trouble with more bribes, and headed to Budva, on the Montenegrin Adriatic coast, where they could pay for their visa to be extended or just be tolerated. There they stayed with Ruth Mitchell, an American heiress and journalist, who Similarly, Italian laws that banned entry of Jews and ordered expulsion of all foreign Jews were never implemented, as detailed in Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf: Exil in Italien 1933– 1945, Vol. I, pp. 275–327. AJ, MUP 14-33-101, 426, 502c, 797. AJ, MUP 14-38-824, 852.

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had moved to Yugoslavia after her husband was arrested as British Consul in Albania in the Italian invasion. Mitchell became interested in the plight of refugees, which inspired her resistance to the Nazis, as will be detailed in the next chapter.137 A month later, the Kirsches decided to embark on yet another journey, this time to France via Trieste and Italy. However, they had only reached Genoa when the Nazi invasion of France began in June 1940, so they travelled back to Yugoslavia for the third time. With the Goldbergs, their family friends from Austria, they bought Argentinian passports in Belgrade, and left for the final time in October 1940, travelling via Bulgaria to Istanbul, where they stayed for six months before boarding a boat to Palestine.138 Few were so fortunate, and few could afford all this travel, staying in hotels, paying bribes, and buying passports and visas. Others were forced into illegal travel, like the Blüh family from Graz. Despite many signs on the horizon, the family did not want to abandon Austria and their successful wood-trading business. Only after personally experiencing imprisonment, loss of property, and threats, the family members began crossing into neighbouring Yugoslavia in late 1938.139 They crossed the border illegally with the help of their wood-trade partners, dressed as forest keepers with diamonds sewn into her clothes. They were able to get rid of their J(uden)-marked passports in Yugoslavia, and later continued their journey to Italy and Ecuador with new passports. Were we all not witnesses to the chaotic treatment of Syrian and other refugees in 2015, and the different actions taken by various European countries, it would be hard to believe that similar chaos ruled in the years preceding the Second World War. Meticulous research by Stephen Roth, based on testimonies, confessions, and the arrest and trial records of the Gentile anti-fascist family Wukitzevits from Maria Lanzendorf near Vienna, divulged many details about illegal border crossings and the destiny of those on the run throughout the region in this period. Wukitzevits father and son, Gottfried, and Werner, traversed illegally all Eastern Europe, from Poland down to Turkey, providing a compelling record of porous borders and corruption. Yet they also testified Ruth Mitchell, a well-known adventurer, would remain to see Yugoslavia invaded, and joined the Četniks of Draža Mihailović as the only American woman. Arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death, she was released as part of a prisoner exchange in 1942 and went back to America, where she campaigned for Četniks and against Tito’s Partisans. For more, see Ruth Mitchell, The Serbs Chose War (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1943). Interview with Susi Friedmann. Tragically, the relatives of the Blühs, who were Yugoslav citizens and helped them in their escape, remained in Yugoslavia and later fell victims to Ustašas. and [accessed 12 December 2021].

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that unwanted ‘foreigners’ and Jews could not hide or disappear, and usually ended up detained once they had crossed the border.140 Werner travelled with Josef Ruttner, who later died from lung inflammation caught on the hazardous journey, and Johann Griemann, who eventually reached Palestine. They easily crossed from Austria into Hungary, where they were helped by the Jewish community of Budapest and the guests of Adria, a coffee house where Jewish emigrants met. On 15 January 1940, they crossed illegally into Yugoslavia near Szeged, only to be later arrested on the train from Subotica to Novi Sad. It was common for refugees to be arrested for illegally entering Yugoslavia, not only close to the border, but even after they made it to Zagreb or Belgrade, although the further they reached, the greater the chance they would be released through connections or bribes.141 The Yugoslav authorities kept Werner and his friends for three months in pretty good conditions before they were asked to leave. This time, they tried to cross into Romania, which they managed, but a month later they were caught and sent back to Yugoslavia. In prison again, they met other political refugees from Germany, and along with three others they were transported by the Yugoslav police 650 kilometres south to the Greek border, where they were put in a sealed goods wagon of a Viennese wine company. Yet they were discovered by the Greek police, who accused them of being members of a German ‘fifth column’ because they were in a Viennese wagon. The accusations of being German spies followed refugees from Germany wherever they went, regardless of their mostly Jewish background. A month later, Werner and his friends were released and deported back to Yugoslavia. In Strumica, they were again treated liberally, only having to sleep in the police station, but otherwise free to roam. From Strumica, Werner Wukitsevits tried to go to Bulgaria, where he and has friends were arrested again but also treated gently, until Bulgaria decided to get rid of them and deported him to Turkey. There he was beaten for the first time and deported back to Sofia. After several unsuccessful attempts to cross into Turkey or Greece, and an eight-months’ ordeal, physically destroyed and without a penny, Wukitsevits gave himself up to the authorities and asked to be returned to Austria (Germany), where he had to face Nazi justice. Given that he was not Jewish and that his ‘crimes’ were committed early in the war, he escaped a death sentence. Nevertheless, Werner Wukitsevits spent the whole duration of war in prison and Dachau Stephan Roth, ‘“Mein Augenmerk war immer darauf gerichtet, mich nicht erwischen zu lassen, den nur, wenn ich am Leben bliebe, konnte ich gegen Hitler kämpfen […]”: Widerstand und Verfolgung der Familie Wukitsevits aus Maria Landenzdor von 1938– 1945’. In Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (2011), pp. 21–110. Weiss, Out of Vienna, p. 153.

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concentration camp, and he died aged thirty-five after the war as a result of his persecution.142 Whereas political refugees were mostly younger men, Jewish families without money faced even smaller chances for successful escape, and they diminished gradually as the Nazi hold on Europe strengthened. After the war began, attempts to cross from Austria (Germany) into Hungary were regularly hindered by Hungarian border police, and the detainees were transferred back to the German authorities, who then later deported them to death camps in the East.143 In Yugoslavia, expulsions remained exceptional and rare. The head of the Polish office of HICEM, Léon Alter, recalled meeting a Polish Jewish refugee from Berlin at the beginning of 1940 in no man’s land between Italy and Yugoslavia. After he was kicked five times back and forth between both countries, a Yugoslav border officer decided to let him stay, breaking the law himself.144 Another testimony described the humane attitude of common soldiers towards refugees navigating the hilly Alpine landscape between Austria and Yugoslavia, but a different welcome by an officer: Just above us was the Yugoslav border outpost. When we reached it, the soldiers greeted us friendly. As it was very early, around four in the morning, they even gave us some breakfast. Then they took us to another outpost. As it was already cold in September, they even provided us with military overcoats. We then walked down to Mežica (first village after the border) where we were met harshly by local gendarmerie commander. He enquired about what we wanted and claimed we must be German spies.145

Less dramatic, but equally risky, was travel on fake passports, which brought Sacher-Masoch all the way to Belgrade.146 Jan Wiener from Prague also travelled to Yugoslavia as a seventeen-year-old student in 1939 via Germany with a Roth, ‘“Mein Augenmerk”’, pp. 51–55. His father reached safety in England, but with permanently destroyed health. Two other brothers died on the Eastern Front in punishment battalions. After the war, Gottfried and Werner Wukitsevits fought for many years to get any compensation from the Austrian state, but both died before any payment could improve their health conditions. Wolfgang Form and Ursula Schwarz, ‘Die Tagesrapporte der Gestapo-Leitstelle Wien’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (2011), pp. 209–29, here on the Kornmehl family from Vienna, pp. 218–19. Voigt, Zuflucht, p. 553. Anton Jelen, ‘Flucht nach Jugoslawien’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Wiederstandes. Jens-Peter Cyprian, ‘“Noch konnte ich nicht daran glauben  …”: Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs 1935–1938’, in Amici amico III. Festschrift für Ludvík E. Václavek, ed. by Ingeborg Fiala-Fürst and Jaromír Czmero (Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2011), pp. 103–118 (p. 106).

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fake pass (Durchlassschein). His father soon joined him in Zagreb, where they stayed until the Nazi invasion in 1941, when Jan’s father lost hope and committed suicide. Desperate and alone, Jan boarded a freight train heading to Italy, then crossed the border on foot, and arrived in Trieste without any documents, money, or knowledge of Italian, but survived.147 A wealthy businessman and known anti-fascist, Rudolf Heller from Kojetice near Prague, fled via Slovakia and Hungary to Yugoslavia in February 1940, travelling by train and on foot on a fake passport. Seven months later, he joined a small informal Czech Army unit, which the British transported to Palestine.148 Instructing his father and uncle to use the same ‘underground railroad’ that brought him to Belgrade, a year later, failed. Both men were caught and killed by the Nazis. Zagreb became full of crooks and con men taking advantage of the plight of refugees, selling permit extensions of false passports, while others faked their ability to forge documents. According to Trude Grünwald, there were so many crooks that it was impossible to know whom to trust.149 In Maribor, an informal network was created, mostly made up of local Slovene socialists and antifascists, who smuggled valuables and information across the border between Graz and Maribor. According to Biró, they did it to help Graz Jews, now split between two towns, and no money changed hands.150 Those who could not get or buy Yugoslav documents, or who had no connections, resorted to people smugglers. Fred Schwartz and his brother Fritz were sent to safety to Holland, while their parents’ only option was a dangerous escape to Yugoslavia. In winter 1939–40, the Schwartzes crossed to Yugoslavia with the father’s brother Oscar, his wife and child. We do not know whether and how much they paid the train conductor, but, according to the letter their mother sent, it was clearly an arranged smuggling:

Jan Wiener, Immer gegen den Strom: Ein Juedisches Ueberlebensschicksal aus Prag 1939– 1950, ed. by Erhard Roy Wiehn (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1992), pp.  18–19. In Trieste, Wiener went into a Slovene-owned milk shop, as he could tell by the name on the owner. Two Serb friends of the owner explained to him how to travel further, hidden under the wagon. He was caught before he reached Genoa and sent to Ferramonti camp. Jan escaped two times from the camp, was rescued by Italian peasants, and eventually joined the Allied forces. Heller too was arrested in Belgrade by Yugoslav police for espionage as a foreigner, but soon released. See Charles Ota Heller, Prague: My Long Journey Home: A Memoir of Survival, Denial, and Redemption (Bloomington, IN: Abbot Press, 2011), pp. 38–43. T. Scarlett Epstein, Swimming Upstream: A Jewish Refugee from Vienna (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2005), p. 36. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 313.

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[We] took the train from Vienna to Villach, change in Rosenbach. German customs control. Slow train to Ljubljana. Got into the last compartment of the last wagon. So far everything fine, only we had no tickets and could not buy them because of the foreign exchange regulations. No lights in the last compartment of the last wagon. Getting in. Just before departure the conductor arrives and wordlessly hands us the tickets. He locks the door and disappears. The train goes into the tunnel. Pitch black, sparks fly by now and then, it stinks of smoke and soot. Everyone is afraid. Daddy is also afraid. Not because of the dark and because it smells like hell here. No, he fears the Yugoslav customs officers who are about to come. We exit the tunnel, but it’s still dark outside. Puffing, the Yugoslav train stopped at a poorly lit platform in Jesenice, the border station. First, it’s quiet. Then doors open and slam, people shout, ask for passports. They are now at the last wagon. Then a voice says in Slovene: ‘It’s dark back there, there is no one left.’ The train departs. We could see the customs officers standing on the platform.151

Toni/Fani Weber, née Isaak, from Leipzig, ran a textile business inherited from her father, before it was taken over after Kristallnacht. After her husband emigrated to Britain, penniless and vulnerable, Toni was physically assaulted in front of her seven-year-old son Manfred during a Nazi raid of her apartment. On an unspecified date in 1940, Toni Weber finally decided to flee via Konstanz and Vienna, trying to reach Yugoslavia. Mother and child ended up in a border village, where they were fed and housed by a local German peasant, who advised her that the only way to cross illegally to Yugoslavia was to jump out of the night train. Desperate, she took the risk, leaving both her and her son wounded and deeply traumatized by the experience of jumping from the train: My little boy began to cry and shivered with fear […] I was maddened with tension […] I could already see the meadow with infinite strength I pulled myself together […] Dear God don’t leave me now […] I grabbed my child […] and threw him from the train. I got chills […] and quickly jumped after, or rather, fell off the train into the darkness …152

Fortunately, Yugoslav border police heard their cries, found them, and brought them to the nearby frontier post. According to the rules, they were supposed to be sent back, but having seen their wounds and heard their story, the border guards emphatically brought them to the Jewish community in Maribor, where they got help. They survived the war hiding in Yugoslavia, and only in 1945 were they able to continue their journey to Manchester.

Schwarz, Züge auf falschem Gleis, p. 87. ‘Toni Weber: Personal account of survival during the Nazi era (typed in Manchester on 9 November 1960)’, Wiener Library, 2041/3.

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Illegal border crossing between what became the German Reich’s border to Yugoslavia was further complicated by the Nazi ban on Jews travelling on trains, but many, especially young people, ignored the ban and managed to get to Graz without much trouble. One of them, Viennese lawyer Ernst Pollatschek, refused for a long time to leave his mother and his much-loved city. Threatened with deportation to Poland, he finally crossed to Yugoslavia near Spielfeld in October 1939, which he chose following advice obtained by a certain lady Mittler that he met at the Viennese Jewish community office. In his experience, German border guards were friendly, and even advised and led him on the way to avoid Yugoslav controls.153 Others walked, like the Dortort family from Graz, who crossed to Yugoslavia illegally on foot on 12 March 1939, and eventually joined the refugees in Kladovo later that year, and their terrible destiny two years later.154 Herma Barber from Vienna set out on the hazardous journey with her parents in November 1939: My father had a compass … and we were told on the border which way we can go, so we walked and walked, and we heard dogs barking, I got scared … And then we ended up, during the night, in a house, peasant house, and they let us sleep and my father went to Maribor to get a taxi to take us to Zagreb.155

The Barbers were then sent to the resort town of Samobor near Zagreb, where they joined another one hundred and fifty Jewish refugees in free internment, paid for by the Zagreb Jewish community and its Refugee Committee. Others were less fortunate. A Viennese wood merchant, Hans Klein (born 1905), having been incarcerated and tortured in Dachau and Buchenwald for more a year, tried to flee to Yugoslavia illegally in the same winter of 1939–40. He was desperate, as his US affidavit had expired while in prison, and he feared being arrested again.156 Klein travelled to Leibnitz, halfway between Graz and the Yugoslav border, where he was supposed to cross and then connect to the Jewish community and helpers in Maribor. German border guards saw him and sent him back, but in the nearby guesthouse he encountered other Jewish refugees, all gathering there waiting for a trafficker who would bring them over. Eventually, a man called Alexander came for them. As Klein had no money, Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 17. Andrea Strutz, ‘“Suddenly I was a Judenbua” – Erinnerungen eines gebürtigen Grazers an Kindheit, “Anschluss” 1938 und Vertreibung’, Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Graz 38/39 (2009), pp. 59−91. Son, Leo Dortort, was among the youth that were evacuated to Palestine just days before the Nazi invasion. Interview with Herma Barber, USHMM, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. ‘Eyewitness account by Hans Klein of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps and emigration attempts’, Wiener Library, 1656/3/8/776.

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he offered his boat ticket as guarantee. What followed was like stories of our times. Alexander, the driver, packed Klein with four other Jewish couples in the small truck trailer, which was sealed by the German customs. The refugees were told that at a certain point they would be released and should jump and continue alone to where the contact was waiting. But as soon as they crossed the border, the trafficker’s assistant opened the trailer and handed them directly to Yugoslav border police. The men were separated from the women and spent the night at the Yugoslav border post before they were released back to Gestapo agents, who beat them unconscious before later sending them back to Vienna. Fugitives who managed to cross to Yugoslavia headed to Maribor, where local Jews offered help, feeding, hiding, and eventually driving or otherwise transporting them to Zagreb or elsewhere, as remaining in Maribor was deemed dangerous due to the proximity of the border, its large ethnic German population, and intense Gestapo intelligence activities after the Anschluss.157 Marko Rosner was the central figure of a small but prosperous Maribor Jewish community before the Second World War (seventy families), covering personally most of the cost for the accommodation and further travel of refugees. He was a successful entrepreneur, owner of two textile factories, and an already known benefactor, when his hometown Maribor began to bear the brunt of the illegal refugee wave, becoming the key contact for HICEM and the Zagreb Jewish Refugee Committee, but also Gestapo-supported smugglers, like Josef Schleich. It was impossible to hide such a massive operation, and Yugoslav police time and again arrested refugees in and around Rosner’s house, and he was issued with huge fines. But Rosner was so influential, and, as Biró observed, Yugoslavs were people with good hearts and a weakness for being bribed, so the transfer of refugees to Yugoslavia under Rosner’s patronage continued until the end of Yugoslavia’s existence as a free country.158 Before turning to the smuggling operation of Joseph Sleich, an explanation is due for the frequent seemingly paranoid accusations that Jewish refugees were spies or German ‘fifth columnists’. While these accusations often served to justify hostile attitudes towards refugees, they were not entirely groundless, as the case of Egon Sabukoschek demonstrated. In 1939, as a young medical student, Sabukoschek fled Austria and came to Belgrade, claiming his Slovene and Jewish roots (his maternal grandfather was a Jew from Maribor). Soon, he infiltrated Belgrade’s Jewish, student, and anti-fascist circles.159 After the Vulesica, ‘Yugoslavia as a Hub for Migration in the 1930s’, p. 218. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, pp. 300–23 (p. 306). Interview with Marko Menachem, USHMM, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive.

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Nazi invasion, and along with Otto Vincent, who similarly arrived as a ‘refugee’ in 1940, Sabukoschek became the so-called Judenkommisar, notoriously patrolling Belgrade streets with a whip and personally selecting Jews for execution.160 In 1992, in his last press conference, Simon Wiesenthal announced that he had located Sabukoschek, who was then a retired dentist in Graz. Criminal proceedings were initiated, but Sabukoschek died in 1995, before being put on trial.161

Smuggled by Josef Schleich Two criminal proceedings, several in-depth studies, and hundreds of personal recollections make Joseph Schleich the best-known people smuggler or Judenschlepper, as he was known at the time. Schleich and his associates account for the biggest smuggling network from the German Reich, bringing at least one thousand six hundred Jewish refugees into Yugoslavia (at least 1162 custom and currency clearance certificates exist for persons Schleich smuggled during the peak of his operation between October 1940 and early 1941).162 Yet his operation lasted much longer, starting with organized travel to Yugoslav and Italian ports, and then by boats to Palestine or Shanghai in 1938, which was soon extended to illegal border crossings near his hometown of Graz in cars, trucks and then mostly on foot, which lasted well into 1941. For his services, Schleich was taking payments not only from his clients, but also from several Jewish organizations in Austria and Germany, as well as HICEM, the Zagreb Committee for Jewish Refugees, and individual Zionists, such as Lavoslav Šik, making the above numbers only a vague estimate, given that Schleich smuggled people much before signing contracts with these organizations. Furthermore, as our testimonies show, many preferred to travel and make their arrangements with Schleich directly. Others relied on his collaborators. During his interrogations in 1948, Schleich claimed that he had saved up to a hundred and twenty thousand Jews and suffered because of it. His account was later published by his daughter, and he was praised in several other publications as Branislav Božović, Stradanje Jevreja u okupiranom Beogradu: 1941–1944 (Belgrade: Muzej žrtava genocida, 2012), pp. 72–74. Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), p. 383. Brunner, Josef Schleich, p. 248; For critical assessment, see Heimo Halbrainer, ‘“Der Illegale Transport Über die Grenze War Eben Kein Ausflug, Keine Ferneise”: die Tätigkeit des “Judenschleppers” Josef Schleich an der Grenze zu Jugoslawien’, in Schleppen, Schleusen, Helfen: Flucht zwischen Rettung und Ausbeutung, ed. by Gabriele Anderl and Simon Usaty (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2016), pp. 241–58.

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the ‘Austrian Schindler’, and Austrian television produced a film about him.163 Dismantling these claims as myth-making, Halbrainer emphasized that Schleich’s operation could not be described as saving Jews, as he was working either under the tacit toleration or the explicit approval and orders of the Graz, and later the Vienna Gestapo, implementing the Nazi policy of expulsion of Jews before it changed into annihilation. In addition to people, Schleich smuggled goods and valuables as well, and maintained a network of document forgers in Yugoslavia, whose documents he then sold to his Jewish clients.164 When the Graz court after the war pressed charges against Schleich, they were based on several accusations that Schleich kept the money, even when those paying were arrested, or that Schleich kept their valuables, threatening to report them to the Gestapo. Private initiatives to Yad Vashem for Schleich’s recognition as Righteous among the Nations were equally dismissed long ago, but some, such as Benzion Lazar, the President of the Association of Jewish (First World) War Victims under the Nazi regime, defended him. In 1948, Schleich spent ten months in prison during investigation on charges of ‘unlawful enrichment on Jewish transports to Palestine’, and died before its completion. Ludwig Biró’s first-hand account placed Schleich alongside other brutal people smugglers he encountered, who raised the price of their services with any obstacle or deterioration of the security situation, just to squeeze more money out of his clients. On the other hand, in his written statement for Schleich’s post-war trial, Biró, along with other survivors, admitted that Schleich brought over to Yugoslavia some people, and especially children, without charging them.165 In Schleich’s defence, it is worth stating that he offered a way out at the time when tens of thousands of Jews were desperately fleeing incarceration and deportations, and, as Robert Weiss noted, only transfer to concentration camps was free in those days. Many refugees did not have customs and currency clearances necessary to leave Germany, and carried valuables along, in breach of German laws at the time. Schleich would not refuse them, but he clearly charged an arbitrary commission on their valuables, or kept them all to himself. Born in Graz in 1902, Schleich originated from the nearby area, which after 1918 became a border zone between Austria and Yugoslavia. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, he was sentenced for smuggling saccharine and flint stone. From 1933, Schleich operated a farm on his grandmother’s land (Minihof-Liebau), which he would later turn into an assembly point for Jews Hannelore Fröhlich, Judenretter – Abenteuer – Lebemann: Mein Vater Josef Schleich. Spurensuche einer Tochter (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007). Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 226. Brunner, Josef Schleich, p. 260 and p. 275.

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along with his flat in Graz, before smuggling them into Yugoslavia. According to evidence, he began his operation after being approached by the Graz Jewish community in 1938 to host a sort of Hachshara camp on his farm, for which he got approval from the authorities.166 At the same time, Schleich developed a business whereby he secured passes for China, allowing groups of Jews to leave Austria via Yugoslav and Italian ports, where he booked Greek boats that would take them to Palestine. Another project was to charter private yachts for transport along the Danube. It is not clear how many people left in this way, but in March 1939, Yugoslavia stopped issuing group transit passes. Schleich was arrested for currency violations in Graz, and the money invested by the Jewish community and individuals was seized by the SS. Once free, Schleich turned to a terrain he knew better, and the Nazi Secret Police (Department for Churches and Jews) allowed him to work in transporting, or basically expelling, Jews illegally over the border to Yugoslavia. The conditions for Jews were valid passes (now marked with ‘J’), customs and currency declarations, while no money or valuables were allowed. Schleich was arrested further several times on currency export charges, demonstrating the rather loose relationship he had with the Gestapo.167 People smuggling was in full swing by August 1939, initially devised for Graz Jews, but then expanded to departures four to six times a month, as various Jewish organizations from Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, and elsewhere lined up for contracts with Schleich. He entered business with travel agencies too. The peak in smuggling was reached between October 1940 and January 1941, when the Gestapo allowed him to open his office next to the Palestine Office (Palästinaamt of the IKG) in Vienna, and to hire two Jewish women as assistants to handle the demand.168 Our testimonies point to an early starting date. Isaac and Josephine (Peppy) Schneier, an Orthodox Jewish couple from Vienna, managed to evacuate their daughter Ruth to Manchester in February  1939, and from letters to her that Ruth kept, we learn about their increasing desperation and the threats they faced.169 Isaac was incarcerated in Dachau, and his wife bought his release by securing an exit visa to Shanghai, but they never went to China. Instead, on 25  March, Isaac crossed the border to Yugoslavia illegally. As usual, his wife was left behind to deal with their property and affairs. The date of her border crossing was repeatedly put off, until finally in June she arrived in Graz and Halbrainer, ‘“Der Illegale Transport”’, p. 244. Brunner, Josef Schleich, p. 266. Halbrainer, ‘“Der Illegale Transport”’, pp. 247–49. The correspondence and testimony of Ruth Edwards, née Schneier, is detailed in Bill Williams, Jews and Other Foreigners: Manchester and the Rescue of the Victims of European Fascism, 1933–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

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spent eleven days in a local hotel paid for by the Jewish Community in a bid to transfer her to Yugoslavia. She was then driven over by Schleich’s associates, and her journey to Zagreb lasted three days. Given that Schleich’s ‘clients’ were initially Graz Jews, by the time the Schneiers were smuggled, the word and business had obviously already spread. Several months later, the smuggling was more organized and on a much larger scale. Anna Weininger got the contact for Schleich from Vienna’s IKG office in December 1939, after finding out that her husband had been murdered soon after being deported to East Poland. She travelled by train to Graz, where she was checked by police and put in a nearby farmhouse with another Jewish couple with a baby. The next day, two men sent by Schleich drove them on the cart to Spielfeld in snow. The guides demanded more money because of the road conditions. After two days, they were brought to Schleich’s farmhouse, where there were eleven more Jews from Germany and Austria. The guides changed for the remainder of the trip, bringing them over to Yugoslavia through an area without border guards. The whole group was brought to Zagreb in a truck, had enough food and water, and everybody spoke German to them, so her recollections were not so traumatic. At the end, three women from the Zagreb Jewish Community, Ingrid, Stella, and Milka, waited for them.170 Crossings gradually became more haphazard, as testified by Gertrude Najmann. An ethnic German married to a Polish Jew in Berlin in 1915, she saw her happy marriage and life began to crumble after 1933, culminating in the arrest and torture of her husband in 1938, and the plunder of her money, house, and other possessions, which she lost as a so-called Judenweiber (Jewish wife). Having managed to secure a place for their daughter on one of the kindertransports to England, and seeing her husband released and escaping, Gertrude also set out on a journey in May 1940. She paid eight hundred Reichsmarks (c. $320) to get to Graz via Vienna, where she learnt of Schleich. After four weeks waiting, Gertrude was finally taken on the journey by one of his men, but after three hours, she was caught, presumably by the Yugoslav border police. She tried again, and was picked up again and sent back. Jewish men, who were caught and sent back were regularly beaten by the German police, but women were spared, so after some days, she tried again and eventually made it. She was led by a drunken guide to Murska Sobota, where she boarded the train to Zagreb, arriving after a twenty-seven-hour ordeal.171 Her detailed account Weiss, Out of Vienna, pp. 151–52. Gertrude Najmann’s manuscript (1816/3) as part of Eva Mills Papers, Wiener Library 1816/1. A slightly different account is given in her unpublished semi-autobiography ‘Verlorene Jugend’, also kept in her family papers.

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of the dangers of illegal border crossing, unreliable and drunken guides, who could abandon one in the middle of a forest, and strictly policed Yugoslav frontiers, is also remarkable for stressing that many Yugoslavs were so poor that for a hundred dinars they would eagerly help a refugee. If one had no money, gold and jewellery would do. Here is her advice on illegal border crossing: The worst thing you can meet in the forest is the human being. You may be seen as a spy because there is a great fear of spying in times of war. If you don’t know what to do in the village or town, try to find a Jewish business, they will help you, but there are also bad people among Jews, but everyone would help a poor refugee. In Zagreb’s community centre, they will help you. If you come from the train station, don’t speak German, show someone the address, pretend you are mute, that’s the best way to escape from seemingly hopeless situations.172

Schleich was also responsible for the border crossing of more than a hundred and sixty children of the Youth Aliyah in multiple operations, and even Recha Freier, the founder of the Youth Aliyah, which had enabled almost five thousand children from Germany and Austria to emigrate to Palestine, came with her daughter to Yugoslavia in July 1940, using Schleich’s network.173 Once in the safety of Yugoslavia, Freier was able to secure entry permits to Palestine and the cooperation of Yugoslav authorities in allowing them to proceed. Among them was Manfred Ehlbaum from Frankfurt, only seventeen when embarking on this perilous journey, and eventually the only one in his family to survive.174 Joshua Degani, born Habergrutz in Leipzig in 1924, was on a Hachshara in Steckelsdorf near Berlin, after his father, a textile merchant, was taken to Dachau (and would later die there).175 In summer 1940, Joshua was in a group of Jewish boys aged eight to sixteen travelling via Vienna to Graz. The travel was unhampered by the authorities, the only negative experience being cursed by locals at Schleich’s farm, near Graz, where they had to wait for a week for a border crossing. Illegal border crossing was so traumatic that Joshua wrote to his mother that it was too risky to send his three sisters by the same route. Kalman Givon, then Karl Kleinberger from Frankfurt, also recalled that teenagers were assembled first in Berlin before travelling to Vienna, where the Palästinaamt sent them further to Graz. Despite paying Schleich’s professional Wiener Library, Eva Mills Papers, 1816/1, Gertrude Najmann, “Verlorene Jugend”, p. 20. Recha Freier, Let the Children Come: The Early History of Youth Aliyah (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, 1964), pp. 64–68. Manfred’s parents and sister were deported to Sobibor and murdered a year later. Kalman Givon, ‘Über den Balkan nach Palästina geflohen’. Degani, Joshua. ‘Segment 36–51’. Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1995.

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smugglers, Kleinberger’s group was caught by the Yugoslav border police in November 1940. After being held for several days, the Yugoslav border police sent them back. Once back in Graz, they were assigned another smuggler, as their original guide was shot. This time they were more successful, and after a couple of days of wandering through the mountain forests without any food or drink, they reached a peasant house near Maribor, where they were given rest and ham to eat. Their smuggler eventually left the group of sixteen children on the road, where they were picked by Armando Moreno and squeezed into two vehicles that brought them to Zagreb.176 The most dramatic was the journey of twelve children from Hamburg Hachshara in December 1940. According to fourteen-year-old Gershon Elyakim Wilkenfeld from Aken (Elbe) near Dessau, during the crossing across treacherous ice roads on high elevation, two of the group fell and disappeared into the abyss. In Maribor, a group of five of them stayed with a Jewish man, Deutsch, for a week before they were brought to Zagreb, where he encountered another hundred or more German/Polish refugee children.177 Joseph Zamora (Zamojre) from Frankfurt am Main, was nineteen in 1940, when he joined the Hachshara in Neuendorf in Brandenburg.178 In December 1940, Joseph travelled to Graz with his father Marcus after their attempts with Lypold-Palestinatransport failed. They too were directed to Schleich, and they were asked to pay six hundred Reichsmarks. The same amount is recorded by Robert Weiss from Vienna as the sum his Zionist youth leader Aron Menzer paid to Schleich for every child/youngster smuggled into Yugoslavia, although other survivors recorded sums ranging from five hundred to a thousand.179 The costs were later compensated by HICEM in Zagreb. The Zamoras’ journey lasted three months. First, they travelled by car from Graz via Leutschach to the German side of the border, where they were placed on a farm. From that farm, they were supposed Armando Moreno was Madrichim (Youth Leader) of the Zagreb Jewish community, together with Joschko Indik and another young man identified as Zahava. For testimonies, see Rettet wenigstens die Kinder: Kindertransporte aus Frankfurt am Main, ed. by Angelika Rieber and Till Liebertz-Groß (Frankfurt a.M.: Der Verlag für angewandte Wissenschaft, 2018). Also [accessed 6 April 2022]. Wilkenfeld, Gershon. ‘Segment  85–108’. Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1999. ‘Eyewitness Account by Joseph Zamora of his Escape from Germany to Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Italy’, Wiener Library, 1656/3/9/222. Zamora, born in Greiz, Thuringia in 1921, lost his parents but survived to tell their story. Eventually, he emigrated to New York, where he worked as a chemist, and Peter Bloch recorded his experience on 5 March 1956. Weiss, Robert. ‘Segment 87–95’ Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1999; Brunner, Josef Schleich, p. 254.

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to cross the border by foot under the guidance of some Yugoslav German villagers. The crossings were in groups of around ten people, mostly Viennese, with a few Jews from Germany proper. Father and son Zamora failed several times, as their groups were discovered by Yugoslav police and sent back to Spielfeld, where they were severely beaten by the Gestapo. Finally, they made it on 11 March 1941, when they arrived in Zagreb. By that time, it was too late to join the rest of the Youth Aliyah transport organized by Recha Freier.180 A similar thing happened to the last larger group to cross the Yugoslav border made up of sixteen German Jewish girls. They arrived at the beginning of April 1941, on the eve of the Nazi attack, when Yugoslav border officials were already on high alert. Yet the Yugoslav border officer Uroš Žun stamped their passes and brought them directly to Maribor. For that act of courage, Žun was proclaimed as Righteous Among Nations in 1986.181 When Schleich was arrested for the last and final time by the Nazis in March 1941, his associates continued for some time despite the preparations and ensuing invasion of Yugoslavia. The Nazi court process against Schleich later that year identified at least twenty people in Yugoslav Styria and thirty in Austrian Styria as part of his network. Most were ethnic Germans he knew from his previous smuggling business or German-speaking Slovene villagers living near the border. Surprisingly, there were many women. Schleich’s wife and son were also involved, and many of the accused were his or his wife’s cousins.182 While some were recorded as members of Nazi organizations, their modest background and jobs indicate that they were common people or petty criminals. Similar to contemporary criminal networks bringing people over the English Channel or Mediterranean, Schleich’s network was far from an ‘Eyewitness account by Joseph Zamora’. Placed along with other remaining children in Zagreb Jewish families, in July 1941, Joseph was able to join the evacuation to Italy’s occupied Slovenia and later Italy, as part of the so-called Nonantola group, while his father, along with seven other parents, fled to Ljubljana and was eventually relocated to safety in Italy. Joseph left the Nonantola group in 1942 to join his father in Rovigo. In November 1943, after being warned by Italians of impeding German occupation, they fled south by bikes, sleeping with peasants along the way and eating whatever they found before being taken by the Italian Partisans together with other fleeing Jews, deserters and liberated war prisoners. On 19 February 1944, the Partisans were betrayed and attacked by German troops. After a long fight, they surrendered. The Zamoras were taken to Fossoli bei Carpi camp (Modena), then Bologna, and eventually to Auschwitz (eight days). Joseph survived death marches, but his father perished. His mother, who remained in Frankfurt, had been deported and killed in 1942. The Slovenian Righteous Among Nations, ed. by Irena Šumi and Oto Luthar (Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2016), pp. 26–32. The sixteen girls were eventually transported to Ljubljana and Italy, as part of what later became known as Nonantola children. Brunner, Josef Schleich, pp. 87–109, and p. 266.

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orderly and secure business. As already noted, refugees were often robbed of their possessions and maltreated by various people they encountered along the way, from those who ‘cared’ for them in Graz or border villages, to actual taxi drivers and guides, to peasants who would meet them on the other side. Yugoslav border guards would often intercept, arrest, and deport at least the men caught in illegal border crossing, who would then be maltreated upon return to Germany. Schleich and some of his guides were also arrested several times by Yugoslav authorities, who clearly perceived them as a security threat for working for the Gestapo, but each time, Schleich was released. Each person in his network demanded a separate fee, and there was a lot of confusion and conflict over money. Some testimonies claim that Schleich was also bribing the Yugoslav border guards. In the beginning, refugees were taken across mostly flatland to Murska Sobota, from where they could take a train to Zagreb, but as Yugoslav authorities tried to prevent people smuggling, the operation had to be moved westward to the more mountainous terrain of Carinthia. Refugees were then driven further north to Eibiswald and Leutschach in cars or trucks, often escorted by Gestapo officials. This journey was longer, more hazardous, and difficult, with refugees staying overnight in mountain huts. The Gestapo was also imposing strict conditions on how many people could go, how long they could stay in Graz and nearby, and so on, making this illegal operation even more dangerous. Most people that Schleich smuggled for free were Jews released from prisons or camps without any money that he had to take on orders from the Gestapo. As Halbrainer demonstrated, the change in Nazi anti-Jewish policy resulted in the order to close the Schleich smuggling operation on 3 February 1941, allegedly for keeping his farm in unhygienic conditions and for setting up the toilet ‘visible from the street’.183 Finally, on 12 March, Schleich was accused of violating currency laws and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a ten thousand Reichsmark fine. At the same time, his business partners raised several charges against him for not being paid, which the District Court in Graz later dismissed as not a priority in times of war. But smuggling and illegal border crossing continued. Trude Binder Stern and her husband Walter Weiner were reluctant to leave Vienna, as she cared for her elderly mother, who was eventually deported and died in Theresienstadt. Nor could they afford the services of the macher (smuggler). In her memoir, Trude describes leaving Vienna in January 1941, with her husband Walter Weiner, on foot, lured by a promise by the Rabbi of Yugoslavia, a relative of Trude’s brother-in-law, that he would help

Halbrainer, “‘Der illegale Transport’”, p. 253.

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them secure a place in one of the internment camps for Jews in Yugoslavia.184 Having been alpine hikers for years, they managed to get across the Alps into Yugoslavia on their own, and followed the same path via Maribor and Zagreb.185 While Schleich from Graz is the most known and widely researched smuggler, illegal border crossing was widespread and recorded in many other places. Smuggling happened along borders with other countries bordering Yugoslavia, such as Italy, Hungary, and Romania, the latter two becoming the primary route for Polish Jews arriving from late 1939 onwards, like Herman Kroll from Konin in Poland, who, like many Jewish soldiers, fled the Polish army to avoid capture.186 Kroll found contacts in some Budapest cafés, and was taken to Yugoslavia by local Jewish smugglers. Other cases of Jewish smugglers were recorded by Gertrude Steiner, who witnessed what she described as ‘a very interesting and adventurous business’ run by Malvina and Samuel Degenstueck.187 A former Austria-Hungarian officer stationed in what then became Yugoslavia, Samuel had the necessary contacts, while his wife Malvina handled the financial logistics of smuggling. Steiner states that out of one thousand seven hundred Austrian Jews who had gone to Yugoslavia in 1939–40, over two hundred were smuggled by the Degenstuecks. Steiner praised him as efficient and daring, alluding to money changing hands and risky affairs, but did not provide details. The Degenstuecks counted on leaving Austria in the same way, but then one of their clients went back to take his girlfriend and tried to cross the border in the same way, but without their help. He was caught and eventually confessed to the Gestapo about the smuggling ring. The Degenstuecks were arrested in November 1940 in Vienna and deported to Poland, where they perished. Another known smuggler was Aleksandar Kanik, arrested with two others in the Yugoslav border village of Ciringa in October 1939. According to Goldštajn, Kanik was part of a wider network with colaborators in Zagreb.188 Elsewhere, on the Yugoslav border with Hungary, in Đurđevac near Virovitica, police arrested Janos Tot and Đorđe Sokol for smuggling Polish Jews across the Drava River in May 1940.189 More were caught nearby on 13 May.190 Five Polish refugees were arrested for illegally crossing the border from Trude Stern Binder, ‘A Survivor’s Memoirs of the Holocaust’, LBI Memoir Collection, ME 1480. They finally arrived in Belgrade just as the bombing started, on 6 April 1941, which is the subject of the following chapter. The Wiener Library, Konin Interview 37: Hermann Kroll, GB, 1988, 28A. Steiner, Exile and Destruction, p. 54. Goldštajn, ‘Kontakti Zagrebačke židovske općine s inozemstvom 1933–1945’, Kladovo transport, pp. 23–49, 34. HDA, BH-KB 24–155, 5598-1940. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 27287-40, 27290-40, 27761-3-40.

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Hungary near Čakovec and deported back on 16 May 1940. Others swam across the river Mura. During summer 1940, there must have been a sharp increase, as the Interior Ministry demanded rigorous action in its order of 12 August 1940. On 12 January 1941, police discovered three Polish Jews in the village of Kikavica, housed by the villager Josip Kika; they had crossed into Yugoslavia from Italy near Sušak.191 In relation to illegal border crossings near Sušak, police also arrested Yugoslav citizens Ivan Vuković from Šibenik and Johan Vininger from Stara Moravica, described as vagabonds and people smugglers, and expelled them to their places of origin. A group of refugees, including a certain Max Baer, was arrested on 20 March 1941.192 The day after, Zagreb police reported the following persons found without any documents: Max Schneider, a merchant born in Budenitz in 1886, and his wife Pepi, born Druckman in Storoznica, Bukowina in 1895, and with them, Dr Erwin Herschman, philosopher, born in 1896 in Saatz, but living in Prague.193 Allegedly, they all crossed the border near Koprivnica, although the border in the Alps remained the most used route.194 According to Vera Laska, a historian who travelled to Hungary and Yugoslavia during the war as a member of the Czech resistance, the same channels that were used to smuggle Jews were later used for German and Hungarian deserters, fleeing POWs and resisters.195 They were also usually manned by the same Macher, who only cared about reward, and not the subjects of their smuggling. Laska also praised them for speaking all local languages, and always outwitting border guards in knowledge of terrain.196 Describing the illegal exodus of many Czechoslovak (and Polish) Jews and Gentiles to Yugoslavia, Vera Laska, stressed that the Yugoslav authorities in most cases closed both eyes to it.

War and Internment As the war clouds were gathering over Europe in summer 1939, control of foreigners and their whereabouts in Yugoslavia intensified. From July, the entry of Jews was again restricted, prompting a prolonged campaign by

HDA, BH-KB, Pov. Br. K. 1 – 16498/41. HDA, BH-KB 93–155, 24751-41. HDA, BH-KB 93–155, 25520-41. HDA, BH-KB 93–155, 24378-41. For example, Kurt von Maltiz with false documents; Ernst von Hartenstein, air force lieutenant; Hungarian soldiers Valyerezky Istvan, Takats Janos, and Nacin Radoje. HDA, BH-KB 93–155, 24750-41. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses, ed. by Vera Laska (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 75–80.

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tourist businesses.197 A government conference on 14  December prompted the Interior Minister to ease again the conditions for tourists and businessmen, but he refused to allow transit visas to Jewish refugees. Tourism advocates argued that Jews spend much more than Germans, and thus should be prioritized.198 Refugees were only allowed under specific conditions and in collective arrangements, such as the much-discussed Kladovo transport. Surrounded by German allies and unable to control the powerful German ethnic minority in the country, Yugoslavia was vulnerable to Nazi political pressure. Internal divisions along ethnic and political lines further contributed to the security fears. Interior Minister Korošec, generally regarded as an anti-Semite, claimed that the presence of so many Russian refugees made it impossible for Yugoslavia to accommodate additional (Jewish) refugees.199 Local police stations were ordered to supervise the movement of refugees and foreign Jews (except for Hungarian Jews).200 Some Polish and Czechoslovak refugees were deported back to Hungary.201 Berta Boscowitz and her brother Siegfried Zeisl were refused entry in 1939, despite the intervention by Pavle Berkeš, an executive of the Croatian bank and one among several Jewish honorary consuls who

HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 27999-40. From July 1939, visas were only issued conditionally to Hungarian Jews, for tourist, business, or family reasons, and the category of collective visas was introduced for the former. Starting from the 1920s, it was Hungarian Jews who invented the Adriatic Sea as a tourist resort, and who were the first to advocate and enjoy the benefits of sea water and swimming. While there were visitors before, hardly anyone swam in the sea. The biggest proponent of sea swimming was Hungarian Jewish doctor Balázs Győző from Pécs, who campaigned on behalf of Hungarians after the Anschluss and the visa restrictions introduced in 1938. Győző wrote over two hundred articles and gave over fifty lectures in the 1930s advocating the benefits of sea bathing and tourism. His friendship with the Yugoslav prime minister Dragiša Cvetković, to whom he wrote directly, enabled Hungarian Jews to visit the Adriatic coast until the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. AJ, MUP 14, 922–925. Jews, but also Germans from Germany (including Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1939), were not considered attractive clients, as they were part of the clearing and settlement mechanism of payment between the two countries. AJ, MUP 33, 100–101. BL, FO Annual Report 1938, Yugoslavia, IOR/L/PS/12/119, PT I, p. 48. For example, Dubrovnik police ordered the supervision of Reuter Beatrice Eleonore, daughter of Holm and Adele Rosenberger, on 27 March 1941, because it was believed that she was Jewish and only allegedly Protestant. HDA, BH-KB 93–155, 21559-41. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 288821-3-40. An example is Ervin Stiefl, born on 20 February 1889 in Nuremberg, a Catholic theologian and anti-fascist activist, who was deported to Hungary on 29 May 1940 for illegally entering Yugoslavia after having spent time in Italy, Hungary, and other countries. The Ministry acknowledged the history of his arrests in Germany and would not deport him back to Germany. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28171-40.

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we saw tried to assist the refugees.202 The newly established authorities of the autonomous Croatian Banovina were even harsher in refusing entry visas to German Jews, but appeals to the Interior Ministry in Belgrade also often fell on deaf ears.203 This second official U-turn forced more and more refugees to bribe, change residence, or simply ignore the rejections, and remain illegal. The flow of refugees to the Balkans nevertheless continued, mostly in illegal ways, and Yugoslavia bore the brunt of it, with numbers increasing in Albania and Greece too. After two years of increasing pressure, when only provisional camps were set up in the emergency, such as the one in Podravska Slatina for Burgenland refugees, in February 1940, the Union of Yugoslav Jewish Religious Communities admitted that the individual aid model was no longer sustainable. As tensions mounted, there was an exodus of refugees, both spontaneous and organized by the Union, to smaller towns in the countryside, where they would be less visible and better cared for. More importantly, in April that year, the Yugoslav government passed decrees about ‘collective residencies’, prohibition of movement of refugees, and passport withdrawal, all amounting to the introduction of forced internment along the lines commonly practised in Europe at the time.204 The decree stipulated that illegal immigrants would no longer face expulsion, but were to be interned in the countryside, and in internment centres if necessary. Refugees were not to leave these places of internment without permission, and had a night curfew from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. The Jewish community went ahead by establishing and managing their own centres to avoid anything resembling concentration camps. Compared to other European countries, the share of the refugees interned under the new measures remained relatively low, and the treatment of internees was lax. Nevertheless, the Zagreb Refugee Committee HDA, BH-KB 1116–1939 106–155. Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, RG-27.03.11, keeps the family letters from Siegfried Zeisl, who survived, whereas Bertha died in 1941. Schnabel Flora, born in 1860 in Vienna, was denied entry despite her old age and the intervention of her son Viktor, who owned a tanning factory in Sisak, Croatia. The appeal was rejected by the Zagreb police and the Ban (Prime Minister) of Croatia on 26 March 1941, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia. HDA, BH-KB 93–155, 24779-41. Viktor Schnabel and his family managed to reach safety in the UK, whereas Flora died in Vienna in 1944. The Ban of Croatia similarly refused the plea of Irma Altaras for her elderly parents, F(l)iorentina and Leopold Nussbaum from Vienna, a decision confirmed by the Ministry in Belgrade in March 1941. AJ, MUP 33, 101. Florentina later died in Theresienstadt. ‘Uredba sa zakonskom snagom o dolasku i kretanju stranaca’, in Službene novine Kraljevine Jugoslavije, br. 90, 18 April 1940, followed by ‘Uredba o boravku Jevreja stranog državljanstva’. Compare to the similarly undemocratic, secretive, and illiberal nature of mass internment in Britain, as exposed in The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain, ed. by David Cesarini and Tony Kushner (London: Frank Cass, 1993).

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made sure to comply with the new rule, even sending special envoys/spies, selected among the refugees themselves, to police the curfew, to the dismay of other refugees, as local authorities and locals did not seem to be much bothered about enforcing the internment.205 Together with almost one hundred other German refugees, Ernst Pollatschek was sent from Zagreb to Makarska, then to a small town on the coast, southeast of Split. Without a proper suitcase, and expecting to return soon, he borrowed a heavy leather one from his Zagreb friends. He never had the chance to give it back, and for the next few years ‘spent many nights sitting or sleeping on it; had him with me on and under seats, in baggage nets and on wagon roofs, coal and animal carts; it still exists today and is still useful’.206 In 1940, things were still relatively good for Pollatschek and others in Makarska. The Schwarzes were also asked to leave Zagreb and move to nearby Samobor, a sort of free internment as many summer houses there remained empty. They were renting a house, while others stayed in hotels paid for by the Jewish Refugee Committee. The mother was cooking for those who could or did not know how, whereas the father was giving English classes, as they wrote to their sons exiled in England. As community support was not sufficient, most relied on their own valuables, family from abroad or, as the Schwarzes, from internal economy.207 In Samobor, they even organized parties. Fritz Kahn remembers that he played while a singer from Vienna called Gita Goldberg sang at the Hawaiian Night party.208 Jacobson admitted that they were annoyed to be away from home, but the widespread feeling was that this was temporary, so life continued as usual. The only conflicts arose about distribution of food and other items.209 Then, in the late summer, due to the imminent threat of war with Italy, refugees were again moved away from coastal resorts to small towns in the Bosnian countryside, to the chagrin of all. The Union of Yugoslav Jewish communities and its donors still covered all the costs, but living conditions and diet deteriorated with the change of location. In poorer towns, local Bosnian Jewish families offered extra rooms or beds if they had them. Pollatschek, along with a hundred others, was relocated to one such small town, called Derventa, which had only a couple of hundred Jews, artisans, and small merchants, most barely

Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 22. Ibid., p. 20. Schwarz, Züge auf falschem Gleis, p. 92. Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Slate. Interview with Fritz Cahn on 23 April 1998, conducted in Serbian in Belgrade by Milica Mihajlovic, p. 12. Jacobson, Werner-Joachim. ‘Segment 3’. Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1999.

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making ends meet.210 Pollatschek was impressed by religious tolerance in the town, with members of all four confessions (Islam, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and Judaism) visiting each other’s places of worship on their major holidays, and jointly shutting their shops on those days. Yet the place was dirty and unhygienic, malaria and hepatitis were endemic, and animals roamed freely. Relations between rich and poor were bad. Pollatschek reprimands the president of the local Jewish community for kicking his Moslem servants and not accepting Western mores.211 A hundred Jewish refugees did not make much difference in a town of eight thousand, and Pollatschek only records internal conflicts within the group. One refugee from Graz oversaw distribution of monthly financial aid and other support. There was an economically priced cafeteria for refugees, but its use was banned for those who had recently converted to Christianity, an example of the many conflicts among desperate and destitute refugees.212 Imre Rochlitz’s family were also sent to Derventa, but he avoided relocation thanks to the intervention of Lavoslav Šik, obtaining a permit to remain in Zagreb and continue attending his high school.213 By September  1940, the Zagreb Refugee Committee had to cater for over three thousand refugees in collective centres. Its correspondence with the Union of Jewish Communities in Belgrade was getting extremely tense. Despite the aid from HICEM and Joint, the bulk of costs had to be covered locally, which was the stumbling block in Yugoslav Jewish politics.214As the numbers continued to grow, both in and away from internment centres, and restrictions on work stiffened, more and more refugees were pressed with basic survival. After giving all their possessions to pawnshops, refugees in Belgrade took any jobs and worked for local Germans, an additional humiliation, but the only option.215 Sacher-Masoch worked as a typist, photographer, and German teacher.216 It was the same in Zagreb, where Anna Weininger took part-time jobs as a laundress, cook, and house cleaner.217 From an experienced refugee, a certain Sternschein, who fled Saarland back in 1933, Ernst Pollatschek learnt about See Nedžmudin Alagić, Jevreji u Derventi (Sarajevo: Jevrejska zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine, 1996). Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 24. Pollatschek also identifies recent Viennese migrants/refugees in town, such as doctors Herzog, Istvan Policer and Adelbert Sendri, and painters Margo and Ricketi from Graz, who worked on the local Catholic church. Ibid., p. 26. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 39. Goldštajn, ‘Kontakti Zagrebačke židovske općine s inozemstvom 1933–1945’, p. 36. Alexander Sacher-Masoch, Maslinici u plamenu (Split: Književni krug, 2004), pp. 36–37. Cyprian, ‘Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs,’ p. 107. Weiss, Out of Vienna, p. 154.

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trade in postage stamps. They could be traded from any location in Europe, could be shipped at low costs, and were of stable value.218 Fischer and Weisz also recall that it was easier trading and smuggling stamps than money.219 The challenges faced by refugees gave rise to some extraordinary survival strategies. Fritz Becker, born in 1920, and his widowed mother, An(n)a, born Berger in 1888, came to Sarajevo from Vienna at the end of August 1938, after father and husband Julius committed suicide, following the loss of his pharmacy. Initially, they were granted a three-month stay as usual, then repeatedly refused residence, and ordered to leave by 15 February 1939, which was later extended for another two months.220 While struggling to regulate their status, Fritz Becker applied for a US immigration visa at the US Consulate in Belgrade. Not being complacent, Fritz tried everything in his means to further his application, an approach not unique at the time. Another teenager from Vienna, Paul A. Weisz, wrote over two hundred letters to cities around the world, addressing the letters blindly to the ‘Jewish Central Office’, requesting aid on behalf of his family and himself, and means of entering that country. Three favourable replies came back, although it was too late to act upon any of them.221 Robert Klüger, also from Vienna and interned in Donji Lapac in 1940, spent his internment writing many letters to foreign representatives in Yugoslavia.222 Fritz Becker’s correspondence is remarkable as he managed to make contact with Mr Hardy Steeholm, who agreed to sponsor his immigration to the US. Steeholm was an American politician and ran unsuccessfully for the Democrats in 1940 in New York, with the support of President Roosevelt. More importantly, the Steeholms and Roosevelts were neighbours in Hyde Park in Dutchess County. In summer 1939, Hardy Steeholm contacted Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of Fritz Becker, as we learn from President Roosevelt’s

Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 27. See Fischer, Lodgings in Exile, p. 215. Weisz, Family in War. ABiH (Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo), DB-KB (Kraljevska banska uprava Drinske banovine), broj registra 171, Osobnik za Becker Anna (Personal File on Anna Becker). The Beckers listed the family of Otto Becker, the brother of the deceased husband and father, as their contact in Yugoslavia, although we do not know when and how this family came. Paul’s family tried various escape routes, but eventually all of them died or were murdered in different places around Europe, including his young sister Ruth, who was on the doomed Kladovo transport. Weisz, Family in War. His unsuccessful letter to Pavle Berkeš, the Honorary Consul General of Finland in Yugoslavia is available at USHMM, Accession number 1995.A.0131, RG number RG-09.059. Fortunately, once the war broke out, Klüger managed to escape, first to nearby Split; eventually he was interned in Salerno in Italy, where he survived the war.

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papers.223 Roosevelt felt constrained in taking a more proactive stance regarding European refugees, but his wife Eleanor Roosevelt intervened in several cases to assist them. Fritz Becker’s handsome picture and application obviously moved Eleanor Roosevelt. The eighteen-year-old refugee managed to have the First Lady intercede for him, but to no avail. The undersecretary of state Sumner Wells replied that Fritz had indeed applied for a non-preference immigration visa under the German quota at the Belgrade consulate on 27  January  1939, but that ‘it is not anticipated that his case will be reached for final consideration for a protracted period of time’. Wells also mentioned another intercession from Miss Cecilia Razovsky of the National Refugees Service, a prominent Jewish social worker and activist for immigrants in the US, and we can only deduce that Fritz wrote to her as well. No matter how high Fritz reached, it was all in vain, given the inflexibility of the US quota system. The next we know is that Anna Becker, in what was described as a common practice, married an elderly Sarajevo Jew, Juda Montiljo, on 26 July 1939, which finally guaranteed their right to stay in Yugoslavia.224 Yugoslav authorities were clearly not very strict, as the Beckers overstayed their permits for several months before the marriage was concluded. In Sarajevo, Fritz worked as a radio mechanic for the next two years. The Beckers were among the first to escape when the war began, reaching Split, and then proceeding to Italy. We find Fritz and his mother again fleeing with the group of refugees interned in Vicenza right after the capitulation of Italy on 10 September 1943. Eventually the group dispersed, and not all survived, but Becker and his mother managed to hide in the province of Macerata, and eventually arrived in Bari in August 1944.225 Later, Fritz Becker became the permanent representative of the World Jewish Congress to the Holy See and, in this capacity, took part in numerous important negotiations on restitution and compensation to Jewish victims, as well as in a number of dialogue initiatives between Jews and Roman Catholics.226

Eleanor Roosevelt Papers; Series 70; Sumner Welles, 1939; Box 335. [accessed 6 April 2022]. Osobnik za Becker Anna (see note 220 above). See  [accessed 1 April 2020]. For more on Fritz Becker’s post-war involvement, see Robert Weisbord and Wallace Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991); Gerhart M. Riegner, Never Despair: Sixty Years in the Service of the Jewish People and the Cause of Human Rights (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006). Once in Italy, Fritz got introduced to pipe smoking by the English, which became his lifelong passion, and he set up a pipe-making business in Rome, later inherited by his son. See [accessed 6 April 2022].

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Some refugees tried to relocate to improve their chances. The Brodheims from Vienna (Marcus, Fanny, and son Adolph) had to abandon Belgrade after their visas expired and headed to Bosanski Brod, a small town on the Sava River dividing Bosnia and Croatia, with a small but thriving Jewish community.227 There, they stayed illegally while still trying to get visas from different consulates in Zagreb, travelling there on so-called milk trains in order to avoid controls on major train routes. They could get some work, such as bookkeeping for local Jewish businesses. According to his letters, Isaac Schneier was not able to register, as he arrived illegally. He stayed on a farm near Zagreb, surviving by selling jewellery he brought along, and on a weekly allowance from the Zagreb Jewish Committee. Without right or possibility to work, Isaac spent time writing letters and trying to learn Croatian.228 Otto and Stephanie Eisler (both born in 1907) from Vienna entered Yugoslavia legally in 1938, but no longer had the financial means to survive. Because of their poverty, Zagreb police deemed that they might take illegal work and interned them on 25 May 1940 in nearby Jastrebarsko, which they could leave only with special permissions.229 Nevertheless, the refugees in new confinement centres that sprang up in Delnice, Samobor, Jastrebarsko, Podravska Slatina, Daruvar, Pakrac, Makarska, Fužine, Vrata, Udbina, and Donja Stubica often ignored the rules of confinement, frequented Zagreb often, or moved between these places, as reported by the Department for State Protection of the autonomous Croatian Banovina.230 This department was created only at the end of 1939, in the Yugoslav government’s attempt to address Croatian discontent in light of impending war. It ordered police to arrest all refugees if found travelling around the country without permission, and chose the remote and poor town of Donji Lapac for strict confinement for those who broke the rules.231 None of this could stop some, like merchant Karl Leibel, born in Vienna in 1900, who after being transferred to Donji Lapac from Udbina was reported escaping on 29 March 1941.232 Sofia

Interview with Adolph Brodheim. ‘Segment  60–73’Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1998. The Brodheims managed to get Belgian visas and escape on time, while the Bosanski Brod Jewish community (around sixty people) was literally wiped out by the Ustaša only a year or so later. According to the correspondence in Williams, Jews and Other Foreigners. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 27936-40. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28752-40. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28002-40. HDA, BH-KB  93–155, 25522-41. Karl, or Carl, Leibel is believed to have been involved with ‘Operation Bernhard’, a secret Nazi plan devised to destabilize the British economy by flooding the country with forged bank notes. See [accessed 6 April 2022].

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Tippel also escaped from Donji Lapac and presumably crossed into Italy.233 She was thought to be involved with Jan Langer, alias Julius Brunner, accused and sentenced by Zagreb police for falsifying passports and visas that were traded among the refugees.234 The Zagreb Jewish Community also refused to care for Boris Tovbini, a Romanian Jew in confinement in Donji Lapac, as he was involved in various affairs including that of Langer, but he was eventually released and allowed to settle in Zagreb.235 Others simply disappeared from the radar. Police reported Herman Pollak, born in Vienna in 1906, first registered in Zagreb on 19  June  1939. as having disappeared.236 Karl Steiner, born in Karlsruhe in 1889, came to Yugoslavia on 3 August 1939 over the Sušak border and was allegedly working for Senk (?) wood processing company, when he went missing.237 In May 1940, Polish citizens David and Leon Kaschenolg (?) and Josef Silberzweig were reported as having entered Yugoslavia on fake visas allegedly issued by the Yugoslav embassy in Berlin. When the forgery was discovered, they had already disappeared and could not be traced.238 Jan Kreutz, Polish citizen, entered Yugoslavia on a transit visa and also disappeared.239 Other local police reported fake Italian and Czech passports or illegal refugees in their charge. Police of Šibenik questioned Maria Fürstenberg, born in 1911 in Poland (daughter of Arthur and Paola Bloch), for having entered Yugoslavia illegally on 7 August 1939. She allegedly converted to Orthodox Christianity to improve her chances. The same authority was also charging Hildegard Simeon, who tried to bribe the Yugoslav Consul in Zadar (then in Italy) to obtain a Yugoslav passport. Both women were reported as living on money received from abroad.240 In March 1940, press reported that the Belgrade police busted a document forgers’ network, led by Paul Reiss, an engineer born in 1896, from Vienna. Reiss and his collaborators, Franz Rudolfer, Manfred Weissman from Burghausen, Max Levinger from Poland, and student Gustav Fellner from Vienna, were arrested, while their wives were expelled. Allegedly, the group forged Dutch, Finish, and Honduras passports, but also the stamp of the Zagreb police department used to extend residence permits for foreigners. According to the report, their customers were Jewish refugees

HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28402-40. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28402-40. Tovbini(e) was born in Falesci, Bessarabia on 14 April 1878. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28402-40. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28958-40. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 28765-40. HDA, BH-KB 24–155, 24551-40. HDA, BH-KB 28–155, 27276-40. HDA, BH-KB 24–155, 24074/40.

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and German deserters.241 Others tried to play safe, such as Endre Fischer, Julius Singer, and Laszlo Weiss, all students from Trenčín in Slovakia, who entered Yugoslavia legally in 1940 on thirty-day visas, and then applied to stay and study at a Commercial school in Zagreb and learn Croatian. As this was refused, they wrote to the Ban (Governor) of Croatia insisting that they would stay illegally and risk deportation as they had no other place to study and go.242 However, many of these strategies were not available to those who did not speak the language or were elderly and sick. Among those fully dependent on the HICEM and the Zagreb Jewish Community were Isaac and Josephine Schneier, who we saw smuggled by Schleich. After spending six months illegally in a village near Zagreb, in February 1941, the couple happily reported to their daughter that they were moved to the village of Vrata, near Fužine – ‘a small mountain village with about a hundred inhabitants’.243 The Schneiers finally recovered and optimistically enjoyed ‘huge mountains’, where they had enough to eat and were gaining weight. Their last letter dates from 2 March 1941 and exudes both panic and hope. They begged their twelve-yearold daughter to ‘get them out before it is too late’, but also stressed that for the time being they were quite well, just asking her to write long letters, so they had something to read. A month later, Yugoslavia was overrun, and for years Ruth Schneier would not have any information about her parents. Isolated in a small village, their destiny was sealed once the Ustaša fascist regime was established.244 Fužine was a destination for other destitute refugees who crossed the border illegally and were placed there by the Zagreb Jewish Community. It was also the last residence of the Genzers from Vienna and the Dortort family from Graz. While their young sons managed to obtain Palestine certificates on time and leave via Rijeka (Paul Genzer) or simply escape (Leo Dortort), the parents felt isolated and desperate in Fužine. As Yugoslavia was about to be attacked, they fled to join the Kladovo transport refugees in Šabac, hoping to be safer in a large group. The Genzers and Dortorts were later executed, along with all refugees still in Šabac.245 The same fate befell Emanuel and Martha (Wechsberg) Weinberger from Vienna, who came to Kladovo from Jastrebasko

‘Velika afera sa lažnim pasošima’, Vreme, 6 March 1940, p. 7. HDA, BH-KB 24–155, 24313-40. Williams, Jews and Other Foreigners, p. 350. Ruth Schneier recorded their deaths in February 1942, and the place of death as Zagreb, but the refugees from Fužine were relocated inland to Brčko, where they were massacred by the Ustaša in December 1941. AHC Interview with Shaul (Paul) Kadari (Genzer), LBI Jerusalem Collection (LBIJER AHC 102); AHC interview with Leo Dortort, LBI AV Collection (Tapes) (AHC 4066).

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internment camp near Zagreb in summer 1940.246 Grünfelder identified at least fifty other refugees who made their way from internment in Samobor, Podravska Slatina, and Daruvar to Kladovo or Šabac, in the hope of continuing their journey faster.247 Ida Rudley and her mother from Vienna were among the last to be smuggled by Schleich on 2 January 1941.248 Rudley paid Schleich in Vienna, and followed the same pattern to Graz by train, before undergoing a full body search for valuables. Then, they had to walk to the border for eight hours in deep snow. Ida remembered a roadhouse near the border where Jews were put to stay until nightfall, as there was no crossing during the daytime. Once they crossed, taxis on the other side of the border took them to Maribor, and eventually Zagreb.249 As Ida Rudley and her mother came to Zagreb illegally, they could not go to any hotel or anywhere where registration was needed, so they ended up renting a room in the Zagreb suburbs, staying with other illegal refugees from Czechoslovakia. The other people who crossed the border with them all registered with the Zagreb Jewish community, which was a regular procedure followed by a placement in an internment camp and regular financial support. Ida Rudley and her mother preferred their freedom, joining an unknown number of Jewish refugees who stayed off the radar, like Simche/Simka Schaechter and Anna, née Brandes, also refugees from Vienna and living underground in Yugoslavia for two years.250 When the Nazis invaded in late April that year, they immediately raided the Jewish community office. Soon all those registered and interned were rounded up, whereas they did not have the names of Ida and her mother, or Simche and Anna Schaechter.251 Ida and her mother had more flexibility to move around, and eventually fled to the safety of Italy.

Yad Vashem, O.75 – Letters and Postcards Collection, File Number 2362. Item ID 10278758. Grünfelder, Von der Schoa eingeholt, pp. 205–07. Interview with Ida Rudley, The Gratz College Hebrew Education Society conducted the interview with Ida Rudley in Philadelphia, PA, on 5 April 1984. Now part of Gratz College Oral History Archive collection at USHMM. Interview with Ida Rudley, pp. 1-1-7 to 1-1-10. For their statement, see CM/1 Akte von Simche Schaechter 09.02.1893, Arolsen Archives, 32160006854. Despite her grumbling about the Zagreb Jewish community, Ida Rudley and her mother were placed by the community as chaperones with the remaining Youth Aliyah children when they were transported to Ljubljana with the help of the Red Cross. According to Ida, their escape and later stay in Ljubljana was possible thanks to jewellery that some Arians smuggled from Vienna for them. They spent the war in the safety of Ferramonti internment camp, where Ida got married to another Jewish refugee. Interview with Ida Rudley, p. 1-2-14.

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In late 1940, the Yugoslav Interior Ministry recounted over three thousand Jews who entered Yugoslavia illegally that year, with two thirds being from Germany and the rest from Poland, Romania, and Hungary, adding that the numbers were on the rise, with several people crossing daily led by people smugglers from Graz.252 As border control failed to prevent Jewish refugees arriving, the Ministry investigated how to send them back or transfer them further to neighbouring countries, such as Bulgaria. Yugoslav diplomats in Bucharest signalled another possible wave of refugees from Romania that never happened. Other proposals included establishing a hierarchy of Jews based on their background and legal status. Another proposal was to arrange through the British Embassy and Yugoslav Consul General in Palestine that the existing illegally residing Jews would be admitted to Palestine. Finally, it was suggested that the treatment in the internment camps should be severed or transformed into concentration camps to reduce the appeal of Jewish immigration to Yugoslavia.253 None of this had been implemented. At that time, there were fifteen internment centres financed by the Union of Jewish Communities, and a large group stationed in Šabac. In parallel, local wealthy Jewish families in Zagreb and elsewhere were accommodating hundreds of children arriving illegally on Youth Aliyah. WIZO activists, such as Helfrida Spiegel, became important in housing and caring for children, while others donated clothing and money.254 For them, the Jewish community in Zagreb also organized the teaching of Hebrew, talks about Eretz Israel, sports activities and small jobs, and provided two meals a day, while on Saturday evenings all children were invited to a special meal in the synagogue.255

Belgrade: ‘Das vierte Tor’ In the late 1930s, the Yugoslav capital Belgrade, in addition to Zagreb, became a Mecca for mostly Austrian Jewish artists and intellectuals, despite being considered a barbaric outpost for centuries, not least when Austria decided to destroy Serbia in 1914, launching the First World War by bombing its capital. One of its chroniclers, Austrian dramatist Theodor Csokor described Belgrade as ‘Das vierte Tor’, after the so-called Fourth Gate or the Jewish section of the

‘Navala Jevreja u Jugoslaviju’ AJ, MUP 15 16–445. AJ, MUP 16–447. ‘Špigel, Helfrida’, in Židovski leksikon. Givon, ‘Über den Balkan nach Palästina geflohen’.

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Viennese Central cemetery.256 Remarkably, many of these Jewish refugee artists and intellectuals continued their anti-fascist resistance while in Belgrade and liaised with Yugoslav anti-fascists. From the cabaret world came Stella Kadmon (Vienna, 1902–1989), who ran her own cabaret in Vienna – ‘Der liebe Augustin,’ with Peter Hammerschlag as writer and performer, Fritz (Fred) Spielmann (1906–1997) as composer, and Franz Eugen Klein as composer and director, producing hundreds of satiricalparodistic anti-fascist sketches before they had to close.257 Kadmon fled to Belgrade in July 1938, where she also underwent a marriage of convenience, and continued to perform, most often with Hammerschlag. Kadmon, together with her elder brother and mother, fled with the help of the Greek ambassador to Tel Aviv in 1940, where she opened Papillion Cabaret in Hebrew language, only to return to Vienna in 1947, where she sang, danced, and acted in the appropriately titled ‘Theater der Courage’ for many more years.258 Peter Hammerschlag (born, 1902, Alsergrund, Vienna – died, 1942, Auschwitz), a writer, surrealist poet, actor, and graphic artist, also began his cabaret career in Berlin’s famous theatres, but he remains most remembered for his engagement in Stella Kadmon’s cabaret, where he was an author, presenter, actor, imitator, or, as he claimed, ‘a girl for all.’259 When his residence permit in Belgrade expired, Hammerschlag decided to return to Austria instead of hiding, faking documents, or going elsewhere. He was later deported to Poland, most probably to Auschwitz, with all traces about his whereabouts being lost.260 In Zagreb, a fate like that of Hammerschlag befell another cabaret artist, Paul Wendel, known as Paul O’Montis. Openly homosexual, he fled from Berlin to Vienna in 1933, where he acted until 1938, and eventually ended up in Zagreb Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 308. Composer Klein fled to France but was eventually interned and deported to Theresienstadt, where he organized musical life before his eventual deportation and death in Auschwitz. Spielmann fled to New York and brought Viennese Cabaret there, achieving great acclaim. Their interwar cabaret continues to influence the arts in Austria today. See Cherry Dress: Kommentierte Memoiren der exilierten Bühnen- und Lebenskünstlerin Anita Bild, ed. by Irene Messinger and Peter Bild (Göttingen Niedersachs V&R unipress, 2018), pp. 181–85. For more, see Henriette Mandl, Cabaret und Courage: Stella Kadmon, eine Biographie (Vienna: WUV Universitaetsverlag, 1993); Peter Berger, ‘The Gildemeester Organisation for Assistance to Emigrants and the expulsion of Jews from Vienna, 1938–1942’, Business and Politics in Europe, 1900–1970, ed. by Terry Gourvish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 215–45. Peter’s father was a Viennese ORL doctor and university professor Victor Hammerschlag. Peter and his mother, Hedwig, converted to Catholicism in 1908, which did not save them later, as the whole family perished except for Peter’s younger brother, Valentin. Kringel, Schlingel, Borgia. Materialien zu Peter Hammerschlag, ed. by Monika Kiegler-Griensteidl and Volker Kaukoreit (Vienna: Verlag Turia-Kant, 1997).

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in 1939, where he performed in a cabaret on the main Jelačić square. For unknown reasons, O’Montis returned to the Reich, where he was arrested and died, or was killed, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 17 July 1940.261 From the world of cabaret also came Oskar Kanitz, writer and conferencier in one of Vienna’s best-known venues, ‘Simpl’, most associated with its Jewish owners and performers, where he constantly criticized and mocked the Nazis. Kanitz arrived in Yugoslavia in 1939 and was placed by Zagreb’s Committee for Refugees in the nearby Draganić internment camp, from where he was deported to Jasenovac and murdered by the Ustaša in 1941.262 From the world of opera and theatre came Georg Tintner (1917–1999), the first Jew to join the Vienna Boys Choir and an assistant conductor of Vienna Volksopper at the time of his expulsion. After several months in Belgrade, Tintner continued his journey, and later built a successful career in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, and is still remembered as one of the greatest Bruckner conductors.263 A close friend of Peter Hammerschlag, and another man of the Vienna theatre world who escaped to Belgrade, was Piero Rismondo (1905–1989). Born into a wealthy Trieste family, who owned the ship company Dalmatia, Rismondo was a journalist and dramatist in Vienna becoming famous for his anti-fascist piece Grillparzer in 1936.264 Rismondo was joined by his anti-fascist friends, the two most prolific chroniclers of exile in Yugoslavia, Austrian-born dramatists and authors Alexander (von) Sacher-Masoch and Franz Theodor Csokor. Sacher-Masoch (1901–1972) stemmed from a famous aristocratic family originating in Bohemia that produced many authors or, as he liked to joke, invented Sacherism and Masoch Torte. Trained as a chemist in Berlin, Sacher-Masoch turned to literature and leftist political activism. After 1933, as a known opponent of the Nazis, Sacher-Masoch had to move to Vienna. Furthermore, his mother was Jewish, and he was married to a Jew, which made him Jewish under the Nazi racial laws, even though he did not self-identify as Kay Weniger, Zwischen Bühne und Baracke: Lexikon der verfolgten Theater-, Film- und Musikkünstler 1933 bis 1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2008), p. 266. Oskar Kanitz, born in Vienna in 1899 to Joseph and Charlotte née Friedman, was under the strict surveillance of Yugoslav authorities for his Communist sympathies. AJ, MUP 14-Kartoteka 246–297. For his fate see: [accessed 6 April 2022]. Tanya Buchdahl Tintner, Out of Time: The Vexed Life of Georg Tintner (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2011). After the exile in Korčula and evacuation to Southern Italy, Rismondo returned to Yugoslavia, and was appointed director of the National Theatre in Rijeka/Fiume, returning to Vienna in 1952, where he was the culture editor of Die Presse newspaper [accessed 6 April 2022].

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such. In 1938, Sacher-Masoch was a political refugee again, this time fleeing to Belgrade, where he worked as a correspondent for the Swiss Newspaper Der Bund, taking any other jobs available and liaising with other refugees and antifascists. Together with Rismondo, Sacher-Masoch authored a drama about the exiles – Das unsichtbare Volk [Invisible people] in 1938–39. The year after, Sacher-Masoch published a book of poems Die Zeit der Dämonen [The Time of Demons] with Belgrade Jewish publisher Paul Bruck, which was circulated among Belgrade Jewish and other émigré intellectuals just before they were to be victimized. The collection paints drastic images of national socialist violence subverting Hitler’s totalitarian rule and is still one of the most poignant reminders of the far-sightedness and engagement of anti-fascist resisters before the eruption of war and the Holocaust. Sacher-Masoch fell in love in Belgrade, and praised the reception locals gave to refugees. He also met his future partner, Milica, the daughter of the prominent lawyer and Social Democrat politician Marko Leitner from Osijek, who also served as vice-president and president of the Osijek Jewish Community.265 Yet he reminds us that in many languages, including Serbian, there exists a common saying ‘Nije naš čovek’ [not our man], pointing to almost anthropological rejection or suspicion of foreigners/strangers who, accordingly, should have no rights or say. Clearly what is foreign, or who is a stranger, changes over time, and often the same people who reject strangers later get rejected on the same basis.266 On a more personal note, Sacher-Masoch described how German journalists in Belgrade that he knew gradually succumbed to pressure and became avid supporters of Hitler. Soon after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, the Gestapo looked for Sacher-Masoch, and arrested his associates Rudolf Hofeneder and Siegfried Stanzl, as well as the publisher Paul Bruck, who all perished in the camps.267 Sacher-Masoch and Milica had fled in time via Sarajevo to Dubrovnik, eventually landing on the island of Korčula, where they reunited with Csokor, and their subsequent exploits will be recounted in later chapters. Sacher-Masoch’s fellow traveller Theodor Csokor (1885–1969), a former dramaturg at the Raimundtheater and Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, was For more on Marko Leitner, see Lavoslav Kraus, Susreti i sudbine (Osijek: Glas Slavonije, 1973), pp.  128–29. Sacher-Masoch’s key work written in Korčula, Die Ölgärten Brennen (Mannheim: Persona Verlag, 1994), is dedicated to the memory of Marko Leitner, who remained in Osijek as the leader of the Jewish Community, and helped save many lives. Despite his many contributions and decorations, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished in 1943. Sacher-Masoch, Die Ölgärten brennen, pp. 55–56. Cyprian, ‘Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs 1935–1938’, pp. 103–18.

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described by a British correspondent in Belgrade as ‘real Christian, representing all that was best in Europe in the flight from Nazism’.268 Descending from a notable Serbian family that was magyarized and germanized before he was born, Csokor was an outspoken opponent of National Socialism ever since he was among the initiators of the anti-Nazi petition at the PEN congress in Dubrovnik in 1933, which cost him a total ban on publication and dramatization of his works in the German Reich. In 1937, his most successful and best-known play November 3, 1918, about the downfall of the Austria-Hungary monarchy, was staged in Vienna’s famous Burgtheater to great, albeit shortlived, acclaim and success.269 After the Anschluss, Csokor’s escape lasted for almost two years, including Poland and Romania, before he landed in Belgrade in 1940.270 Another friend who Csokor met in Belgrade was celebrated German actress Tilla Durieux (born 1880 in Vienna as Ottilie Godeffroy), who shared with him the fear about the unknown and pondered the danger of being in the big city during the war.271 Durieux had previously achieved fame on stages throughout the German-speaking world from Olmütz (now Olomutz in Czechia), Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) to Deutsches Theater, Lessingstheater, Königliches Schauspielhaus and Staatstheater in Berlin, most notably directed by Max Reinhardt.272 With her Jewish husband, businessman Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, once owner of the Schultheiss brewery in Berlin and other companies, she flew first to Switzerland in 1933, but after their residence was refused there, they settled in Yugoslavia, with Tilla performing in both Belgrade and Zagreb.273

David Walker, Death at My Heels (London: Chapman & Hall, 1942), p. 208. Lebensbilder eines Humanisten: Ein Franz Theodor Csokor-Buch, ed. by Ulrich  N. Schulenburg (Vienna Löcker, 1992). More on the dedicated website [accessed 6 April 2022]. Zoran Konstantinović, ‘Franz Theodor Csokor und die Südslawen’ in Franz Theodor Csokor: Amicus Amicorum, ed. by Brigida Brandys (Lodz: University of Lodz, 1994), pp.  19–25. Csokor’s grandfather’s brother was Julijan Čokorov(ić), Serbian bishop, poet and publisher. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 18. Melanie Ruff, ‘Tilla Durieux: Selbstbilder und Images der Schauspielerin’, History Dissertation, University of Vienna; Nenad Popović, ‘Die Texte Tilla Durieux über die Jahre der Emigration in Zagreb. Ein Bericht’, Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, 6 (2001), pp. 159–64. Tilla described her exile experience in a play, Zagreb 1945, and recollections, Eine Tür steht Offen, later extended in her autobiography, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre. Tilla could continue her acting career with tours of European capitals, whereas her husband set up a bus factory, but the business later failed. They also ran hotel Cristallo in Opatija/Abazzia for a while.

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Another refugee from the theatre world that Csokor met in Belgrade was Willi Forst, the greatest Austrian actor of the time, once partner of Marlene Dietrich. Forst fled together with journalist Klausner, his wife, and sister Lilly Karoly (Natalie Klausner), another famous actress from Vienna’s Burgtheater.274 Another prominent Gentile artist escaping via Yugoslavia was Richard Nikolaus Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi, writer and politician of Austrian/ Japanese background, one of the pioneers and founders of the European unification movement, who proposed Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ as European hymn. Coudenhove-Kalergi left Austria with his Jewish wife, actress Ida Roland, who famously played Kleopatra in Burgtheater the evening before they fled.275 Adrienne Thomas (pseudonym of  Hertha  A.  Deutsch,  née  Strauch)  (1897– 1980), an anti-war activist, novelist, and children’s author, known as Erika Theobald, also escaped through Yugoslavia with a fake passport that her friends secured in Vienna, having previously fled Berlin.276 Czech Jewish Communist politician, poet, and writer Louis Fürnberg (1909–1957), author of the later GDR Party anthem, escaped Czechoslovakia after imprisonment and torture in 1938. Fürnberg reunited with his wife in Belgrade, where the couple had a son, Misha, before they managed to flee to Palestine just days before the Nazi invasion.277 Others were less fortunate. A Viennese painter, Walter Kraus, who fled to Belgrade and married a local Jewish girl Vera, née Klein, tried to escape to Italy after the invasion. They were caught by the Ustaša in Bosnia. None of his works survive except for a sculpture and drawings from the Jasenovac concentration camp, where Kraus was murdered.278 Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 298. Lilly Karoly returned from exile in 1945 and could immediately join Burgtheater again. For more on the remarkable person of Coudenhove-Kalergi and his flight, see . ‘Thomas Adrienne, geb. Hertha A. Strauch, verh. Deutsch, verh. Lesser, Ps. Erika Theobald, Erzählerin und Kinderbuchautorin’ [accessed 6 April 2022]. Fürnberg returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, and became a prominent political and literary figure, but he moved to Germany because of the anti-Semitism in the 1950s and died in Weimar. He is mostly remembered as the author of ‘The Party is Always Right’, the song that served for years as the official anthem of the East German ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). For Lotte’s story of their war and post-war experience, see Volker Müller, ‘Die Dichterwitwe Lotte Fürnberg erinnert sich ihrer Lebensjahre mit Louis Fürnberg: Es ist so viel Blut umsonst geflossen’, Berliner Zeitung, 26 January 2001. For more on the tumultuous life and work of celebrated Communist, see Dieter Schiller, Der Träumer und die Politik: Louis Fürnberg zum 50. Todestag (Berlin: Helle Panke, 2007). Rajner, Fragile Images, pp. 265–66.

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In February  1941, the Belgrade PEN association hosted a welcome party for Theodor Csokor, gathering most of these refugee artists. Despite his close encounter with danger, war, and hate during three previous years spent on the run across various countries, Csokor felt at peace in Belgrade. Writing from Belgrade’s Hotel Bristol, Csokor described the atmosphere: [people] feasting, dancing, playing, loving each other in a mixture of Balkan and Paris, one of the last truly neutral countries on the Continent […] When Hitler appears on the screen in newsreels everybody whistles and frets. On Sunday in Bristol Hotel, Gipsy band plays Csardas and kolo and even the giant Prime Minister (Dragiša Cvetković) from Niš dances to Waltz, while journalists from New York and London stare […] it smells of sweat, Slivovitz and British tobacco and no one talks about the war.279

In Belgrade night clubs and elsewhere, people proudly sang ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, a British war song from the First World War, when Serbia fought alongside Britain against Germany.280 British and American correspondents were exhilarated.281 Heinrich Queller, one of over a thousand refugees in Šabac, reported the same in their local cinema, each image of Hitler or German soldiers on screen evoked boos, while refugees were welcomed with open arms.282

Last-Minute Escapes By 1940, the signs of danger for Jews in Yugoslavia had multiplied. After German companies in the country laid off all their Jewish staff, some Yugoslav banks followed suit.283 Then, on 5 October 1940, in the vain hope that it would appease Nazi Germany, the seriously divided Yugoslav government passed two anti-Jewish measures with the power of laws. The numerus clausus was set for Jews in secondary schools and universities (except Croatia), and Jews were excluded from wholesale trade of certain food items.284 The Yugoslav Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 298. Walker, Death at My Heels, p. 209. They included Basil Davidson of Reuters, Ray Brock of the New York Times, Lovett Edwards and Robert St John of AP, Terence Atherton of the Daily Mail, and others. See Ray Moseley, Reporting War: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture, and Death to Cover World War Two (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 80–89. Queller, Meine Erlebnisse, pp. 70–71. Vesna Aleksić, ‘Otpuštanje Jevreja službenika Opšteg jugoslovenskog bankarskog društva A.D. 1940. Godine’, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, 4 (1) (1997), 49–63. Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam, pp.  395–462; Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 74–85. In addition, there were several arrests and confiscations in Croatia undertaken

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Jewish community leaders with their old-style strategy of pressuring important contacts had little chance facing Korošec, who switched his portfolio from interior affairs to education.285 Mass protests erupted, led by women’s groups such as the Yugoslav Women Society and Union for Protection of Children, whereas in Sarajevo, women and men of all ethnic backgrounds organized to offer free education for Jewish children and youth affected. Sarajevo professors were the most vocal in their indignation, as well as the local Orthodox bishop, who immediately met his Jewish peers to reassure them of his solidarity.286 In Belgrade, violent clashes erupted between leftist and fascist university students in demonstrations, with over twenty-five students injured, and rioting was also reported in Zagreb.287 Eventually, even before Korošec’s unexpected death in December 1940, the interpretation of regulations was mellowed, and most Jewish students were eventually accepted.288 That winter, the Yugoslav government even made a promise to Dr Hyman of the Joint to accept 125 orphaned Jewish children arriving from Germany and to place them under the care of Zagreb and Belgrade Jewish communities, which would be some of the last to escape.289 At the same time, in Sarajevo, the notion that Ashkenazi Jews were foreigners to the city was reinforced by a steady flow of refugees arriving after the Anschluss. Wherever the influence came from, anti-Semitism was on the rise among all Sarajevo confessional communities, as evidenced in their press, despite centuries of peaceful cohabitation and tolerance.290 While the British tried to counteract and contain Nazi propaganda with their own, they could by autonomous Croatian authorities, and several declarations of protests recorded by the Jewish community. Exceptions were given only to Jews inhabiting territories belonging to Yugoslavia prior to 1918. Other ministers in the Yugoslav government were still decisively pro-British and not anti-Semitic. Once in exile, Minister Krek employed Margarete Stern, née Hirsch, who had been a German Jewish refugee in Maribor before. Stern then continued to work for Yugoslav news agency TANJUG, and eventually stayed as a telephonist with the Yugoslav Embassy after the war when the country was taken over by the Communists. My Story, pp. 36–39. Pauline Albala, Yugoslav Women Fight for Freedom (New York: The Yugoslav Information Center, 1943), pp. 26–7; Dujmović, ‘Uzajamna lojalnost,’ pp. 166–67. ‘Yugoslav Students Riot’, The American Jewish World, 1 November (1940), p. 4. On 7 November 1940, the decree was modified to permit matriculated students to continue, as well as the enrolment of the children of war veterans. ‘Yugoslavia and the Fight for Democracy’, The Sentinel, 17 April (1941), p. 27; Singer, My Father’s Blessings, p. 39. ‘Yugoslavia and the fight for Democracy’, The Sentinel, 17 April (1941), p. 27. Boris Havel, ‘Haj Amin al-Husseini: Herald of Religious Anti-Judaism in the Contemporary Islamic World’, The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, 5 (3) (2014), 221–43; Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945.

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offer no credits or armaments to the struggling Yugoslav government, which increasingly felt overwhelmed, with the loss of France as traditional ally. All of this was deepening the desperation among the refugees on the run or in makeshift internment centres. Some were already so traumatized that they broke down or committed suicide. According to the testimony of Erika Reiss Kinel, her young cousin from Vienna, who was previously incarcerated and tortured in Dachau, took his own life after only a couple of weeks’ stay in Zagreb, despite being safe and well taken care of.291 Others decided to return to Vienna or elsewhere in the Reich, like Hammerschlag or O’Montis, sick and tired of exile. Drug abuse was widespread. Eventually, most fell into the same lethargic routine, desperation, and denial, as described by Peter Rosenfeld: Every Saturday, after synagogue services, they went with their friends to the Hotel Majestic, the best in Belgrade [also the nearest B. A.], to have Dobos Torta and Turkish coffee. They were part of a group of young couples with small children. The conversations were the same every week: ‘When are you leaving?’ ‘Who left this week?’ ‘Have you sold your business?’ ‘Did you get your Cuban visa?’ ‘Did you get your American visa?’ The answers were similar every Saturday: ‘The Steins went to Venezuela where their cousins are;’ ‘The Goldbergs went to New York;’ ‘I haven’t got my Canadian visa;’ ‘We haven’t yet sold our business;’ and then ‘When are you leaving?’ The only things that changed were the cakes. These conversations continued throughout 1939, all of 1940, and for the first 95 days and 7 hours of 1941. To make it more painful, I could say that this went on during September, October, November, and December of 1939. And it went on during January, February, March, April to December of 1940 and it went on 80 Saturdays. ‘When are you leaving?’ Then, on April 6th [1941], our world fell apart. The Germans bombed Belgrade and invaded Yugoslavia. Fifteen days later Yugoslavia had surrendered. After that, no business could be sold at any price. No houses could be sold either and worst of all, no visas could be obtained anywhere.292

Prior to the German attack, on 27 March 1941, people in Belgrade and in many places around the country stood up against the ‘pact’ or the agreement that the Yugoslav government had signed with Nazi Germany two days earlier. Some Jewish refugees also joined occasionally violent protests on the streets.293 The very young, newly enthroned King Peter, shortly after the putsch that declared him ‘of age’ to take power, received the delegation of Jewish representatives led by the Chief Rabbi Alkalaj and reassured them, expressing his resolute Interview with Erika Reiss Kinel, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection. ‘I owe my life to Kasztner, and to Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Becher, Eichmann and Blaschke’. An Interview with Holocaust Survivor Peter Rosenfeld Span (recorded by Sheryl Ochayon). Lisa De Curtis, unpublished memoir written in 1980 in New York, Leo Baeck Institute Archives Memoir Collection (ME 883), p. 51.

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opposition to German-driven anti-Jewish propaganda.294 The American Jewish World reported on 4  April  1941 that the Serb revolt against Yugoslav adherence to the Axis had saved (sic), at least temporarily, five thousand Jewish refugees there from falling again into the hands of the Nazis, according to Joseph  C.  Hyman, executive vice-chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Joint contacts in Zagreb reported caring for five thousand persons, mostly from Austria, who found a haven in Yugoslavia and were given a new lease on life with the elimination of pro-Axis forces.295 Shockingly naive and optimistic, this report reflected the mood among many refugee and Yugoslav Jews alike. Among those from Germany or Austria, many, especially war veterans and bearers of the Iron Cross, strongly believed that their previous merits would spare them any trouble, even if Yugoslavia was invaded.296 During that last winter of peace in 1940–41, while Belgrade cafés and nightclubs were beaming with pride or naivety, many believed that Yugoslavia was different from other countries. Very few Yugoslav Jews made the move, even when the German attack became imminent. When writing about these critical events, Yugoslav Jewish survivors share a sort of an embarrassment. Most are stuck with a puzzling incomprehension as to why they or their parents and relatives did not do more. Why did they not escape after hearing all the stories from successive waves of refugees, let alone the frightening experiences shared by those arriving from Poland – was it ignorance or naivety, or more likely refusal to accept what was coming, or sometimes even mad courage?297 Foreign Jews with experience of persecution feared that the war would be particularly bloody in the Balkans, even though they found a haven there. Most locals, including Yugoslavia’s well-integrated Jews, were offended by this attitude, or simply remained unimpressed and continued with their lives as usual.298 Only a few Zagreb Jews left on time. Others sent money abroad, or changed it into foreign currency or gold coins.299 Some hid money and objects of value, buried Edward W. Jelenko, ‘Yugoslavia and the Fight for Democracy’, The Sentinel, 17 April (1941), p. 6. ‘Serb Revolt Saves  5,000 from Nazis’, The American Jewish World, 4  April (1941), p.  6. Joint calculated with the same number in other reports, such as in ‘J. D. C. Appropriates $ 2,293,600 for Emergency Program’, The American Jewish World, 9 April (1941), p. 3. Interview with Werner Reich; Also, Singer, My Father’s Blessings. One of the most prominent Yugoslav Jewish writers and Auschwitz survivor, Đorđe Lebović, dwelt on these issues in many of his works, most notably his autobiography, Semper idem (Belgrade: Laguna, 2005). Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, pp. 305–06. This was usually the privilege of the richest, such as Artur Drach of the wood industry of Sisak, or Milan Marić, who managed the Shell oil industry. See Mira Kolar-Dimitrijević, ‘Strani kapital i Banovina Hrvatska 1939–1941’, Povijesni prilozi, 9/9 (1990), 165–94 (p. 178).

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what they could, or gave it to Gentiles for safe (or not so safe) keeping, but once they had to flee, many of these preparations became useless, and the only useful things were portable jewellery and diamonds.300 Even those close to the border were quite unconcerned. According to Alice Brosan from S(z)enta on the Hungarian border: ‘We were absolute fools; it would come to everybody else but not us.’301 Marko Rosner was so persuaded by his own abilities and wealth that he mistook refugees’ warnings for envy.302 The Rosners only left their border town of Maribor to head to Belgrade on 27 March, witnessing the tumult on the streets.303 Another witness, Lisa Heilig, a Viennese refugee in Ljubljana, described how she and her family lived among people who were determined to keep their freedom, which made them feel safe, or at least they hoped so.304 Zdenka Novak, née Steiner, tried to explain: We were blind and deaf and convinced to the very end that Yugoslavia was different from other countries. We believed that we should fight Hitler; that, to us Jews who are so loyal to the country that is equally loyal to us, is one of the answers to a paradox which essentially will never be comprehended […] They were certainly aware of the Nazis’ threat, which was asserted by the intensified feeling of adherence to the Zionist movement, but the ethical conception of humanity based on truth, honesty, justice, pity and gratitude was rooted so deeply that this awareness was not strong enough to make crucial decisions which would have meant leaving everything behind and emigration to another place.305

Indeed, many Yugoslav and Greek Jews thought that they should fight Hitler instead of fleeing. Pollatschek and other Jewish refugees in Derventa also believed that it was better to have a war than any deal with the Nazis, persuaded that a war would not last long and would bring freedom sooner.306 A document in the Zagreb archive from 1940 records a telling incident. The police chief of Brčko in North Bosnia reported on a grand celebration of Hitler’s birthday organized by the local German community and attended by local officials. All went well and cheerfully until the speeches were interrupted by a local Jew, Zumbul Montiljo, who climbed on the stage and addressed all those present offensively, as the report quotes: ‘I f … all your mothers.’ The event ended in turmoil. Zumbul (Hyacinthus), named after the most adored flower in the Milo Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien: Eine Odyssee des Überlebens 1941–1945 (Klagenfurt: Wieser-Verlag, 2010), pp. 82–83. Interview with Alisa Brosan. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 350. Starman, ‘Twice Disowned by Slovenia’, p. 197. Lisa De Curtis, Unpublished memoir, p. 48. Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked, p. 16. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 30.

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Balkans, would soon die along with hundreds of thousands of his fellow Jews and Yugoslavs, Albanians, Greeks, and others.307 During the last days of freedom, most Jewish leaders were busy with unabated waves of Polish Jewish refugees arriving in Yugoslavia. The Polish Committee for Refugee Aid from Belgrade reported hundreds on a list sent to the Ministry of the Interior on 4 April 1941, and demanding their concentration for better coordination of aid activities.308 A group of eighty German refugees landed in a hurried flight from Belgrade to Ankara in Turkey just before the attack on Yugoslavia, the last such report.309 Finally, just days before the German invasion, Šime Spitzer and the Union of Yugoslav Jewish Communities secured from the Yugoslav Ministry passports for around three hundred and eighty children and teenagers with entry certificates to Palestine. Yugoslav temporary passes also contained all necessary transit visas (Greek, Turkish, French Syrian). Escorted by twenty adults, they left Yugoslavia in four groups via Greece, Turkey, and Syria.310 Records vary, but between two hundred and two hundred and eighty of them were once part of the Kladovo transport now stationed in Šabac. Among them was sixteen-year-old Erika Ben-David, née Walden, from Vienna, and Mikha Paz (born Fass) from Berlin, who recalled the excitement of the last-minute escape from the camp and the hope among others that they would soon follow suit.311 They were joined by a group of children from Hachsharas and Youth Aliyah stuck in Zagreb. Their leader, Armando Moreno, warned them not to speak German on the streets of Belgrade, as they were used to doing in Zagreb. These youngsters were on the last trains to leave Yugoslavia and all survived, thanks to great support along their long journey

HDA, BH-KB 24–155, 6137/40. Brčko hosted a sizeable internment centre for refugee Jews. AJ, MUP  16–516 lists forty-three refugees in Leskovac, and identifies Polish Jews (Gliechenstein Dawid and Hein, Felsenstein Adam, Schulman Gabriel, Wiesenfeld Jakob and Munio Izydor Helman, Recher Mozes), twenty in Zagreb, eight in Banja Luka, one in Prnjavor, twenty-nine in Crikvenica, two in Sušak, thirty-six in Nova Gradiška, four in Bled, three in Vukovar, four in Makarska, Dr Seelib Wilhelm with his wife in Herceg Novi, four in Dubrovnik, one in Stubičke Toplice, unidentified others in Petrovgrad, Valjevo, Soko Banja, Majdanpek, Čačak, and forty-four in Jagodina. The largest group of sixty-six was in Kuršumlijska banja, most of whom fled to nearby Kosovo, as will be discussed later. The American Jewish World, 28 March (1941), p. 10. JIM (Archive of Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade), 2718, K.22-9-1/1-I. The transcript of the interview with Erica Ben-David deposited with the Leo Baeck Institute, Austrian Heritage Collection; Mikha Paz (born Fass) had to leave behind his mother and brother Shmuel, having previously lost his father and sister in Berlin. His brother was too young for the Aliyah, so remained with his mother to share the destiny of refugees in Šabac. Miša Pas, ‘U Erec. U slobodu’, Mi smo preživeli …: Jevreji o Holokaustu 2 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2003), pp. 412–19.

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from the local Jewish communities.312 The Belgrade Jewish community and Šime Spitzer did everything in their power to furnish the children and youngsters for the long journey in the most difficult circumstances. Every traveller got a suitcase full of clothes, shoes, and bedding. Yugoslav Jews escorted them and met them on every station with food and other goods, making sure they were all fine – pictures that the last escapees kept in their memories while they lived, given that it was the Yugoslav Jews who would soon after bear the brunt of the Holocaust.313 Among the refugees from Zagreb were Joshua Degani, Gershon Wilkenfeld, and Kalman Kleinberger, who travelled first to Belgrade and then left by train to Thessaloniki, one day before the bombing and German invasion. In Thessaloniki, they experienced similar scenes of locals greeting them with food, even though sirens announced air raids and all had to seek cover. In Istanbul too, the locals prepared the warmest welcome. After three weeks’ journey via Turkey, Aleppo, and Beirut, the group reached Palestine at the end of April.314 The warm welcome and help extended to Jewish refugees was the same for those sailing illegally on the Danube, and then the Black and Mediterranean seas. From Budapest, through Yugoslavia, and onwards to Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, those who managed to escape remember local Jewish communities providing supplies and medicine, as did the Orthodox bishop of Varna in Bulgaria and the poor Greek people of Mytilene, throwing apples and pears to the young refugees struck by hunger, lice, cockroaches, and sea sickness.315

‘Die Flucht von Deutschland nach Palästina (Eretz Israel) über Jugoslawien: Ich wurde von Recha Freier gerettet, Von Kalman Givon (Karl Kleinberger)’, [accessed 6 April 2022]. Queller, Meine Erlebnisse, pp. 76–81. Interview with Degani, Joshua. ‘Segment 54–61’. Joshua’s mother and sisters were deported to Riga in 1942, where they all perished. ‘Herman Herskowitz’, in Voices from the Holocaust, ed. by Rothschild, pp. 116–18.

Chapter 3

Annihilation of Jewry in the Balkans In that year there was no spring. Spring was cancelled in 1941.1

This chapter reports on the ‘drowned’ (Primo Levi), that is, those among Jewish refugees in the Balkans who were arrested, deported, and murdered, despite their efforts to escape their persecutors. More than elsewhere in this book, I have had to rely on meagre archival records, previous literature, and indirect testimonies of survivors. Lists of names of victims are very often the only thing left behind, but often names are missing or are misspelled. For the Balkans, 6 April 1941, was a shock that led to four years of suffering and destruction. For refugees in Yugoslavia and Greece, it was the last episode of horror that lasted for years on end. Thousands escaped to Italy or to Italian-held areas, which will be analysed later in separate chapters. Considerably fewer obtained temporary relief fleeing to Hungary. But many were tracked down, massacred, or deported to their deaths. A case study of the fate of Jews in the town of Ruma, which follows, will detail various waves of deportations, as well as the roles taken by local authorities and Nazi Germany. This chapter, on the other hand, can only sketch in basic strokes about how the Holocaust was implemented in various regions of Yugoslavia, with a few observations on Greece. No attempt is made to provide lists of victims or conclusive numbers, as the existing databases are incomplete, with often contradictory information. Instead, the differences in how the Holocaust was implemented (or, in a couple of cases, not implemented) in various contexts are singled out and explained, analysing the interplay between Nazi Germany and various local authorities. More specifically, this chapter examines to what extent the fate of ‘foreign’ Jews differed from that of local Jews, and whether those Jews escaping to the Balkans were particularly hard hit because of their ‘inferior’ location. Towards the end, this chapter also reports about the few survivors who stayed alive, hiding in towns or among the Balkan peasants.

Vera Laska, ‘Czech Connection’, p. 82. Here, Laska, a Czech-born resister, recounts the bombing of Belgrade, which she witnessed first-hand together with many other refugees, whose stories follow.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_004

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Attack and Escape(s) Less than two days after the Yugoslav government unwillingly signed the Tripartite Pact with the Axis, during the night of 26 to 27 March 1941, a few Air Force officers staged a coup d’état, removing from power the Prince Regent and the signatories of the Pact. The putsch was followed by jubilant demonstrations in Belgrade, and other, mostly Serbian, cities and towns across the country, although ‘every Serb knew that the chance of victory was almost nil’, according to the Daily Mirror correspondent David Walker. Walker insisted that the atmosphere was decisively pro-Russian or pro-Soviet, but that this information was removed by British censorship and the impression was created, which has stuck until today, that the move was pro-British, and organized by the British security services.2 The crowd on Belgrade main square broke into the German Verkehrsbüro (Information Office) and tore it to bits, as everybody knew that it was nothing more than a German spy outlet. As the American AP journalist Robert St John came late for the show, the crowds moved to wreck the Italian Travel Agency shouting ‘down with the Nazis’.3 In towns around Belgrade with significant German minority populations, such as Ruma and Pančevo, pro-Nazi organizations, but also German private property, were targeted. The attackers were watched closely by the pro-Nazi members of the German ethnic group. Soon after, like Zumbul Montiljo in Brčko, who swore on Hitler’s birthday celebration the previous year, the rioters would be the first victims of Nazi rage. After the celebrations, a rather carefree atmosphere in Belgrade, described in the previous chapter, turned into anxiety and war preparations. From every village and hill, men poured to the recruiting centres singing rude songs about the Germans, only to join a horse-drawn artillery trek towards the borders where German panzers were massing. St John noted that they were ‘the fightingest bunch of soldiers in the Balkans, which really meant something, for fighting war has always been to the Balkans what playing cricket is to the English or watching someone else play baseball is to the Americans’.4 Enthusiastic as these soldiers were, everybody knew that theirs was a peasantcart army. Greece was the only ally, and the courage of the Greek people, and its untidy army resisting the Italians the year before, stirred the Serbs, according to Walker. At the same time, he reported that the black market had moved in ominously, and some refugee Jews approached them, as foreign correspondents,

Walker, Death at My Heels, pp. 176–94. Robert St John, From the Land of the Silent People (London: Harrap & Co, 1941), p. 16. Ibid., p. 22.

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offering any rate of exchange just to buy British pounds.5 Within a couple of days of the coup, all foreigners left the country, spearheaded by the most numerous of them, the Germans. As foreigners were leaving, Ruth Mitchell, a handsome American poet, who we met with the Kirsch family in the previous chapter, arrived in Belgrade from Montenegro, and began connecting first with men looking like Četniks, the old guerrilla fighters against the Ottomans. Among those trying to escape in the aftermath of the coup were actress Tilla Durieux and her husband Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, who, despite all their connections, could not gather all the necessary visas and permissions in time. They bought passports from Honduras, and obtained entry to the US, but they needed transit visas. In Belgrade on 27 March 1941, Tilla experienced the putsch and mass demonstrations, about which she rejoiced, like all other European anti-fascists. However, when she returned to, in her words, gloomy and silent Zagreb, Tilla realized that they had to flee immediately, making their way south again, as a middleman promised them a Greek visa from the consulate in Skopje. At the beginning of April, Durieux described the Belgrade railway station as looking like a military exercise ground. Townspeople, peasants, and soldiers, all running in confusion, a tumult of desperate people, piles of suitcases, boxes, bundles, and bags. The train was so full that one could enter only through the window, which she managed thanks to her gymnastic training.6 In Skopje, they were told that they could get their Greek visas only in Belgrade. Leaving Katzenellenbogen with their possessions in Skopje, Durieux decided to go back to Belgrade straightaway. But amid war preparations, the train departed very late on Friday evening, arriving in Belgrade only in the evening of Saturday 5 April. She fell asleep in a hotel and was soon awoken by the bombs. On 6 April, a gloriously sunny spring morning turned into what was later remembered as Belgrade’s Bloody Sunday. Officially called Unternehmen Strafgericht (Operation Punishment), this was a Hitler’s retribution for the coup d’état. The undefended and unprepared city was heavily bombed by German planes, leaving more than three thousand dead. Bombing continued until Tuesday, and then again for another two days, causing the destruction of almost fifty per cent of Belgrade housing. Amid the first screams and confusion, Theodor Csokor, who had already experienced escaping from Austria, Poland, and Romania, went for his heavy haversack with the instinct to run immediately. The porters helped him, refusing any tip.7 Walker described how Walker, Death at My Heels, p. 185. Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre, pp. 348–51. Walker, Death at My Heels, pp. 196–98.

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some Polish (Jewish) refugees were trying to climb on to the lorries evacuating the British Legation, but they were pushed off at revolver point.8 A few others escaped from Šabac and other internment camps, and headed south, but most stayed put. With a few other people, Irene Grünbaum, née Levi, from Darmstadt, who had already been naturalized in Belgrade by marriage to Bobby Eskenazi, ‘borrowed’ a car from a garage damaged by a bomb blast. They only wanted to get out of the Belgrade inferno: ‘Damaged streetcars were scattered like broken toys’, and passing by the marketplace, they ‘caught sight of dead women, their baskets containing apples, vegetables, and eggs overturned.’9 Escape from Belgrade was most vividly and dramatically described in Durieux’s memoir. With just a purse and three buns she took from her hotel, the once famous actress hid with complete strangers in Belgrade cellars for a day, before realizing that she had to escape the burning hell that the city had become: We ran, as fast as we could, through the streets, over dead bodies, horses and dogs, we ran through the suburbs, crawled into a small house as the bombs fell over us, we ran into the fields, we ran away from rail tracks, we ran for 8 hours non-stop and then we reached a small house, and my feet could not move any longer.10

Durieux ran in the direction of Skopje, where she left her husband trying to reach Greece. The next day, everything was covered in snow and the bomb attacks continued. Stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere, she was joined later that evening by two more young women who spoke French. One was a tall and slim blonde, and the other rather small, chubby, and dark-haired. Exhausted, the three women decided to head further together to Niš, despite the snow. Soon, however, Tilla discovered that the two women stopped every couple of hours, lifted their dresses and injected morphine into their thighs. Angela, the blonde woman, and Lilly, the dark-haired one, were Viennese Jews, who had escaped to Belgrade after the Anschluss, married Serbian men for papers, and were now again on the run, but not always ‘on the ground’, as Durieux realized. They spoke French in order not to be taken for Germans. Nevertheless, when they reached Velika Plana, some ninety kilometres south of Belgrade, the three women were arrested on suspicion of espionage. With their lives hanging by a thread, Tilla admitted that she was also ready to inject morphine, but eventually the women were saved by an officer’s beautiful and Ibid., p. 197. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, p. 4. Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre, p. 354.

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elegant daughter, who spoke French. The Yugoslav officer warned them not to wander further, and instead to hide from the advancing Germans in the hills. There, they were taken in by a local peasant, Milan Simić, who opened his house near Smederevska Palanka. In a house full of flies, sleeping on straw beds, Tilla felt as if she was in the best hotel she had ever stayed in. The women could wash and eat and stay warm, recovering fully with a family of strangers. The three women celebrated Easter with other villagers, going to the Orthodox church for a service. It was there that Durieux cried for the first time, immersed in worries about her husband, left alone in Skopje, and her situation.11 The Germans had by then conquered the country, and the three women had no choice but to return to Belgrade and explore what to do next. When they boarded a German military train to Belgrade, Durieux overheard the German soldiers, and recognized the same conversations she knew from the First World War: The English would soon ask for ceasefire, the Russians are unfit and cowardly, the French did not deserve even to be mentioned: everything I already heard, everything already said to the sacrificed fathers of these new victims that were to be sacrificed.12

Back in Belgrade, after only a couple of weeks, the women were shocked to see the Jews forced to clear the piles of rubble from the bombing, and already wearing yellow stars. Angela proposed to stay in her old house, but they found only the walls remaining. Instead, they spent the night freezing in an abandoned house. The next day, a group of soldiers brutally kicked them out, and, in the fear of curfew, the three women rushed into the Jewish Community building in the old town. The partially damaged building was already totally full. There was no air, children were crying, and people murmured in all possible languages, staring at them from corridors and overcrowded rooms. Angela knew the lady housekeeper, so they could spend the night in the kitchen, squeezing between the stove and cupboards on the floor, one next to another. The whole night, they could hear the gunfire, screams, and roar on the street. Sleepless and frightened to death, Durieux decided she had to leave dangerous Belgrade instantly. Help came in the person of Milan Marić, a wealthy Zagreb Jew, already mentioned as an honorary Turkish consul.13 Marić issued her with a provisional travel document and gave her money. Yet to go to Skopje, occupied Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre, pp. 354–60. Ibid., p. 375. Marić was saved by the Turkish ambassador and fled to Istanbul, but his siblings were killed in tragic circumstances. They were related to the richest and most prominent

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by Bulgarians, was impossible, so she decided to go back to Zagreb. She was thankful to Angela and Lilly, knowing that she would not have been able to survive the chaotic days after the assault on Belgrade on her own. But they were also difficult: ‘One moment they were tenderly caressing, the other they cursed each other like drunken chauffeurs, but mostly they were unseemly, loud, and quarrelsome.’14 Both women came from good Viennese families, as Durieux immediately found out, but morphine transported them beyond real life. Unfortunately, she could not find out what happened to them after she left Belgrade. Given their vulnerability, there is a little chance they could survive.15 Trude Binder and her husband from Vienna were also caught in bombing soon after they landed in Belgrade. Hiding with complete strangers, they stole some sugar that would keep them alive for days. Eventually, the Binders joined other Belgradians fleeing from the burning city to the south. In their retreat, they came across the Yugoslav Chief Rabbi Isak Alkalaj, who with his family managed to escape to Turkey via Bulgaria, but the Binders had no money, no papers, and nothing but the sugar cubes they had taken from a smashed store. Instead, they joined another group of Jewish refugees from Poland, hoping to move better in company. Yet, like Durieux, they were stopped by the remnants of the Yugoslav army, and arrested for speaking German, suspected of being fifth columnists or Yugoslav Germans (Volksdeutsche). After a few days, when the confusion had cleared, they were taken into houses by the Serbian peasants, only soon to find out, just like Durieux and her companions, that the Nazis were everywhere.16 Some ran in the opposite direction, such as Herman Kroll with a couple of other Polish Jews from their internment camp in Kuršumlijska Banja (spa) in south Serbia. They walked for eight days northwards to Belgrade in the midst of the Nazi invasion and Yugoslavia’s collapse. ‘If you said you were a Pole, Yugoslavs gave you food’, Kroll explained about his journey. From Belgrade, the young men crossed clandestinely into Croatia and then to Ljubljana, where the Italian authorities placed them in the Cukarna (sugar factory) refugee camp ran by the Red Cross, and they were later transferred to Ferramonti camp. ‘You could breathe when you got to the Italians’, concluded Kroll about their journey.17 Their escape was so illogical and dangerous, but their young age and the fact that they had nothing to lose helped them to survive. They moved quickly while the country was still in turmoil, before Jewish family in Zagreb, the Alexanders. See Ivan Mirnik, ‘Obitelj Alexander ili kratka kronika izbrisanog vremena’, Radovi. Zavod za hrvatsku povijest, 28 (1995), pp. 96–127. Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre, p. 361. Yad Vashem database lists several women from Austria named Angela or Lilly who perished in the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, so their precise identities could not be established. Trude Stern Binder, A Survivor’s Memoirs of the Holocaust, pp. 3–5. The Wiener Library, Konin Interview 37: Hermann Kroll, GB, 1988, 28A.

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tighter controls and outright repression of Jews began in earnest. Around forty to fifty remaining Polish Jews in Kuršumlijska Banja fled to Priština/Pristina, which was taken by the Italian Army. Time and again, Jewish refugees from Poland behaved differently than Yugoslav or German Jews. When Pollatschek arrived in Italian-held Split, among the first German Jewish refugees to do so, he found the rooms of the synagogue and community centre were already taken by the Polish Jews.18 In the meantime, the columns of people fleeing their homes multiplied throughout the country. Just a couple of days after a Radio Belgrade programme was cut off mid-broadcast while the capital was bombed, Ben-Amnon observed the columns of German soldiers passing through the Schlesinger estate in Donji Miholjac in North Croatia. Yugoslavia was overtaken so quickly that no one was prepared. Adolf and Dora Schlesinger with their three children quickly escaped, all cramped on a single coach. Yet they were the only ones to have saved themselves, abandoning everything. The other personnel and many employees, including refugees that the family had taken on board, remained in fear and disbelief.19 For Ben-Amnon, it was a déjà vu of Prague, including locals who greeted the Nazi troops on their three-day parade with flowers and sweets. Pollatschek was escaping from his internment in Derventa on a crowded train to Sarajevo, annoyed by his fellow traveller, Fischl, who did not bother to learn Croatian during his exile, and, as we saw, speaking German could endanger both.20 People were boarding trains transporting soldiers for free, or simply walking alongside the railway tracks. Alfred Missong, in exile as a child with his Austrian anti-fascist family in one of the biggest Yugoslav German settlements, Futog, near Novi Sad, watched columns of deprived Serbian expellees from occupied Bačka, dodging through the town. Local Germans lined up to cheer their misfortune. His father, Austrian politician and journalist Alfred Missong (senior) predicted: ‘All those that line the streets and ogle at refugees will soon go through the same and be expelled as the roles change.’21 Condemning the Yugoslav German minority’s association with Nazism, Missong sounded a fearful omen of things to come. Most people were fleeing from the advancing German army towards the country’s interior. Sarajevo, hidden among the Bosnian mountains, was expected to hold out the longest. Yet what St John discovered was a city of bleak desperation:

Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 45. Ben-Amnon, Wurzel aus dürrem Erdreich, p. 25. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 30. Alfred Missong, ‘Als Emigrant in Futog’, Zwischenwelt (2010), 1–2, p. 62.

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As a group of British and American journalists and diplomats drove out of Sarajevo, many refugees, including Csokor, were begging to be taken on board. But there were not enough cars and no petrol, and German planes continued bombing. The convoy fleeing Sarajevo eventually reached the Adriatic coast in Montenegro, where the British aircraft only evacuated the diplomatic personal, leaving hundreds of journalists, Yugoslav pilots, and civilians behind. A few others managed to sail some makeshift boats and dinghies south to Greece in an adventure that begot many books.23 Aged just seventeen, Boža Rafajlović and a group of Belgrade Jewish and Serbian youths did not want to flee, but instead to join the Yugoslav Army defending the country. After they were refused by the units in the vicinity of Belgrade, they took the freight train hoping for more luck in Sarajevo, where the army and the government also retreated. By the time they reached Sarajevo, it became much worse. Rafajlović’s group and hundreds of other Jews and Gentiles fleeing Belgrade, Sarajevo, and other cities, joined the convoy reaching Montenegro, but they could only watch in disbelief as a couple of British hydroplanes evacuated just a few people, leaving all the rest stranded.24 It was even worse for those who remained in Sarajevo, such as a group of Hashomer Hatzair youngsters from Novi Sad trying to escape to Palestine, but without any means or guidance. Others managed to get further west and made it all the way to Mostar, but when they got there, they found its station destroyed and the rest of the railway towards Dalmatia broken, so they had to return to Sarajevo, only to find Germans already in charge. The Viennese family St John, From the Land, pp. 84–85. Besides Walker and St John, Ruth Mitchell wrote a book, The Serbs Chose War, describing the events. The British who remained were eventually arrested by the Italian forces, but placed in a hotel and treated well before they were finally evacuated. The negotiator between the British and Italians was Hugh Seton-Watson, future SOE agent and Russia expert, and the son of Robert Seton-Watson, the greatest British Balkan expert. Walker, Death at My Heels, p. 223–29. Interview with Boza Rafajlovic. USHMM Collection, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation.

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Levi fled from Zagreb to Sarajevo, hoping that its Sephardic community would offer more safety than anti-Semitic Germans and Ustaša sympathizers in Zagreb. They were shocked to see some young Muslims pointing the Germans to Jewish houses.25 Just days after the Germans took Sarajevo, Ustaša Croats and Muslim gangs were ransacking Jewish shops, and they set the Grand Sephardic temple on fire.26 Singer and other Belgrade and Novi Sad youths were so scared by the scenes in Sarajevo and Mostar that they decided to return to Belgrade, or wherever they had fled from. Very soon, Sarajevo would become the site of the worst slaughters, but also some of the riskiest rescues.27 Following the German invasion of Yugoslavia, escape became difficult, extremely costly, and fraught with dangers, if not utterly impossible. Samuel Weiss, a Jewish businessman from Vienna, and once an American vice-consul in Belgrade, was caught in the bombardment with his family. Despite having American citizenship, the family members had to hide in a village near Belgrade for several weeks before they could cross into Hungary. It took them almost a year of travel via Turkey, Iraq, and Syria to Bombay, India, where they caught the last boat to Cape Town, South Africa, and eventually to America.28 The key Zionist helper, Marko Rosner, and his family, who were in Belgrade at the time of the attack, spent a few months hiding in Serbian villages before they found a German officer to bribe to smuggle them into Hungary. There, they were saved by Joel Brand, who arranged for them to be evacuated to Palestine.29 Later on, Brand was also key in rescuing Osijek Chief Rabbi Steckel and his wife, who crossed over the frozen Drava River and were met by his helpers on the Hungarian side.30 For most Jews, refugees, and Yugoslavs, however, escape was by then beyond reach. Similarly chaotic and life threatening was escape from Greece. Most people trying to escape, Jewish refugees included, were fleeing south to the island of Crete or east to the coast of Anatolia (Turkey). There were no longer any direct passenger boats to the USA or Britain, and some Jews tried to board cargo ships ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, Rothschild, Voices from the Holocaust, p. 106. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Überlebens, pp. 32–35; Levi, The Last Exile, p. 74. Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945, pp. 110–16. ‘Journey’s End’, The Reform Advocate, 23 January 1942, p. 11. The Rosners eventually settled in Israel, where Marko died in 1969, after prolonged and futile efforts to clear his name due to the sentence in 1945 of high treason (fifteen years of forced labour) for alleged contacts with the Nazis delivered by Yugoslav courts after the war. His property was confiscated, and Yugoslavia and Slovenia for decades refused the restitution, with Rosner only being rehabilitated in 2013. See Boris Hajdinjak, ‘Marko Rosner kot Mariborčan’, in Maribor in Mariborčani, ed. by Maja Godina Golija (Maribor: ZRC SAZU, 2015), pp. 27–51; Starman, ‘Twice Disowned by Slovenia’, p. 180. Steckel, Destruction and Survival, p. 46.

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to no avail. Some were arrested as holders of German passports.31 In Greece too, Jewish refugees were often identified with spies or the Fifth Column, commonly attributed as the reason for the speedy collapse of the Greek Army on 20 April, just like the Yugoslav three days before it. Anyone speaking German was believed to be a spy. American reporter St John, who was among those who arrived in Crete, wrote: Every day for weeks small Greek caiques had been putting into the many coves and harbours scattered round the island. Each boat had a few passengers. Maybe five. Maybe twenty-five. Some of them were legitimate refugees from places like Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. And from Greece itself. A lot of them were Jews. But most of them were German agents.32

Among those supposed to be evacuated with the help of the British Military Attaché, according to Rudolf Rosenbaum, were recent arrivals from Vienna, Dr Hermann Alexander-Katz, Walter Pfeffer, former concert master at Wiener Volksoper, and Renato Mordo, theatre director with the last post at the Deutsches Theater in Prague. But the latter two, both employed by the King’s Theatre (Greek National Opera) remained in Athens, and even worked until 1943.33 Many simply did not dare to leave the Piraeus port under bombs. Indeed, a ship carrying four hundred people, including many refugees, became a victim of air attack while still in Piraeus harbour.34 A rare successful case of rescue was the group of some twenty Central European Jews, previously refugees in Athens, who were evacuated to Crete on the insistence of the Greek royal family.35 By late May, as Germans were attempting to land on Crete, they Rosenbaum, The Diaries 1936–1948, p. 52. St John, From the Land, p. 228. Mordo remained in Athens and continued to work under a pseudonim until he was arrested in 1944. By that time the Greek Partisans had already cut the transport lines, preventing his deportation from Chaidari camp. Pfeffer was also allowed to work, under the condition that his name did not feature anywhere. In 1943, he fled to Palestine after the Italians left. Pfeffer and Mordo were allowed to work in the National Opera, as there was no one else to replace them. Both men later helped revive musical life in post-war Greece. The State Orchestra of Athens also employed two refugees from Germany, conductors Franz von Hoesslin, who lost his post in Bresslau due to having a Jewish wife, and Leo Borchard, another prominent anti-Nazi. See Alexandros Charkiolakis, ‘Music and Musical Life in Occupied Athens’, in The Routledge Handbook to Music Under German Occupation, 1938–1945: Propaganda, Myth and Reality, ed. by David Fanning and Erik Levi (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp 74–87 (pp. 78–79). Rosenbaum, The Diaries 1936–1948, pp. 56–60. Yitzchak Kerem, ‘The Greek Government-in-exile and the Rescue of Jews from Greece’, in Governments-in-Exile and the Jews During the Second World War, ed. by Jan Láníček and James Jordan (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013), pp. 175–96 (p. 179).

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were transported to Egypt on a British submarine, along with the royal family and the gold of the Bank of Greece.

Occupation and Implementation of the Holocaust Soon after Yugoslavia’s defeat, the country was carved up. Large portions of Yugoslavia inhabited by ethnic minorities, whose patron states Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria had harboured revisionist policies ever since the Versailles Peace Treaty, were attached to these fascist or quisling states. Hitler and Mussolini also used Yugoslavia’s key interwar political battleground between the Croatian autonomists and/or separatists on one side, and Yugoslav unitarists and Serbian nationalists on the other, by awarding the former an independent state. However, the Croatian state was not to be led by its primary political force, the Croatian Peasant Party, as its leader declined the offer, and its ministers fled the country along with the King and the rest of the government. Instead, power over territories of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina went to a little-known fascist group called Ustaša (a term used for rebels or insurrectionists), with no credentials except compliance with the Axis leaders, who supported their decade-long exile in Italy. Returning the favour, Ustaša leader Pavelić had to surrender most of Dalmatia and islands to his Italian sponsor. To strengthen their new puppet state, the two Axis powers also divided it into two spheres of supervision and military occupation, with Germany to the north and east controlling historic Croatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia, and Italy in charge of the rest of Dalmatia and Herzegovina in the south and west, where the Italian presence offered varied degrees of protection for Jews and Serbs, as will be seen later. Greece also succumbed, despite the presence and participation in its defence of approximately forty thousand British (and Australian) troops, with only about half of them surviving it, while the rest died fighting, sank in the evacuation boats, or were taken prisoner. Large parts of Thrace and other areas in northeast Greece were occupied by Bulgaria, Italy occupied the south with Athens and the country’s western coast, while Germany occupied central parts, including Thessaloniki, with the largest Jewish (Sephardim) community in the whole of the Balkans. The division of Yugoslavia and Greece into separate areas determined the fate of the Jews, with the Italian-controlled areas being the only places where Jews faced no persecution. Most of the Jewish refugees elsewhere fell victim to the Nazi Final Solution, along with local Jews, during the next four years. But it did not look this way at the very start. The establishment of the Ustaša collaborationist Croatian state initially saw no consequences for German

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Jews, and the German consulate in Zagreb extended their passports. There was also a significant difference from the notorious experience of Viennese Jewry after the Anschluss, or later in the Czech Protectorate and throughout occupied Europe, when local Gentiles participated widely in anti-Semitic humiliation and pogroms. In both Yugoslavia and Greece, attacks by civilians on Jews were extremely rare, and in a few recorded instances they were perpetrated by Nazified ethnic Germans.36 As a result, some refugee Jews indulged in the same naivety as the Yugoslav Jews, even though they had already lost their homelands, houses, businesses, and other possessions. In Zagreb, many acquired certificates of baptism from the Catholic Church for a bit of money in the hope that this would be a magic bullet. When Werner Reich later showed the Gestapo his certificate, they laughed at it and tore it up.37 The subsequent onslaught on Jews in Zagreb came to many as a surprise, because the Ustaša came from exile in Italy, where anti-Semitic laws were scarcely applied, and where Jews experienced little persecution. Zagreb, like the rest of Yugoslavia before the war, displayed hardly any visible signs of anti-Semitism.38 Some leading Ustaša had links, even spouses, who were Jews. Following their interwar political trajectory, the primary targets of the new Ustaša fascist regime in Croatia were ethnic Serbs and Yugoslav unitarists.39 Nevertheless, Ustaša adopted the anti-Semitic drive of their Nazi political Maecenas, which they began to implement with such an intense and heinous vigour that they eventually stunned even their mentors.40 Another group that competed with Ustaša in the levels of bestiality and brutality were the Volksdeutsche (Yugoslav German minority), although their radius was limited to areas where they lived. Jews in Belgrade and heavily For example, on 13  April, a mob of local Germans and Ustaša burned the main synagogue and destroyed the Jewish cemetery in Osijek. For more on Croatia, see Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p.  42; for Belgrade, interview with Sara Alkalaj, USHMM Collection, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation. Rauscher, The Death Camp Magicians, p. 65. ‘Eyewitness Account by Joseph Zamora of His Escape from Germany to Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Italy’, Wiener Library, 1656/3/9/222; Interview with Werner Reich. For an analysis of the at times controversial historiography of the issue, see Dejan Djokic, ‘The Second World War II: Discourses of Reconciliation in Serbia and Croatia in the Late 1980s and early 1990s’, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 4/2 (2002), 127–40. For disputes on the number of victims, see Josip Jurčević, Nastanak jasenovačkog mita: problem proučavanja žrtava Drugog Svjetskog rata na području Hrvatske (Zagreb: Hrvatski studiji Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 1998). For the history and analysis of Ustaša anti-Semitism, see Nevenko Bartulin, Honorary Aryans: National-Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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German-populated Banat in north Serbia were mobilized into labour units immediately after the invasion. In Vršac, they were purposefully humiliated by being made to clean the septic tanks, while their German neighbours and former friends pretended not to recognize them.41 Only local Serbs were sympathetic to Jewish plight. Pollatschek, an Austrian Jewish refugee who observed Yugoslavia as an outsider, suggested that previous good relationships between Serbian and Jewish merchants and elites, and their prominent status in trade and industry, were an excuse for the severe anti-Semitism and anti-Serbism of many Croatian and German peasants, who filled the Ustaša and Nazi ranks. On the other hand, urban bourgeois Croats and Germans were repulsed by the crimes of their co-nationals, and many assisted Jews and Serbs in their flight or hiding.42 Irene Grünbaum described the general population of Belgrade suffering as much as the Jews, but still helping them whenever they could, visiting, bringing bread, shopping, and water, the supply of which was cut for months after the bombing. On the other hand, the local Germans, or the Schwaben as she called them, laughed and shouted at them, humiliated girls and women, and made a sport of harassing old Jews, hitting them in the street for no reason.43 In June, the American Jewish World similarly concluded, via Istanbul, and citing German Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia as sources, that the Nazi acts of brutality against Serbs and Jews had brought together these two peoples in an unbreakable friendship, ‘the sole beacon of hope in a country filled with repression and horror’. Further, it reported that Serbian women, in defiance of Nazi orders, ventured to the special labour camps for Jews and brought food to the half-starved inmates. In the period of strict rationing, according to these reports, Serbs, who were receiving slightly larger food and clothing allowances than Jews, shared their portions with their Jewish neighbours. Other stories included Serbs helping Jewish shopkeepers to save their stocks from Nazi confiscation and endangering their lives by concealing persons being hunted by the Gestapo. Finally, the refugees reported the first guerrilla bands, alluding to Četniks, sworn to fight Nazism.44 Initiated as a resistance movement of those who refused to surrender, Četniks became recognized as the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, led by Colonel, and then General, Draža Mihailović. A loyalist, monarchist, and anti-Axis movement, in 1941, the Četniks engaged in resistance together with Communist-led Partisans, but after few months opted for Singer, My Father’s Blessings, p. 63. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Überlebens, p. 41. Grünbaum, Escape Through the Balkans, p. 10. ‘Nazi Acts Strengthen Serb–Jewish Friendship’, The American Jewish World (6 June 1941), p. 1.

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tactical postponement of military operations due to German reprisals. Soon after, the Četnik detachments entered selective collaboration with the Italians, and some even collaborated with the Germans.45 Once fighting stopped and train connections reopened, many Jews attempted escapes again. From nightmarish Belgrade, Durieux crossed by ferry to Zemun, already part of the Ustaša state, where she could board the train to Zagreb, but then had another horrific experience when all the men were taken off the train. While Tilla Durieux managed to get to Zagreb by train, Trude Binder went even further – to Ljubljana, and without any resources.46 Aboard one of these first restored trains were also Reuben Hecht and Edit Zilzer, who got married in Belgrade just before the bombing, while Hecht was organizing illegal transports to Palestine.47 Once in Zagreb, the Hechts stayed at the Hotel Milinov (now Hotel Dubrovnik on Zagreb’s central Jelačić square), which also served as the German Headquarters, before they escaped to Italy.48 The owners of the hotel, four members of Serbian family Milinov, were brutally murdered by Ustaša only a couple of months later, along with the first Jewish victims executed on the island of Pag.49 In a miraculous way, Ernst Pollatschek obtained a document from a local German Army commander in Užice that said: ‘Herr Dr Ernest Pollacek, deutscher Staatsangehöriger aus Wien, der nach Rumänien will, kann hier frei passieren’ (Mr Dr Ernest Pollacek, German citizen from Vienna, that wants to go to Romania can pass freely). A simple note written by an officer who, amid the chaos of war, did not know what to do when asked for assistance would save Pollatschek’s life on many occasions.50 Other German-speaking Jews also managed to pass themselves off as Volksdeutsche, and to escape in the period before occupation was stabilized and permanent authorities established.51 See Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Walter  R.  Roberts, Tito, Mihailović and the Allies: 1941–1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Duke University Press, 1987). Trude Stern Binder, A Survivor’s Memoirs of the Holocaust, pp. 5–6. See Hecht, Edita in Židovski leksikon. For more on Reuben Hecht, see the website of the Hecht Museum in Haifa [accessed 29 April 2022]. The testimony of Nada Feuereisen  [accessed 29 April 2022]. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Überlebens, p.  39. Eventually, Pollatschek was able to get to Italian-occupied Makarska with the help of the same document. Marian Malet, ‘Narrating the Jews of Belgrade and the Second World War’, in Voices From Exile: Essays in Memory of Hamish Ritchie, ed. by Ian Wallace (Leiden: Brill, 2015),

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It seems that a larger proportion of refugees than local Jews took the risk of escape, and thus saved themselves. As we saw, despite several years of warnings, most of them explicitly carried by the Jewish refugees from Poland, Yugoslav Jews behaved like those in other countries where similar scenarios had unfolded before. The routine of everyday life continued unabated. Prior to the war, Yugoslav Jews could travel freely, even to Germany, and were not affected by any anti-Semitic discrimination until the ominous Numerus Clausus, just a few months earlier.52 The refugees, who had experienced persecution directly, behaved differently. As Pollatschek wandered around Serbia in the aftermath of the invasion, he simply recognized the Spanish Jews, as he called them, in their shops and asked for help. Local Jewish communities he encountered in Obrenovac, Belgrade, Pančevo, Požarevac, and Niš were still willing to help (with money or other assistance) a German Jewish refugee, not believing that they would be in danger, despite the first arrests, shootings, and strict anti-Semitic measures being enacted.53 When Božo Rafajlović returned to Belgrade with Italian permits to bring his sisters away to the safety of the Italian occupation, his parents refused to let them go. His assimilated father was adamant that they would be safe, and that it was better for them all to be together at home, insisting that the Germans could not kill them all. Božo returned to Montenegro, but his parents, two sisters, and grandmother perished in less than a year.54 Within a matter of weeks of the start of their rule, Ustaša imposed a series of Nuremberg-style racial laws. Stringent laws, discriminatory measures, and extortion throughout Zagreb and Croatia saw Jews expelled from their homes, and forced to hand in their valuables and property. Extraordinarily harsh measures were taken against the Zagreb Jewish community, shutting their institutions, confiscating property and harassing many, as witnessed by Dr Lav Susman, counsellor at law in Zagreb and a Zionist activist, who provided an early first-hand report.55 Unlike in the rest of what was Yugoslavia, where pp. 244–58 (p. 249). The Rosners from Maribor also managed to escape from Serbia in this way, as told by Starman, ‘Twice Disowned by Slovenia’, p. 180. Dina Rajs recounts how her aunt Erszi and uncle Leo travelled to Sweden via Germany for their son to have an operation on a brain tumor, just days before the invasion in March  1941, obtaining all their visas including the transit through Germany. Stuck in Sweden after the unsuccessful operation, they were her only family members to survive. See Dina Rajs, Ein Riss war im Netz … da kam ich durch (Berlin: Rugerup, 2014), pp. 68–69. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, pp. 39–43. Interview with Boza Rafajlovic. Lav Susman, Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee (manuscript published by World Jewish Congress, Reports on the Jewish Situation, New York City, 20  May  1943). Susman left Yugoslavia on 5  August  1941 and spent nine months in Italy and five months in Spain

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German occupying authorities executed or supervised the Final Solution, in the newly created fascist state of Croatia, the Ustaša were initially directly in charge.56 The first arrests in Zagreb of Jewish lawyers and members of the B’nai B’rith Lodge began already at the end of April, followed by the arrest and deportation of Jewish young men from the Maccabi sport club at the end of May.57 In early May 1941, Ustaša police set up a Contribution Committee in Zagreb, demanding payments from the Jews, and setting a target of one thousand kilograms of gold, or the equivalent of one hundred million dinars. A complex system of contributions administered by the Jewish community caused much bad blood.58 The Committee, made up of the forty wealthiest members of the Jewish community, negotiated (including bribes) with Ustaša officials, who in turn issued at least two thousand leave passes to members of what was then a ten to twelve thousand strong community, including refugees. A subsequent investigation confirmed that the amount someone paid was directly related to securing freedom by obtaining travel permits to the Italian zone. Even for those who could afford to leave, it was not an easy task. Often Jews were robbed during escape, and many feared arriving in a foreign land without any money.59 Others would not leave behind their sick and old relatives and imprisoned or deported family members, with whom they had little or no contact. They hoped that if they remained, they would be in a better position to get their relatives back.60 Finally, besides a risky journey, and relations compelling many to stay, there was also a naive expectation that the repression in Zagreb would somehow fade away. Susman stressed that it was difficult to secure the permits and, in many cases, costly, but emphasized that ‘many more people could have fled, had they not stayed on for the sake of their fortunes, or for sentimental before arriving in the United States, where his report, based on his experience and other eyewitness accounts, was published. Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 113–208. Susman, Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee, pp. 2–3. Some community members were thought to have reported on others to escape their debts or gain advantage. Four years later, the Security Officers of the Allied forces stationed in Bari investigated the accusations of extortions, bribery, and mismanagement alleged to have taken place during the collection of contributions. A full report on the investigation was published in Bernd Robionek, Croatian Political Refugees and the Western Allies (Berlin: Osteuropa-Zentrum, 2009), pp.  274–89. See in detail, Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 153–60. First-hand testimony in Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 396. Testimony of Abraham Kišicki given to the Yugoslav State Commission for the Determination of Crimes of the Occupiers and their Collaborators in 1945, published in Jevreji u Šidu, ed. by Radovan Sremac and Emil Klajn (Šid: GIP ‘Ilijanum’, 2014), p. 96. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 72–74.

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reasons’.61 Paying the contribution, on the other hand, did not secure one from deportations or imprisonment, and neither did conversion. Thousands of Jews in Ustaša-ruled Bosnia and Croatia converted to Islam and Catholicism to no avail.62 Zagreb’s Archbishop Stepinac, very popular among the Croats and Jews alike, and on whose support they counted, found himself unable to intervene with the Ustaša, bound to cause as much havoc and blood.63 The actual implementation of laws eliminating Jews from public life was only occasionally tempered by countervailing pragmatic considerations, such as in the case of much needed physicians.64 Furthermore, some Croatian Jews could be protected by applying for the so-called Aryan status, or if they were married to an Aryan Croat or had one Aryan parent. Around one hundred Jews obtained that status, along with four hundred members of their families. What counted was support for the Ustaša and Croatian cause in the past, family history, and, most of all, personal connections, and bribes to top Ustaša officials, as the final decision remained arbitrary.65 Refugee Jews were equally targeted, but they were particularly vulnerable as most of them had no money or connections. Refugees were also asked for contributions, even if they previously had had to surrender all their valuables when fleeing Germany, and pay the so-called Jewish contribution and Reichsfluchtsteuer as preconditions to leave.66 The most vulnerable were the ones in collective accommodation organized by the Jewish community, as they were all registered and easy to apprehend.67 Among those Maccabi youths arrested first was Viennese born Sam Hochberger (born in 1923). The youths were targeted for allegedly writing antifascist graffiti and collecting material for the Communist resistance in the group led by Aleksandar Savić Alel. The group was deported to Koprivnica, and later Gospić-Pag, the first Ustaša concentration and execution camp, where they were murdered.68 Hochberger’s parents, father Ignatz and mother Maria, Susman, Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee, p. 10. Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945, p. 93. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 411. A few Croatian officials undertook serious risks to preserve the lives of 169 Jewish physicians and members of their families who were sent to rural Bosnia to combat endemic syphilis. See Esther Gitman, ‘The Rescue of Jewish Physicians in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), 1941–1945’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 23/1 (2009), 76–91. Bartulin, Honorary Aryans, pp. 71–78. This was the argument made to Ustaša authorities by Gustav Fall, the chair of Donau-Save Adriabahn-Gesellschaft, who arrived in Zagreb from Vienna in October 1940 after following all the procedures. Both Gustav and his wife Friederike survived, fleeing to Dalmatia and then Italy. See Fall, Gustav in Židovski leksikon. Zločini fašističkih okupatora, ed. by Zdenko Levental, p. 54. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945, p. 391.

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were later deported by Ustašas and killed. Marcus and Hermina Weiss from Vienna were among the first Jews in July to be deported from Croatia’s provincial town of Koprivnica, and eventually perished in the Jasenovac concentration camp, established at the end of August to take over the survivors from Gospić-Pag, disbanded by the Italian Army. Their daughter (Margarete) Grete née Weiss, son in law Heinrich Hacker, and twelve-year-old granddaughter (Gertrude) Gerti were executed by Ustaša on a Zagreb bridge at around the same time, most probably being previously taken as hostages to curb acts of resistance.69 On 9 July 1941, Ustaša executed a number of prominent Croatian and Jewish intellectuals who were known Communists before the war and were also held as hostages.70 This soon became a common practice. A particularly sinister role in denunciation and arrests was played by two Austrian agents of Jewish extraction, Kurt Koppel and his lover Margarete Kahane, who were transferred from the Viennese Gestapo to the German embassy in Zagreb. Their activities extended to Sarajevo and Belgrade and focused on infiltrating and then denouncing hundreds of resistance and Communist activists, including Austrian Jewish refugees, most of whom were murdered following Gestapo torture.71 From late August, Jews from Daruvar, Ruma, Podravska Slatina, Draganić, and other internment centres housing destitute refugees were being deported to Jasenovac and its associated camps (Stara Gradiška, Đakovo, among others), equivalent in their bestiality and deadliness to better known Nazi camps in Poland.72 In September, Ustaša undertook the first massive, planned

Weiss, Out of Vienna, pp. 173–74. According to the only surviving family member, Hans Hacker, who was in Switzerland at the time, the Hackers were murdered, together with other Austrian refugees in Brčko [accessed 29 April 2022]. Among the executed were writers Viktor Rosenzweig, Ivo Kuhn, Božidar Adžija, Otokar Keršovani, Ognjen Prica, and Zvonimir Richtmann. See Ivan Jelić, Tragedija u Kerestincu: zagrebačko ljeto 1941 (Zagreb: Globus, 1986). Hans Schafranek, Widerstand und Verrat: Gestapospitzel im antifaschistischen Untergrund 1938–1945 (Vienna: Czernin-Verlag, 2017). Koppel, under the name Konrad Hans Klaser, was also one of the key German propagandists in the Balkans, publishing two books with Zagreb’s German-language Europa publisher. Kahane committed suicide upon arrest in 1945, but Koppel managed to flee, and was reported in Palestine and Egypt before he disappeared from the radar. Gruenfelder surveyed the remaining archival evidence regarding deportations and extermination of Jews in Ustaša concentration camps 1941–42. Unfortunately, the exact circumstances of death could be established only in very few cases. The databases of Jasenovac victims, Yad Vashem, or Austrian war victims, also contain only some names,

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deportation of over seven hundred Jews from Zagreb to Jasenovac.73 This were preceded by raids which specifically targeted foreign Jews, even if they had valid visas and documents for further journeys. Among them was Dr Josef Jakobowitz, lawyer from Vienna and a decorated World War One veteran. His wife Stella Frischler wrote to Willy Requard, Councillor at the German Embassy in Zagreb, begging for mercy and stating that they had just lost their only child at ten years old. She also assured him that they had obtained Croatian exit visas for Italy. Requard forwarded the appeal to the German Ambassador, Siegfried Kasche, who decided against intervening. Stella herself was deported and later killed.74 Imre Rochlitz and his Viennese relatives in Zagreb were denounced for attempting to leave the city. Just turning seventeen, he was sent to Jasenovac, where he soon realized that he and everyone else was certain to die – ‘either by being shot, knifed, or clubbed to death by an Ustashe guard or by succumbing to exhaustion, malnutrition, disease, and cold.’75 When Rochlitz arrived in January  1942, his stepfather, Friedrich Löbl, deported from Derventa and a distant relative of Zagreb lawyer Lavoslav Šik, had already been murdered, along with countless other inmates. Rochlitz worked as a gravedigger, and after a couple of weeks he was the only one alive from the group with which he had arrived from Zagreb. Soon, he also became one of the handful of documented cases of release from Jasenovac, thanks to the intervention of Edmund Gleise von Horstenau, the Wehrmacht’s Plenipotentiary General to Croatia, who was a First World War veteran acquaintance of his uncle.76 In Brčko, all Jews were slain on the spot. Elsewhere in Croatia and Bosnia, there were street executions, but usually only individuals rather than groups. After committing horrendous crimes against local Serbs, on 10 December 1941, Ustaša troops supported by members of the local German minority, dragged 168 domicile Jews and, two days later, 236 refugees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, previously housed with Brčko Jews, to the banks of the nearby Sava river, stripped them naked in the freezing cold and brutally butchered them with knives and hammers; their corpses were thrown in the river and often do not coincide with the archival evidence of those arrested or deported by the Ustaša state. Sustigla ih Šoa, pp. 141–94. Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 231–35. The letter is published in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp.  382–83. Frischler and Jakobowitz were not among HICEM aid recipients, and it is not clear how Ustaša obtained their address. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 62. Eventually, von Horstenau grew so dismayed at the Ustaša atrocities that he became implicated in the plot to overthrow their leader, Pavelić. The plot failed, and Pavelić and the German ambassador Siegfried Kasche conspired together and effected his removal in 1944. Von Horstenau committed suicide in American detention in 1946.

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or buried in a mass grave.77 Among the victims were more than thirty members of the extended Montiljo (Montiglio) family, including five-year old Isidor and his brother Salomon, sons of Zumbul, who a year before had obstructed the celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Here too, foreign Jewish victims have been only exceptionally identified, such as Margarete (Greta) and Heinrich Hacker with their thirteen-year-old daughter Gertrud(e), who were previously interned in Fužine.78 Simon Josefsberg, his wife Gisa (born Körner), and their son Leo, born in 1931, from Graz, fled illegally to Yugoslavia in 1938. They were followed by Gisa’s brothers. First went the oldest, Markus, who worked as a vulcanizer, and his wife Maria; they escaped to Yugoslavia on bicycles, and later helped other siblings: Arnold Körner, who worked as a locksmith, and Isidor, who escaped with his wife, and their son.79 In the case of the murder of the Montiljos, Körners, Hackers, Josefsbergs, and more than four hundred Jews in Brčko, we also know the name of the perpetrators, identified as Vjekoslav Montani (District Police Chief), Ljubo Palošek (Police Chief), Salko Salković (Police Chief Deputy), Musan Mutavelić, Slavko Oršić, Marko Tubić, Rašid Užičanin, Martin Petrović, and Ante Šimić, all Ustašas. Together with Kulturbund members, they also robbed the victims. Among refugees, only three brothers Feiner from Munich heeded the warning from the Communist party and joined the Partisans escaping the slaughter, but they later all fell in battle.80 After the war, a memorial was erected on the site of the massacre, which was recently replaced, and, along with monuments to the Kladovo transport victims, remains the only reminder specifically commemorating refugee Jews. Among other Jewish refugees interned throughout Ustaša-controlled Bosnia, fifty-eight in Banja Luka, thirty-four in Bosanski Šamac, and around fifty to sixty in Derventa were reported as victims of the Ustaša rampage in Bosnia.81 Zločini fašističkih okupatora, pp. 70–71. Locals were murdered on 10 December, and refugee Jews a week later. For more on the Jews of Brčko and their tragedy, see the catalogue of the recent exhibition prepared by Tamara Vijoglavin Mančić, Katalog izložbe tragom brčanskih Jevreja (Brčko: Odjeljenje za javni registar, Služba za arhiv Brčko distrikta Bosne i Hercegovine, 2020). Grünfelder provides the list of ninety-one victims, mostly Viennese refugees, who were previously interned in Fužine, Von der Schoa Eingeholt, pp. 209–13. According to information provided by his son and brother Hans to Yad Vashem. Gruenfelder lists them as murdered in Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, Sustigla ih Šoa, p. 109. This information gathered by Verein für Gedenkkultur in Graz [accessed 29 April 2022]. Ismet Dedeić, ‘Jevreji u Brčkom: Zločin nestanka i grijeh sjećanja’, in Migracije i Brčko (Tuzla: Centar za istraživanje moderne i savremene historije, 2020), pp.  299–323 (pp. 309–12). Jakov Danon and Verica  M.  Stošić, Memoari na holokaust Jevreja Krajine (Banja Luka: Jevrejska opština, 2010), p. 46, and similarly in Eli Tauber, Holokaust u Bosni i Hercegovini (Sarajevo: Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti, 2014).

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Fifty-eight Jewish refugees from Germany, Poland, and Austria accommodated in Slatina, near Banja Luka, including several families with children, were immediately put under Ustaša surveillance, and in December taken to Jasenovac camp as a ‘threat to public order and security’, according to the official request, with all of them perishing. Before the deportation, they made a plea for group travel to Italy to Ustaša Police, and submitted a copy to the German Embassy, stressing their German citizenship.82 The list of their names, dates, and places of birth is preserved, although spelling and other issues mean that it would require a team of researchers to properly identify them, as many were registered in existing databases as dying elsewhere.83 There is very little evidence of what was going on inside these camps from summer 1941. Pollatschek, who escaped from Derventa prior to the invasion, and arrived in Split in May after a long journey through Serbia and Bosnia, wrote to warn his fellow interned refugees. Within a couple of weeks, thirty to forty out of ninety made their way to Split with passes they bought on the black market. The first ones paid a couple of hundred dinars, the last ones, ten times that much.84 As a result of the sudden arrivals, the Split Jewish Gruenfelder, Sustigla ih Šoa, p. 166. 1. Alpern Abraham (born 1887 Kolomea) 2. Alpern Roza, née Shekhter (1890 Buczacz) from Vienna  3. Auerbach Markus (1890 Wiczyn) 4. Auerbach Chanhe (1895 Skalat) 5. Auerbach Leon (1927 Bremen) 6. Auerbach Josef (1929 Bremen) 7. Benedikt Heinrich (1884 Traunsdorf) 8. Benedikt Josef (1886 Traunsdorf) 9. Eckhaus Abraham (1888 Cholojora) 10. Ehrlich Simon (1901, Sasnovitz) 11. Ellinger Hans (1898 Porlic) 12. Feldmann Paula (1903 Matersburg) 13. Figer Kleryl (1894 Mikulszin) 14. Frühling Chaim (1893 Zmigorod) 15. Hernfeld or Hornfeld Hans (1904 Vienna) 16. Hernfeld Berta (1904 Kiev) 17. Hernfeld Mira (1928 Vienna) 18. Hirschenhauser Samuel (1882 Sarvar) 19. Hirschenhauser Rosa (1888  Marc) 20. Hirschenhauser Adalbert (1925 Matersburg) 21. Hirschenhauser Bernard (1932 Matersburg) 22. Horovitz Benno (1901 Neu-Sauderz) 23. Katz Moses (1904 Lemberg) 24. Katz Cynja (1908 Kazumino) 25. Katz Alfred (1931 Frankfurt) 26. Katz Herbert (1936 Frankfurt) 27.Kornfein Arnold (1888 Lakenbah) 28. Koch Paul (1894 Pressburg) 29. Kuhlberg Moritz (1896 Oswitzim) 30. Kuhlberg Channe (1895 Polonice) 31. Kupfer Leo (1887 Zamost) 32. Kupfer Regine (1894 Kolomea) 33. Kupfer Ingeborg (1922 Berlin) 34. Lindenfold Alfons (1909 Stutgart) 35. Lubadovsky Aron (1883 Auszinowo) 36. Majirovit Seliji (1890 Bukovska) 37. Mayersholm Sigmund (1903 Frankfurt a.M.) 38. Nemon Benjamin (1889 Kropyvna) 39. Pragan Julius (1887 Vienna) 40. Pragan Emilie (1890 Buda) 41. Ritter Mendel (1889 Osvierzin) 42. Ritter Agathe (1899 Escin) 43. Scharf Sigfried (1909 Coski Tošćin) 44. Schneider Karl (1879 Neufeld) 45. Schneider Johana (1892 Kobersdorf) 46. Schnur Friedrich (1904 Vienna) 47. Schnur Hilde (1903 Vienna) 48. Siener Wilhelm (1908 Vienna) 49. Siener Ettel (1894 Sokolovka) 50. Steiner Olga (1899 Vienna) 51. Stern Berthold (1906 Frankfurt a.M.) 52. Triger Heinrich (1896 Vienna) 53. Triger Margit (1898 Lemberg) 54. Triger Johanna (1937 Vienna) 55. Wajsblatt (Weissblatt) Hil Pinkus (1898 Volbron) 56. Wajsblatt Chaje (1895 Krakow) 57. Wajsblatt Toni (1925 Frankfurt). According to Danon and Stošić, Memoari na holocaust, p. 79. As described by Regina Kaminker [accessed 29 April 2022].

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community was overwhelmed, and did what Pollatschek said any other Jewish community in the world already did. They sent a message to Derventa asking them to stay where they were, as Split did not have the financial means to support more new arrivals.85 The exodus slowed as obstacles and prices mounted. Several local and refugee Jews were sent to Gospić and Jasenovac, or were murdered already in 1941. Eventually, those refugees who remained behind in Derventa, together with tens of local Jews, fell victim after they were deported in August 1942, except for one fourteen-year-old boy who managed to escape to the mountains. Men were taken to Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška camps, while women and children were taken to Đakovo.86 Among them was Imre Rochlitz’s mother, Irene, aged forty-four.87 Most other Derventa refugee victims remained unidentified, except for Abraham Schlesinger (born in Poland in 1892, escaped from Vienna to Yugoslavia), Friedrich Schulbaum (born in Vienna in 1888, killed in Jasenovac), mother and daughter Tunk Entner Elsa and Berta (born in Vienna in 1895 and 1922 respectively), Paula Rosenstein (born in Nowe Sielo, Poland in 1892) and her husband (?) Joseph Rosenstein (born in Vienna in 1895). The last two came along with Joseph’s sister, Franziska Rosenstein (born in Vienna in 1892), to Yugoslavia in 1939. Franziska was reported to have married Zagreb Jew David Wessely, most probably for papers, but Wessely was then deported and murdered. Her death record, however, names her as Franziska Milićević in Bosanski Petrovac. It seems that neither of her marriages, first to a Yugoslav Jew and then to a Serb, could save her.88 Yad Vashem keeps records of some of these victims, based on the information provided by relatives, but rarely contains details about how they reached Yugoslavia and how their lives ended. Sometimes this is the case for whole Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, pp. 46–47. Nedžmudin Alagić, Jevreji u Derventi (Sarajevo: Jevrejska zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine, 1996), pp. 28–30, lists the names of over ninety Derventa Jews and where they died 1941– 1942. Rochlitz, who spent the period from April until the end of summer 1941 with his mother and stepfather in Derventa, described a failed attempt to deport the entire local and refugee Jews in early July 1941, Accident of Fate, p. 49. Rochlitz, in Accident of Fate, p. 87, writes that his mother, along with other Derventa Jews, was deported to Auschwitz, although all other evidence points to Jasenovac. The Association of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia were informed that they both perished in camps with the document number 4416289, currently held in Yad Vashem together with the testimony provided by their nieces, with contradictory information about Franziska. One has her as committing suicide in Belgrade in 1944, and the other as being deported from Zagreb. The list of war victims from Yugoslavia lists her as Milićević. How the two sisters were separated, and who Frances married (and how, given that she was already married), remains a secret, like thousands more that the victims carried to their graves.

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families, such as the Adlers from Vienna (Polish-born Gertzen, his wife Rudi and daughter Izabella);89 the Auerbachs from Frankfurt (Polish-born Markus and his wife Chame Secki Auerbach, née Mayrilies, and their sons Leon and Josef, born in Bremen in 1927 and 1929) sought refuge in Varaždin, from where they were deported to Auschwitz in 1942.90 For carpet dealer Simon Rendi (Rosenbaum) from Graz, we know he was deported to Jasenovac from Zagreb and murdered upon arrival in January 1942.91 Arthur Adler, clerk from Brünn/ Brno, Czechoslovakia, and his wife Riya were deported from Slavonski Brod to Jasenovac.92 Viennese couple, David Altmann and his wife Katica, née Gros, were reported by their daughter only as deported in 1942;93 Salomea Amreich, née Liebling, another Polish-born Viennese, was deported from Zenica, Bosnia the same year, wrote her daughter.94 Among three hundred Jews deported from Sisak was also doctor Szerena Wagschal, born in 1901, who came from Vienna in November 1939 with her young daughter.95 By the time Yugoslav Jew Dr Milan L. Herzog, who escaped to Turkey via Split, compiled a report dated 22  April  1942 to the World Jewish Congress, thousands were executed or dying in death camps throughout Croatia.96 According to Herzog, the situation in Ustaša-ruled Croatia (and Bosnia), home to most Yugoslav Jews, was the worst, except for the fact that many escaped towards Italy and Italian-occupied territories. Similar to Austria, Jews in the Croatian countryside fared worse than in the capital. In early summer 1942, Ustaša moved Croatia’s second largest Jewish community of Osijek in Slavonia to a purpose-built ghetto in the suburb of Tenja, which the Osijek Jews built and ran themselves. Even children took part, as Ben-Amnon recalls overseeing geese.97 The nearby castle of Schlesingers in Donji Miholjac overnight . . . . . . Mira Kolar-Dimitrijević, ‘Strani kapital i Banovina Hrvatska 1939–1941’, Povijesni prilozi, 9/9 (1990), 165–94 (p. 178). ‘Report on the Situation of Jews in Yugoslavia by Dr. Milan  L.  Herzog’, The Wiener Holocaust Library, 877.3. Ben-Amnon, Wurzel aus dürrem Erdreich, p. 27.

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turned into Wehrmacht Headquarters, and its synagogue was demolished. The connection to the monarchy and Yugoslav government of the Jewish elites in the regions of Slavonia and Srem was a special thorn in the side of the Ustaša and local Germans, organized in Nazified Kulturbund, as will be detailed in the following chapter. In August 1942, after only a couple of months, Ustaša deported almost three thousand Jews from Osijek, Donji Miholjac, and surrounding areas by trucks to the railway station, where in several transports they were taken to Auschwitz. Ninety per cent perished.98 One of the few who escaped was Ben-Amnon, then a young boy. Pushed around by Ustaša bayonettes, Ben-Amnon was separated from his mother when boarding the cattle wagons and hid. Eventually, he was taken and set free by the Partisans, who were political prisoners in the ghetto.99 After the massive deportations of summer 1942, the reports of the German police and the German embassy in Zagreb clearly indicated that the Jewish question was almost resolved in Croatia, identifying a few gaps concerning Jewish doctors and other experts, which were needed for the new Croatian state, as well as the so-called honorary Aryans. Other exceptions were Jews in mixed marriages. The German embassy reported how those individual cases were targeted by the Croatian authorities based on an entirely political selection. In 1943, the Gestapo and SS took over the Jewish question, making a final push to deport many remaining Jews from Croatia to Auschwitz. Among the few that remained was Elly Reich, convinced that her deceased husband’s Iron Cross and her American citizenship would protect her. Soon after the occupation, she placed her children, Renate and Werner, in the care of friends/resistance activists in Zagreb while she tried to get the situation under control. They survived the initial Ustaša terror and deportations, but in 1943, the Gestapo discovered both mother and son, and arrested and deported them.100 Some Jews were still sent to, and murdered in, Ustaša camps, when Mirko Najman, ‘Stradanje Osječkih Jevreja’, in Mi smo preživeli …: Jevreji o Holokaustu 2 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej Saveza jevrejskih opština Srbije, 2003), pp. 206–19. Ben-Amnon, Wurzel aus dürrem Erdreich, pp.  34–36. According to his testimony, Ivan Ben-Amnon was taken by a Partisan called Nikola, who placed him with his wife Ilona. The family took care of him before he could be sent to Slovakia, where his father was. Interview with Werner Reich; Rauscher, The Death Camp Magicians, pp.  66–151. While Elly is believed to have perished in Graz, Werner Reich’s Shoah trajectory took him to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and eventually Mauthausen, where he was liberated at the age of seventeen weighing no more than thirty kilos. One of the so-called Birkenau boys picked up by Mengele, Werner Reich, survived and returned to Zagreb after the war, and after a few years he emigrated to England, and eventually to the US. His sister Renate escaped to Italy, where she survived. Reich is still alive as this book is being written and, in his nineties, is indefatigable as one of the most prominent Holocaust educators. His

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they were discovered hiding with the Partisans or the peasants. In a final document on the issue dated 22 April 1944, the German embassy praised the Croatian police and Ustaša for their measures taken against Jews, stating that only a few exceptions were made. The police were said to have implemented deportations in a fast and radical manner.101 During 1944, the Germans also took over Dalmatia and most islands, previously occupied by Italy, proceeding immediately to deport any Jews remaining there. Having researched the number of Austrian Holocaust victims for decades, Jonny Moser estimated that at least 1660 Austrian Jews who were stuck in Yugoslavia perished during the war. In fact, he records only eleven survivors, who returned to Vienna – one from Buchenwald, two from camps in Yugoslavia, and another eight who had lived in hiding.102 The recent elaborate study on the fate of Jewish refugees in Ustaša-ruled Croatia by Grünfelder identified several hundred victims, and provided lists of names, although these are far from conclusive.103 It was similar in Belgrade and Serbia, where, by the end of April 1941, Jews had already been registered and ordered to work long hours in clearing out the rubble from bombing in the most humiliating conditions. At the same time, Jewish shops and houses in Belgrade were looted, with Nazi soldiers often sending stolen goods to their families in Germany. Confiscation of property and other anti-Semitic measures followed. Doctor Hinko Salz, a Belgrade Jew who testified at the Eichmann trial, insisted that despite all the troubles at that time, many Jews tried to save their property and belongings rather than flee.104 By summer, there were the first arrests, imprisonments in specially set-up camps, and executions of Jews, again as retribution for alleged attacks on Germans and/or collaborationist forces, in a scenario similar to that most recent TED talk is available at [accessed 29 April 2022]. ‘Report of Ostuf. HELM, Police Attaché in Zagreb, and Report of the German Embassy at Zagreb to the German Foreign Office concerning the progress of the “Solution of the Jewish Question” in Croatia, dated 18  April  1944’. Reference Number: 1655/2429, The Wiener Holocaust Library. Menachem Shelah, ‘Genocide in Satellite Croatia During the Second World War’, in A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, ed. by Michael Berenbaum (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 74–79. Jonny Moser, ‘Österreich’, in Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Wolfgang Benz (Oldenbourg: Wissenschaftsverlag, 1991), pp. 67–93 (p. 74). Grünfelder, Von der Schoa Eingeholt, pp. 213–37. Additional data in Lea Maestro, Logor Đakovo (Sarajevo: Jevrejska opština Sarajevo, 2013); JIM 651, K.24-8, dok. 14. Dr Hinko Salz in the Trial of Adolf Eichmann – The District Court Session, Session  46, part 2, p. 3 .

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of Croatia.105 Emil Sabukoschek, the so-called Judenkommisar, who had lived with Jewish families in Belgrade for years under a false identity, now read off the names of Jewish hostages to be shot.106 Refugees from internment centres were again among the first to be detained. The most alarming situation was in Šabac, where over one thousand people now found themselves in complete isolation. They had endured almost two years of hardship when their transport was halted on the border with Romania. Before getting to Yugoslavia, many went through personal ordeals, arrests, and long spells in Dachau and other concentration camps. Friends from Vienna, twenty-one-year-old Otto Klein and Walter Kornfein, were refused entry to Switzerland, and this transport was their last chance.107 Others, such as fifteen-year-old Ruth Weisz, returned her Palestine emigration certificate because she fell in love with a boy, eighteenyear-old Josef ‘Sepp’ Baumgarten, who was the leader of the City Kibbutz in Vienna. Instead of secure arrangements, Ruth preferred to travel with Sepp on the maligned transport in November  1939.108 Among them were many Polish Jews who fled the invading Nazis and illegally crossed several borders before reaching Šabac. They had no illusions about what was prepared, and many either fled or tried everything in their power to get out of Šabac camp in time. However, most were stuck after a rapid invasion in April. In May, the refugees wrote to the local Nazi German District Commando in Šabac. After the first pleas on 10 June, they came up with a detailed plan for their evacuation, proposing to travel to Lisbon in a sealed transport via Vienna. Signed by leftist Zionist activist Dr Karl Rottenstreich, and a certain Kramer (there were several on the transport, so he could not be identified), the letter stated that their final destination was the USA, and that they were in possession of valid German passports.109 Such a trip was impossible even long before the invasion of Yugoslavia, and the letter remains the act of desperation, if not of utter naivety. Only a month later, Jewish refugees in Šabac were the first Jews in Serbia to be detained on the grounds of their internment camp. By August, sixty-five Šabac Jews were arrested and joined to the group in a manifestation of how closely intertwined the destiny of Jewish refugees and Jews in Serbia Christopher  R.  Browning, ‘Germans and Serbs: The Emergence of Nazi Antipartisan Policies in 1941’, in A Mosaic of Victims, pp. 64–73. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, p. 13. Shaul Ferro, ‘Switzerland and the Refugees Fleeing Nazism: Documents on the German Jews Turned Back at the Basel Border in 1938–1939’, Yad Vashem Studies, 27 (1999), 213. Writing to her cousin Will in Palestine from Kladovo on 20 June 1940, as published in Weisz, Family in War, p. 50. Originally in German, this request was published in Berger, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, p. 348.

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became.110 On 21 August, prominent Šabac doctor and known leftist sympathizer Alfred Koen was in the first group of ten shot in town as retaliation for Partisan insurgence. Jewish refugees were ordered to hang their dead bodies on power poles, having to hang Koen’s body in front of the bank building covered by a large anti-Jewish banner. In September, German commanders in Serbia enquired about deporting Jews to Romania, Russia, or occupied Poland, but all these attempts were rejected as impossible, and instead Eichmann suggested shooting them.111 This was also the approach of General Böhme’s punitive expedition, which saw at least eight hundred and thirty Serbs from villages around Šabac shot. More than four thousand locals were detained. They were forced along with the Jewish men from the camp on a death march across the Sava River, with around two hundred killed or dying from exhaustion before returning to Šabac. Then, on 12 and 13 October 1941, at least seven hundred and twenty-five refugee men and two women from the camp, along with twentythree local Jewish men and eighty-four Roma and several Serbs, were executed by the village of Zasavica, on the banks of the river Sava.112 The remaining Jewish children, women, and elderly, at least three hundred and twelve of them, were kept in Šabac camp in agony, only to be joined by a group of Serbian Jews from the nearby town of Obrenovac. On 26 January the following year, in one of the most brutal and criminal acts of Nazi rule in the Balkans, they were marched to Staro Sajmište concentration camp, with several children and older women freezing to death on the eighty-kilometre route. Eventually, they were gassed or died of starvation and cold along with other Serbian Jewish women and children.113 Altogether, at least 1011 German, Austrian, Polish, and Czech refugee Jews interned in Šabac fell victim, along with thousands of Serbs and Roma, in a brutal Nazi retaliation campaign merged with the Final Solution that was first implemented in Serbia. Among a handful of survivors was Gertrude Najmann, who only admitted she was German when being boarded on a gas van, and who was subsequently released as ‘Aryan’.114 She survived the rest of war in Belgrade, hiding and working as a housemaid. Another woman who survived Staro Sajmište was Hedwige Schönfein, who testified about the camp

Only a handful of Šabac Jews survived in hiding in Belgrade or as POWs. Milan Koljanin, ‘The Last Voyage of the Kladovo Transport’, in The Kladovo Transport, pp. 428–66 (p. 443). Original documents published in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp. 370–71. Koljanin, ‘The Last Voyage of the Kladovo Transport’, pp. 443–46. Milan Koljanin, Nemački logor na Beogradskom Sajmištu 1941–1944 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu isroriju, 1992); Christopher  R.  Browning, ‘The Final Solution in Serbia: The Semlin Judenlager – A Case Study’, Yad Vashem Studies, XV (1984), 55–90. Najmann, ‘Die Reise nach Palästina’.

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after the war. Although Jewish, she was released along with her daughter after they proved their Swiss citizenship.115 Following Šabac, Jews of Vršac, Pančevo, and Bečkerek (now Zrenjanin) were rounded up during the summer and deported to Belgrade, where they were initially placed among the locals. No one, not even bed-ridden people, were left behind. By November, all adult men from Belgrade and Banat were taken to Topovske šupe military camp, from where they were daily brought to execution squads. There were foreign refugees among them, such as Hugo Theodor Schützer, a medical student from Vienna, born in Stryj (now in Poland) in 1916, although little is known about how and why he ended up in Belgrade.116 From late December, Serbian Jewish women, children, and elderly people were rounded up and placed in the Staro Sajmište concentration camp, which was an improvised camp just across the Sava River on the fairgrounds. By May the following year, they were all gassed in specially designed trucks that drove them across the city to a mass burial site at Jajinci. Elsewhere in Serbia, in the second largest town of Niš, one hundred and fifty-five, mostly German and Austrian, Jewish refugees, who remained in Kuršumlijska Banja, were brought by the Wehrmacht units, and housed among local Jews soon after the occupation. In October, men and boys over twelve were brought to the Crveni krst camp, alongside hundreds of Niš Jews, partisans, and others. On 12 February 1942, the group of inmates attempted an escape, and over a hundred managed to break through the fence, later joining the Partisans. The remaining prisoners, including all refugee Jews, were subsequently executed in Nazi German retaliation on the nearby Bubanj hill, along with a thousand other Jews, Serbs, Partisans, and others.117 Refugee women from Kuršumlijska banja were brought to Belgrade and gassed alongside other Serbian Jews. Often their death registers are the only information available about their existence, and even less is known about refugees among them.118 In June 1942, an SS officer, Emanuel Schäfer, Her doctor husband came to Yugoslavia after the First World War as part of the Red Cross mission, and the couple remained. Cited in Zločini fašističkih okupatora, p.  6. Koljanin identified other Gentile women survivors as Anna Hecht, Dorothea Fink, (?) Zimmerman, Klauber and Eškenazi, although it is not clear if the last one was from Šabac camp or a spouse of a Yugoslav Jew. ‘The Last Voyage of the Kladovo Transport’, p. 462. In addition to basic biographical facts, Yad Vashem displays his photograph [accessed 29 April 2022]. His parents were deported from Vienna and perished. Their story and the list of names is in Zoran Milentijević, Jevreji zatočenici logora Crveni krst (Niš: Narodni muzej, 1978). The list also available at . The refugees from Kuršumlijska Banja are erroneously recorded as Jews from Niš on Yad Vashem database.

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reported to his supervisors that ‘Serbien ist Judenfrei’ (Serbia is free of Jews). In August 1942, Harald Turner, an SS commander and privy councillor in the German military administration of Serbia, in a letter to Karl Wolff, chief of the personal staff of  Reichsführer-SS  Heinrich Himmler, confirmed that Serbia was the first European territory where the ‘Jewish problem’ was solved.119 Paradoxically or not, in Serbia, as noted earlier, anti-Semitism was a marginal, if not an unknown, phenomenon, and many refugees saw Serbia as the most Jewish-friendly country in Europe.120 While the guilt for the annihilation of Jews in Serbia lies exclusively with the Nazi German occupiers, local authorities were not passive bystanders. The collaborationist administration headed by Milan Nedić was tasked to assist German orders regarding the Jews, with gendarmerie enforcing registration, escorting Jewish forced labourers, and guarding Jews and Roma at the detention centres.121 Serbian hostages were initially spared at the expense of Jews, who, along with the Roma, became the most targeted group. In autumn 1941, local police of the collaborationist administration, most notably a special unit of the Belgrade police, who possessed lists of Jews based on the documentation acquired from Jewish communities, issued arrest warrants for those who escaped from detention or avoided registration, and handed over around three hundred and fifty captives to the Gestapo. Serbian police and a special department for Jews and Roma also raised alarm about the trade in fake documents, and alerted that this was most common in the towns in the south of the country, where most people were heading in the hope of escaping to Italian-held Kosovo or Bulgarian-held Macedonia. Most were Serbian Jews, as it was certainly easier for them to find contacts in the countryside, but there were also refugees captured after years on the run. The archive material in the Jewish Museum in Belgrade points to whole families captured and executed, such as the Katzengolds from Cracow, the Kaufmanns from Hanau (on the Main), the Pollaks, Schwartzes, Schreibers and Wasse(r) vogels from Vienna, and the Rosners from Budapest.122 On 3 May 1943, thirtyfour members of the German Roma Blum family (and other families related to them) were brought from the concentration camp in Niš to the Banjica prison in Belgrade, having been previously arrested in Skopje as travelling circus artists. On 7 July of the same year, all of them, except a six-month-old Manoschek, Serbien ist judenfrei is still considered the most thorough work on the subject. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 36. For the full analysis of the Serbian collaborationist administration’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, see Alexander Prusin, Serbia Under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), especially the chapter, ‘Serbs and Jews’, pp. 126–40. JIM, Belgrade, 2369k. 24-1-2/1.

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baby, Paulina Schmitt, and her father Wilhelm, and another baby cousin, Rudolf Kler, who died in Banjica prison, were deported to Auschwitz. All of them perished in Auschwitz or other camps to which they were subsequently transferred. The team of Belgrade historians involved in the preparation of the Auschwitz museum exhibit identified this extended family headed by Karl and Alma Blum.123 With four of their eight children, their spouses and children and relatives, who were also circus artists, they fled to Zagreb, where they were resident when the war started.124 We do not know how and when they escaped Germany, and how they were able to travel from Zagreb to Niš during the war. Their racial outlook and circus occupation made them very vulnerable, as their tragic end demonstrated. From 1942, when the official extermination of Jews was concluded, until the liberation in 1944, Special Police agents aided by the Serbian Volunteer Corps (formerly members of the Yugoslav fascist party Zbor) apprehended at least five hundred more Jews hiding in Serbia, almost all of whom were subsequently executed at the Banjica prison in Belgrade.125 After the almost total extermination of Jews in Serbia, the head of its quisling administration, Milan Nedić, decreed the appropriation of remaining Jewish property, although most of it had already been confiscated or used by the Germans. From the rest, the Serbian administration paid for occupation costs. This information was kindly submitted to the author by the Project Team of the Republic of Serbia for the Preparation of the Joint Exhibition in the State Museum Auschwitz Birkenau. They are listed as Banjica inmates in Logor Banjica: Logoraši. Knjiga zatočenika Koncentracionog logora Beograd-Banjica (1941–1944), II, ed. by Evica Micković and Milena Radojčić (Belgrade: Istorijski arhiv Beograda, 2009), p.  91. The Historical Archive of Belgrade contains further documents related to their deportation and deaths. The deportees were identified as Blum Karl (53), Blum Alma (57), Blum Urahma (20), (Blum) Schmitt Wilhelmina (31), all registered as circus artists, Blum Sigrfried (29) musician, Blum Alfred (36) musician, Schmitt Wilhelm (29, died in Banjica), Schmitt Wilhelm (3), Schmitt Adolf (7), Schmitt Johanna (1), Schmitt Paulina (baby, died in Banjica), Schmitt Selma (46), mother of Schmitt Wilhelm and also circus artists, Schmitt Wilhelm’s siblings Regina (15), August (14), Ana (13), Adolf (5), Blum Siefgried’s spouse Kler Elfrida (18) and son Rudolf (1), Blum Alfred’s spouse, Franciska (24), son Toni (baby), Verna (7), Carol (5), two other children, Richter Heriga (11) and Franz Elisabeth (7), whose parents could not be established, three sisters, Franz Elisabeth (19), Margareth (27) and Lina (23), then Franz Hedwiga (52), Franz Julhana (4), who were also circus artists related to the family; Fisher Lili (22) and her two children, Albert (2) and Reinhold (6), and finally Fisher Franz (54) and Franz Karl (59), who were probably not related to the family, but were part of their circus team. Sanja Petrović Todosijević, ‘The Escape of Jewish People from the Territory of the German Occupation Zone in Serbia, 1941–1944’, in The ‘Jewish Question’ in the Territories Occupied by Italians: 1939–1943, ed. by Giovanni Orsina and Andrea Ungari (Rome: Viella, 2019), pp. 249–70 (pp. 249–56).

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The Final Solution in the Hungarian- and Bulgarian-Occupied Areas of Yugoslavia and Greece Fleeing to Hungary was much more difficult than to Italy, as it involved crossing major rivers – the Danube, Drava, or Tis(z)a – to reach the annexed regions of Bačka, Baranja, and Međumurje, and facing very organized and hostile state apparatus on the other side. Nevertheless, some Jews in Serbia and Croatia who spoke Hungarian or had family connections chose this route. Hungarian Reformed priest János Gacsal in Debeljača, Banat, and others were recorded as doing everything to soften the measures inflicted on Jews, including helping some to procure ‘Aryan’ documents and make their way.126 One of them was Ruth Gutman, née Zaloscer, from Vienna, who we saw in Zagreb obtaining her medical specialization. With her husband, they bought two Hungarian passports in fake names, and crossed from Croatia into Hungarian-annexed Bacska/Bačka across the Danube.127 The Stolzbergs from Vienna, who escaped to Yugoslavia illegally and stayed in Belgrade for six months before the war, and the Weiss family from Ruma, also managed to cross to newly Hungarian-occupied territory, settling in Subotica and Novi Sad respectively.128 However, Hungarian police captured and sent back many Jews, while remaining in Novi Sad or elsewhere in Bačka soon presented similar uncertainties and dangers. In the newly occupied territories, the Hungarian authorities extended their anti-Semitic legislation and expelled all of the non-domicile population, specifically targeting Jewish refugees and Serbs that had moved into these territories in the interwar period.129 There are no data about how many refugees were expelled, but from reminiscences we learn that many went underground or travelled to Budapest in the hope of disappearing in the big city. On  27  August  1941, the Commander of the 2nd Hungarian Cavalier Brigade in charge of Bačka, Lajos Veress, warned that the influx of Jews from Serbia and Croatia would swell the number of Jews well beyond their interwar numbers, and above the number that ‘Hungary can expel over its Eastern border’. In order to prevent what he called a cleansing operation, which indeed happened only few months later, Veress proposed compulsory labour for all Jews, and strict controls of their movement and registration, in order to protect

Susman, Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee, p. 7. Gutman, ‘Through Hell with a Guardian Angel’, p. 17. AHC interview with Alexander Stolzberg, LBI AV Collection (Tapes) (AHC 3965); Rajs, Ein Riss war im Netz. Zločini fašističkih okupatora, pp. 141–43.

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‘morale and discipline of both civilian population and the Army’.130 How difficult to cross into Hungary is further illustrated by the letter of Antal Kovač, the leader of the fascist organization of the local Hungarian minority in Croatia, who denounced Jews Kremzir and Magda Misler to German authorities for escaping across the Drava. On the other hand, from the letter we learnt that the fugitives obtained help from members of the local Hungarian (presumably Calvinist) religious community.131 A reign of terror imposed by the Hungarian authorities in the newly occupied parts of Yugoslavia culminated in the so-called Raid of Novi Sad in January 1942, which saw over four thousand Serbian and Jewish inhabitants of Novi Sad and surrounding areas brutally executed, often on the banks of the frozen Danube with their bodies tossed into holes made in the ice.132 Gutman and her husband escaped death, but her husband’s family was annihilated. She ascribed the brutality of the Raid to the lower Hungarian military echelons who, in addition to well-established anti-Semitism, were motivated by local envy and hate of the wealthy Jewish merchants and rich Serb farmers with huge estates, whereas Hungarians were poor with petty fields, perhaps a cow or a few pigs.133 In fact, most Hungarians in southern Bačka had been colonized by Magyarizing Hungarian authorities at the end of nineteenth century. It was the children of the impoverished settlers who now had the upper hand in crimes. Nevertheless, the murderous brutality of the Raid stunned many in Budapest, so that even its parliament and government ordered an investigation. Those responsible fled to Germany, and only a few were ever put on trial after 1945. Mass killings targeting Jews, such as the Novi Sad Raid, would not be repeated in Hungary and its occupied areas until spring 1944, when Nazi Germany invaded the country, deporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps. In the meantime, the situation for Jews in Hungary remained better than in Serbia or Croatia, prompting more Jews to look for refuge there in 1942 and later.134 A special phenomenon was Budapest, where those escaping from the horrors of war in Yugoslavia discovered ‘theatres and The original Hungarian document was published in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp. 369–70. Original letter published in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, p. 411. For more on the Novi Sad raid, see Zvonimir Golubović, Racija u Južnoj Bačkoj 1942 godine (Novi Sad: Istorijski muzej Vojvodine, 1992); Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 207–15. Gutman, ‘Through Hell with a Guardian Angel’, p. 20. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 101–02. Gutman mentions another Viennese woman doctor, R., who escaped from Croatia to Hungary and who she met again on the transport to Auschwitz in 1944.

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coffee houses full of elegantly dressed and good-humoured people. It seemed, in a few words, a fool’s paradise.’135 Every day, Gutman went to the theatre, as Budapest had very good actors, many of them pupils of Max Reinhardt, whose talents often surpassed those of Vienna. Even the tragedy such as the Raid of Novi Sad did not affect Budapest, with its huge Jewish community, who went on with their lives as ‘if the war didn’t matter to them a bit’, according to Gutman.136 Budapest was mostly spared when Jewish men from the provinces were interned, sent to labour camps or the Russian front, where thousands lost their lives. A month after Hungary was occupied by Germany, which established a Nazi collaborationist government in March 1944, all remaining Jews in the Yugoslav regions annexed to Hungary (Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje) were rounded up, deported, and almost completely annihilated until mid-July, in what was the last and one of the most gruesome chapters of the Holocaust. Some were killed during arrests and deportations, whereas others perished in Auschwitz. Viennese doctor Rut Gutman was deported from her exile in Srbobran, a town in Hungarian-occupied Bačka. Facing the SS and Hungarian gendarmerie, Rut was resolute, as she later recorded: On the way to this location we (thirty local Jews) had to go through the main street and I was sure that many Serb people would watch me. I consciously walked very erect, with raised, head to show them that I still had my pride. When I returned home more than a year later, I found out that they really had watched and seen me, and they were impressed. Serbs are a very proud people.137

The most disturbing element in Ruth Gutman’s testimony is that she and the others on the transport already had knowledge about what was awaiting them at Auschwitz. Gutman also recalled that throughout the journey, there were Germans, including German soldiers and officers, who felt ashamed of what they were witnessing, and tried to help as much as they could. Again, Budapest was an exception, as deportations were halted with the advance of the Soviet Red Army. While thousands of Budapest Jews were killed on the streets or the banks of the Danube, and many others went through an ordeal during the brutal reign of the Hungarian Arrow Cross fascist party that autumn, most were spared. Among them, the two young brothers Stolzberg, previously refugees in Subotica, who survived with the help of Raoul Wallenberg.138

Gutman, ‘Through Hell with a Guardian Angel’, p. 23. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 26. AHC interview with Alexander Stolzberg, LBI AV Collection (Tapes) (AHC 3965).

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From October 1941, Jews in Bulgarian-occupied areas (most of the Yugoslav regions of Macedonia and southeast Serbia, and the Greek region of Thrace) were exposed to harsh anti-Semitic measures, which included dispossession of businesses and properties, and forced ghettoization. By that time, its main city, Skopje, was already full of Serbian Jews fleeing to its relative safety. The local Jewish community was registering them, with most trying to prove some family or business connection, as otherwise the new Bulgarian authorities would not allow them to stay.139 In November the same year, the new Bulgarian authorities apprehended forty-eight Belgrade Jewish men and handed them over to the Germans, who sent them back to Belgrade, where they were executed along with Serbian Jews on 3 December.140 While this was the most known and numerous deportation, there were other instances when Serbian or foreign Jews were handed over from Bulgarian to German occupying authorities in Serbia, and thus sent to their deaths.141 In 1942, the oppressive anti-Semitic legislation was further enforced. In frequent blockades, policemen searched house after house for unregistered valuables to confiscate. Grünbaum described Jews in Skopje become cunning in burying their valuables, and ‘each thought that he was cleverer than the next and that his hiding place was more secure’.142 Then, in March 1943, almost the entire communities of Skopje, Monastir/Bitola, and Štip/Shtip, or 7215 people, were deported to Treblinka in a joint action of German and Bulgarian police, with the latter doing most of the manual work. Skopje was placed under blockade, and thousands were taken away from their houses and marched by foot or on horse- and ox-drawn carts to the Monopol tobacco warehouse on the outskirts. Very few remained, hiding with their Gentile neighbours. Even the famous Muslim hospitality for those in need was absent, as witnessed by Grünbaum, with fear of the Germans being greater than sympathy for the Jews.143 A couple of hundred people were released from the Monopol warehouse and not deported: families with Spanish or Italian documents, upon the intervention of the Italian Consul in Skopje; a few physicians and pharmacists with their families; and Illés Spitz, a celebrated Hungarian football player, who had come to Yugoslavia to work as a coach in 1937, and was saved upon the intervention of colleagues from the football club Macedonia/Skopje.144 Of those transported to Treblinka, nobody survived. Less than two hundred survived by joining the Partisans or fleeing Grünbaum, Escape Through the Balkans, pp. 10–11. Zločini fašističkih okupatora, p. 190. Todosijević, ‘The Escape of Jewish People’, p. 268. Grünbaum, Escape Through the Balkans, p. 14. Ibid., p. 19. Rašela Noah-Konfino, ‘Saved by Our Spanish Citizenship’, We Survived … 2, pp. 427–38.

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to Albania before deportation, with some refugees among them, as will be detailed later.145 In occupied Greece, which, like Yugoslavia, was carved up by Germany, Bulgaria, and Italy, anti-Jewish measures were initiated almost immediately. Homes and businesses were requisitioned, repression mounted, and eventually Jews were ghettoized in Thessaloniki. From 1942, Jewish men were conscripted for forced labour, while the rest of the population faced starvation, like so many in Greece, but with even fewer resources available. On 4 March 1943, 4058 of the 4273 Jews in Bulgarian-occupied western Thrace were arrested and deported to Treblinka, along the Jews from Skopje, Bitola, Štip and Pirot. From 15 March 1943, the transports begun to deport Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, with nineteen transports taking close to fifty thousand Jews, who were gassed within hours of their arrival. The collaborationist Greek government issued two token protest letters.146 The Thessaloniki community, the focal point of Sephardic Jewry for five hundred years, or the Sephardic Jerusalem, as it was described by many, was no more.147 Again, only joining the Greek Communist-led Partisans, or fleeing to the Italian-occupied parts of Greece, offered any chance of survival. Seven to eight hundred Jews joined the resistance, mostly fighting for the communist ELAS, which is also credited with assisting thousands of other Jews who escaped from Thessaloniki and other cities.148 However, after the capitulation of Italy, the Germans proceeded to deport the Jews living or hiding in previously Italian-held areas of Greece. During the previous two years, some three to seven thousand Thessalonikan and other Jews were estimated to have fled to Athens. Most hid with Greek friends and neighbours, in Orthodox and Catholic churches, or escaped via the island of Evia and in other ways to Turkey, Cyprus, and eventually Palestine.149 The latter was a tremendously difficult affair, with logistics for moving on land, Zamila Kolonomis and Vera Veskovic-Vangeli, Macedonian Jews in World War II (1941– 1945), Collection of Documents vol. I–II (Skopje: MANU, 1986) [in Macedonian]. Andrew Apostolou, ‘Greek Collaboration in the Holocaust and the Course of the War’, in The Holocaust in Greece, ed. by Giorgos Antoniou and Dirk Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 89–112. For the Holocaust in Greece, see all articles in the volume above; Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews; and Yitzchak Kerem, ‘La destruction des communautés sépharades des Balkans par les nazis’, in Le Monde Sepharad, ed. by Shmuel Trigano (Paris Seuil, 2006), pp. 907–54; Michael Molho and Joseph Nehama, The Destruction of Greek Jewry 1941–1944 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1965). Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, p. 136. For difficulties in the attempts to flee to Palestine via Turkey or Cyprus, see Alexis Rappa, ‘Jewish Refugees in Cyprus and British Imperial Sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1933–1949’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47/1 (2019), 138–66.

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let alone on sea, hard to overcome, while British intelligence continuously tried to thwart Jewish boat movement from Greece to Turkey. Smugglers charged Jews exorbitant sums to take them to Çeşme in Turkey via Evia, until ELAS and the Haganah negotiated a price of one gold piece per Jew. Eventually, between one and three thousand Greek and foreign Jews were taken out of the country via Evia, although priority was given to Greeks, who were transported with the aim of joining the Greek army in the Middle East.150 Even when in safety, the Jews escaping Greece were interrogated by British Intelligence before being allowed to proceed. Like elsewhere, most Greek Jews remained in the country, and when deportations extended to the rest of Greece and the islands, more lives were lost, with five thousand Jews deported from Athens and continental Greece to Auschwitz in April 1944, followed by another few thousand from the islands of Crete, Rhodes, Corfu, and Kos from June to August  1944, just days before the liberation of Greece. Ultimately, around 85 per cent of Greek Jews were brutally murdered, the highest proportion of all European countries, comparable only to parts of Yugoslavia.

Rescue and Survival Once Greece and Yugoslavia were occupied, their reluctance, even if halfhearted, to join in the all-European persecution of, and discrimination against, Jewish refugees, was finally defeated. As we saw, the Nazi Final Solution was aided by local collaborators and fascists. On the other hand, both Greek and Yugoslav governments in exile engaged in the rescue of the Jews of their respective countries, including foreign refugees. Yet their assistance was limited to statements, and radio broadcasts to their people to help fleeing Jews. Financial aid from their limited resources through their embassies and consulates in Cairo, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and London was only available to those who had already escaped and who approached them.151 The exiled Yugoslav government continued to meet Jewish representatives and to

Kerem, ‘The Greek Government-in-Exile’, pp. 179–82; Bowman, The Agony of Greek Jews, p. 200. Kerem, ‘The Greek Government-in-Exile’, p. 192; Milan Ristović, U potrazi za utočištem: jugoslovenski Jevreji u bekstvu od holokausta 1941/1945 (Belgrade: Službeni list SRJ, 1998) offers a detailed picture of the attempts of Yugoslav Jews to escape abroad, and the efforts of the Yugoslav government and its legations throughout the world to help them, and sometimes foreign Jews too.

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advocate on their behalf.152 In their home countries, there was no support, and almost no way out. In Ustaša-ruled Croatia and Bosnia, as in Germany, exemptions applied to all Jews in mixed marriages, but in Serbia, as in some other East European occupied territories, only Jewish women in such marriages were exempt. In his fictionalized account of flight from Belgrade to Korčula, Sacher-Masoch tackled this largely ignored topic – the fate of ‘mixed’ couples of Jews and Gentiles, and their particular suffering that tested their commitment in the most brutal way, as we saw in the case of Gertrude Najmann, who admitted her ‘Aryan’ background only when facing imminent execution.153 Sacher-Masoch’s Jewish co-traveller committed suicide in Dubrovnik after his Gentile wife decided to remain in Sarajevo, and he could not deal with the abandonment. Rarely a ‘mixed’ family could survive through conversion or disguise, as the case of the Weissbergers demonstrates. During Kristallnacht, they were the target of a terrible attack on their home in Villach, in Austrian Carinthia, which turned into an hours’ long ritual, whereby all their possessions were either stolen or destroyed by being thrown out of windows to the cheering crowds beneath. Bigger objects such as a piano had to be hacked up inside. The father, Egon Weissberger, was arrested and sent to Dachau. After giving up all their property and paying what amounted to ransom dues to the state, the Weissbergers fled to Yugoslavia in March 1939 with their daughter Erika, while their son, Egon Junior, fled via Italy to southern France. They landed in Mostar, where they registered as Protestant, the confession of Arabella, Egon’s wife, before their marriage. The daughter could attend the local Catholic high school for girls. While they lived in constant fear through the long four years of war, they survived and returned to Villach in 1945.154 After the initial window of opportunity, which was probably used to a greater extent by mobile Jewish refugees than by local Jews, their situation drastically deteriorated, and opportunities for escape evaporated. The division of Yugoslavia and Greece into occupied zones, and the systematization of border and general control, meant that from summer 1941, opportunities depended largely on individual ability (financial or otherwise) to procure In November  1943, Yugoslav monarch, King Peter, together with the Interior Minister Miličević, visited Palestine. Besides meeting Dr M. Simon on behalf of the Jewish Agency and the representative of Yugoslav Jewry, Dr M. Weltman, the King also met some refugees, and expressed his concern for the fate of Yugoslav Jewry. ‘King Peter at Communal Settlement’, The Palestine Post, 15 November 1943, p. 1. Najmann, ‘Die Reise nach Palestina’, p. 14. Hans Haider, ‘Aus dem Gedächtnis in die Errinerung holen’ [accessed 29 April 2022].

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fake documents, and on smugglers to get them out. Macabre as it was, Ivan Singer insisted that there was a way out for Jews with money.155 Belgrade Special Police reported rich individuals for acquiring travel documents from the Italian Consulate in Belgrade.156 According to another testimony, it cost thirty thousand dinars to procure identity papers showing that the bearer was from (Italian-held) Dalmatia.157 Unlike his father and the rest of his family, Singer refused to follow what he perceived as the fatalistic orders of Belgrade Jewish authorities implementing German commands, and even reporting unruly detainees, who were then executed. Singer wrote about how women and children left behind naively believed that their loved ones were taken to work somewhere in Germany. Singer and his friend Pavle Paja Ciner (Zinner) were helped by Dr Eshkenazi (Aškenazi), who headed the Jewish hospital, and who arranged the contact for travel documents.158 After Ivan paid for documents for himself, there was no money left for the rest of his family. Even if money was not a problem, escape was only possible by overcoming the huge fear of what would happen to them and their families in the case of failure. Singer gave us a glimpse into the world of anguish surrounding his escape. Amid mass deportation and execution of Jews in Belgrade, Singer spent the last night before escaping with the Levičanin family, having to listen to their constant complaints about how nervous they were about him being there: Every sound in the street sent shivers up and down their spines. They were all pale and full of fear […] Nevertheless, […] as unpleasant as they were, they did not turn us out of their home.159

In early November, with documents handed to them by Eshkenazi, Singer and his friend Pavle Ciner (Zinner) escaped from Belgrade by swinging up into a moving train with the help of their macher. But this was just the beginning of a long journey, where more help and luck were needed. As Emily Greble demonstrated regarding the fate of Sarajevo Jews, Sephardic Jews had a larger regional network to fall back on than did the Ashkenazim, let alone refugees.160 Belgrade and Sarajevo Jews made their way to other Sephardic communities in (Italian-held) Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, and Dalmatia, often relying Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 113–14. Todosijević, ‘The Escape of Jewish People’, pp. 259–60. Estera Stela Margalit, ‘Život sa tek po kojom radošću’, in Mi smo preživeli … 5, pp. 283–303 (p. 292). Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 73–94. Ibid., p. 126. Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945, p. 110.

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on family ties along the way.161 In order to purchase travel documents for his numerous family members, Dr Eshkenazi spent a sum close to the value of a modest house, and only did so after a German colonel burst into their luxury apartment and confiscated all the furniture, which he then shipped to his family in Germany.162 The documents were produced for the huge sum of twenty thousand dinars by a certain Cozincer, an ex-medical student from Belgrade of German descent. Cozincer allegedly collaborated with a German officer, who gave him genuine documents to copy in order to produce the false ones. These included the stamps of the German military authorities, the Italian Embassy, and the Belgrade Police. From these testimonies we also learn about a certain Angelo at the Italian Embassy, who traded in travel passes (lasciapassare) on genuine stationery, with genuine stamps, for the sum of ten thousand dinars, a document which was only good for the border guards on the Italian side. The Eshkenazis had another asset in the person of a German woman, Dr Ruth Bondi.163 She passed through several countries before landing in Belgrade before the Nazi occupation. Already a respectable age, Ruth Bondi had a remarkable look, dressed in a long black dress with a big silver cross on her chest and a headscarf, resembling a nun. It was Ruth who made contact with German officials and the black market, helping them to secure false documents with German stamps certifying that they were from Korčula and returning there. More importantly, she escorted the numerous Eshkenazi family members on their escape journey, which lasted several weeks and took them first to Niš, then to Priština/Pristina and Prizren in Kosovo, and then via Albania and Montenegro to Dalmatia.164 All along the way, Dr Ruth Bondi helped each time there was danger, introducing herself as a Volksdeutsche. This was not a unique case in which rescuers or helpers came from those least expected to do so. In autumn 1941, a German soldier (Volksdeutsche from Maribor) warned the Adanja family in Belgrade (that he knew from before the war) about the imminent deportations and executions.165 Another Volksdeutsche called Bayer was sought after for assisting Jews in obtaining fake documents. Among those Plenty of examples can be found in interviews with Rafael Abarbanel and Rachel Abarbanel, Accession Number: 1995.A.1272.1 | RG Number: RG-50.120.0001; Sara Alkalaj, Accession Number: 1997.135.10 | RG Number: RG-50.459.0010; Avram Avramovic, Accession Number: 1996.171.10 | RG Number: RG-50.426.0010, all in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 104–30. Dr Isak Aškenazi, ‘Doživljaji Jevreja u vreme Nacizma’, New York, 1955 (typed manuscript), JIM 3332, K. 22-7-b-1. Once in Split, the Eshkenazis were transferred to Italy, where they survived the war. Estera Stela Margalit, ‘Život sa tek po kojom radošću’, in Mi smo preživeli  …: Jevreji o Holokaustu. 5 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2009), pp. 283–303 (p. 290).

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also investigated for providing fake refugee papers to Jews was the Catholic Church in Belgrade.166 While the Eshkenazis succeeded, this was not always the case. The fake documents could not guarantee escape, and even Šime Spitzer, Secretary General of the Union of Yugoslav Jewish Communities, was caught trying to escape from Belgrade to Niš with his daughter on fake documents. They were both later murdered.167 Those unable to purchase travel documents looked for safety in the countryside and with peasants.168 In Serbia, the Nazi authorities had issued orders against giving shelter for Jews or their belongings, but the orders were reported as widely violated.169 Children and local Jews had much higher chances to survive hidden in villages, but this were fraught with dangers. Talma Shpancer (née Rena Deutch) from Budapest, Hungary, whose father came to Serbia as a travelling merchant, hid with her parents and sister in the village of Beršići, where her father had previously had some business connection. They did not have to wear yellow badges, and they moved freely about the village as all the villagers knew that the family was Jewish. When they were denounced by someone in April 1942, the Serbian collaborationist gendarmes entered the house and arrested her parents and sister, while Rena hid under a bed and remained with the Stoković family until the end of the war.170 Ava Kadischson Schieber described her time hiding in a Serbian village as the anteroom of hell, but not hell itself, which she clearly located in the camps. She paid for her protection by doing farm work. Amidst pigs, chickens, and dogs on the farm, she hid her family’s Meyers Lexicon, knowing that she had to keep a low profile as her cultured speech would betray her.171 Cultural conflicts were rife in these situations, and they will be detailed in the chapter on resistance. Attempting to escape and hide carried much risk. In early spring 1941, Franziska Tzipora Faigele Weintraub, born in 1888 or 1897, from Cieszanow, Todosijević, ‘Bekstva Jevreja’, p. 72. ‘In Memoriam: Sime Spitzer’ [accessed 29 April 2022]. Many of these cases were documented and published if rescuers were declared Righteous among the Nations. Recently, some other cases involving rescue, throughout former Yugoslavia that for various reasons did not qualify, were described in Milan Fogel, The Righteous without a Medal (Zemun: Jevrejska opština Zemun, 2019). ‘Unrest Grows in Conquered Lands as Red Army Advances’, The American Jewish World, 16 January 1942, p. 4. The Deutsch family were executed soon after their arrest at Banjica prison in Belgrade. Rena Deutsch was taken with other Jewish orphans to Israel. Her story is available online at [accessed 29 April 2022]. Ava Kadishson Schieber, Soundless Roar (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. XIII.

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was travelling via Czernowitz to Lisbon with her three (or four) children. Their escape journey was cut short by the German invasion of Yugoslavia. They left the train, and for a while hid in Lazarevac, near Belgrade, with a certain Danilo Bukiš, until they were betrayed, arrested, and deported to Banjica prison in Belgrade, where they were all murdered. Her children were named as Esther, age twenty-six, Saul Jose (or Elsa), twenty-two, Joel, sixteen, and Viktor, fourteen.172 Just before mass roundups of Jewish women and children in Belgrade, Polish refugees Irene Fisher and her mother Helene tried to escape to Bulgaria with fake papers provided by Helene’s lover, Blagoje Panić. Yet they were returned from the border, and they spent the next several months with a peasant family, acquaintances of Blagoje Panić, who lived near the border.173 Eventually, they had to leave their hideout for fear of being discovered. Running short of food, they were desperately roaming through forest and fields before they were taken in by a group of Partisans. They shared their food with the two women, gave them shelter, and trained them to fight. They slept in huts and cherished the few months, before there was a clash with a group of local Četniks (Četnici) from Vlasotince, who collaborated with the Germans, and captured the Partisan group, imprisoning and raping Irene and her mother.174 The two women were rescued again with Panić’s help, who then brought them back to Belgrade, where they hid for the next two years, considering it to be safer than the countryside, where many Jewish refugees joining the Partisans fell victim to Nazi or other rival factions’ attacks and capture.175 A similar case of rescue by peasants and Partisans is that of Anna Weininger from Vienna. Having managed to get her daughters to England, she only fled to ‘Weintraub Franziska’ at [accessed 29 April 2022]. Interview with Irene Binzer, ‘Segment 2’. Interview with Irene Binzer, ‘Segment#: 4’. Both sixteen-year-old Irene and her mother were repeatedly raped by a local Četnik commander. Fear made them numb and lifeless. Irene’s experience conforms to Sinnreich’s characterization of Holocaust narratives focusing on a wide variety of experiences, including forced labour, ghettoization, beatings, and starvation, but rarely rape. Since rape did not fit neatly into the standard Holocaust victimization, Irene kept it secret for the rest of her life. Even when she shared it in her USC Shoah Foundation interview at a very old age, the interviewer was not particularly interested, or rather did not know what to do with it. Helene Sinnreich, ‘“And It Was Something We Didn’t Talk About”: Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 14/2 (2008), pp. 1–22. This was the fate of Majer and Pesija Levi and their son Jakov, who settled in Yugoslavia after leaving Russia and moving across several countries in the interwar period. They were captured while with Partisans and executed by German forces in 1942, as testified by their daughter, the sole family survivor. Lidija Vasović, ‘With the Partisans in South Serbia’, We Survived … 2, pp. 63–68.

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Zagreb illegally at the end of 1939, after her husband was deported and eventually murdered. In Zagreb in her early fifties, Anna struggled to survive doing menial jobs, but it was through these contacts that she eventually managed to leave the occupied city once the extermination of Jews began. She lived with Ivka Kostelić, for whom she cleaned, until 1942, when it became too dangerous, so she moved to a nearby village, Odra (Sisačka), helped by a local villager and Yugoslav Partisan supporter, Viktor Schlesinger, who claimed she was his sister. By February 1943, her village haven became too dangerous, as its proximity to Zagreb meant frequent raids by Ustaša against the Partisans. For a long time, Anna tried to join the Partisans, but they were reluctant to take an elderly woman. Eventually, the Partisans took Anna Weininger, and even trained her to shoot, although she was never asked to do this. Instead, she was constantly on the run with Partisans in the Croatian mountains, taking care of children, and the sick and wounded. Only after the Partisans liberated more territory was she allowed to stay in the village of Haganj (on the road from Zagreb to Bjelovar). After the end of the war, Anna Weininger decided to remain in Yugoslavia, and she died in her eighties in Zagreb’s Jewish old people’s home.176 It was not just Helene and Irene Fisher who found urban environments safer amid the civil war ravaging Yugoslavia alongside fascist occupation. Viennese Hermann Pohoryles and his wife Wilhelmina obtained fake documents in Zagreb to flee to Italy, but they could not take the risk of bringing their seven-year-old daughter, Suzana Knoll, and instead they surrendered to the care of their friends, a Slovene couple, Vera and Ludvik Valentinčić. All went well until December 1944, when Ludvik and Vera were arrested for supporting the resistance in Zagreb. Ludvik was hanged with forty-nine other hostages. Suzana Knoll survived in the care of Vera’s parents.177 Another Austrian woman, Franziska (Franciska) Brand, fled to Zagreb in 1938, and was later interned in Samobor. While interned, Franziska tried to make some money teaching German to three children of a wealthy widow, Ivana Belajac. When the war brought danger and strict anti-Semitic laws, Ivana Belajac offered for Franziska-Franzi to move in entirely with them. As this was extremely risky, Ivana bribed the local authorities to issue documents for her sister-inlaw, who had emigrated to the US before the war, and submitted Franziska’s photograph instead. Ivana Belajac hid and protected Franziska for almost four years in her home, risking her life and the lives of her children.178 After the war, Anna Weininger’s story is told by her nephew, Ernie Weiss, in Out of Vienna, pp. 152–230. The Slovenian Righteous, ed. by Šumi and Luthar, pp. 68–73. For this and other cases of rescue in Croatia, see Miriam Steiner Aviezer, Hrvatski pravednici (Zagreb: Novi Liber, 2008).

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Franziska too remained in Yugoslavia, and she worked to help the family that had saved her, as the Belajacs had lost their wealth in Communist-enforced nationalization. Another person who stayed in Zagreb after the war, working in the puppet theatre, and who was awarded Yugoslav citizenship by the new authorities for her resistance activities, was Tilla Durieux, with whose account this chapter began.179 Arriving in Zagreb from the ruins of bombed Belgrade, she had to cope with the grim reality of Ustaša rule for years, sharing her accommodation with her host, Zlata Lubienski, another Jewish person, and a French couple. Durieux described Zagreb under the Ustaša and Nazis, who moved into stolen villas, and whose wives wore the fur coats of those expelled or deported to numerous concentration camps. The German officers came to Zagreb with one suitcase, but usually left with wagons full of furniture, paintings, silverware, and whatever else they pleased to collect. Already in 1941, the resistance emerged, supported by almost all intellectuals, what Tilla described as the ‘Red Help’ network, collecting medicines, documents that could be used, and, later, munitions and weapons that were smuggled to Partisan-held territories. Often, resisters were caught, and hanged on the street to frighten other inhabitants. Nevertheless, Tilla Durieux and Zlata Lubienski felt obliged to join the resistance, and they hid supplies in their house or garden, which also had to house German officers, offering a sort of protection. They also kept rabbits, reaching seventy at one point, which provided meat for all those who took refuge in the house, and which kept them busy, which was, according to Durieux, essential to survive. She also knitted socks, shawls, and caps for Partisans and, more importantly, participated in the saving of Serbian children from Ustaša concentration camps organized by an Austrian-born woman in Zagreb, Dijana Budisavljević.180 While helping others, Durieux learnt that her husband Katzenellebogen had been caught by the Gestapo in Thessaloniki and taken to Berlin prison. She tried everything to rescue him, involving his family in Switzerland, his business partner Alfred Schulte from the Schultheis s-Patzenhofer-Ostwerken, and the German officers stationed at their home, Tilla Durieux is one of the few refugees who also made a permanent connection to Zagreb as her place of exile, presenting to the city a valuable collection of artworks, part of a rich collection she acquired together with Paul Cassirer. After her return to Germany in 1955, Tilla Durieux continued her successful acting career, and she died in Berlin in 1971. Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre, pp.  366–76. Lubienski was a relative of Croatia’s greatest Catholic Prelate, Bishop Strossmayer, and thus enjoyed protection. For more on the bravery of Diana Obexer Budisavljević, see Nataša Mataušić, Diana Budisavljević (Zagreb: Profil, 2020); Wilhelm Kuehs, Dianas Liste: Ein biographischer Roman (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2017).

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but nothing could save Ludwig Katzenellebogen, who died in the Jewish hospital of Berlin in 1944.

Instead of a Conclusion Conclusion to this grim chapter is not possible. It has only offered fragmented data about Holocaust victims among the refugees, and the circumstances of their death. Most have not left a trace about their lives, and we can only attempt to imagine their anger and helplessness in their final days. One record we have is that of Peter Schwiefert, who survived the occupation in Greece. He wrote to his mother from the front line in France, where he arrived as a volunteer on 27 November 1944, sharing his feelings: And you see, Mother, what they’ve done to our own people, to all the Jews who hadn’t a chance to get away – what they’ve done to them in the Polish camps and in the ghettos! What those Hunns have done, those Germans, those representatives of their people, men from every class, from the north and the south, of every complexion and character! How they’ve tortured, massacred, systematically exterminated, coldly annihilated! It demands the most terrible vengeance. Those responsible for these atrocities will be judged. But who is responsible? The nation whence such creatures emerged; the spirit and blood of this nation; the human community which allowed such things to exist, to live, to grow, to act, to flourish. Who is responsible? The nation, of course, which gives itself such leaders, perfect representatives of the general vileness, and which chooses them because it recognises itself in them. Yes, they have all recognised themselves: the killers, the assassins of Lublin and the gas chambers, the thousands of killers who coldly shot, mowed down, gassed, buried alive, burnt alive; the populace who followed or preceded the killers, the populace who broke windows, pillaged houses, illtreated, humiliated, beat up; and then those who didn’t know, who didn’t want to know, who let things take their course, who chastely lowered their eyelids while they washed their hands; and finally the mass, the great indifferent mass of ‘decent chaps’, indifferent to the ignominy, the outrage, the radical and irreparable evil that was being done to other men. Yes, a whole people is to blame, to blame because of its mentality, its spiritual attitude, its indolence, its apathy, its contempt for true civilisation, its inability to control its instincts, its innate barbarism, sometimes hidden and sometimes unleashed and which turns a German into a Hun.181

The Bird Has No Wings: Letters of Peter Schwiefert, pp. 126–27.

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Peter Schwiefert was killed in Alsace, five weeks after sending this letter. He did not live to see the trials he expected, or the Germans confronting their past. Throughout his ordeal, Peter Schwiefert remained an ardent cosmopolitan and internationalist. He intentionally embraced all the suffering, and eventually his death, by officially declaring himself a Jew. At the same time, he opposed Zionism for ‘trying to build up a nation […] We have enough of them! […] [Jews] must live among other people to stay fully conscious of their identity. There must be someone to do this job, it’s a very important one […]’.182

Ibid., pp. 169–70. Peter’s mother, Else, made a whole circle from denying her Jewishness to eventually embracing it. She returned from Bulgaria to Germany to stay close to her loved ones, but her world soon collapsed, and she became terminally ill. On her deathbed, she veered to Orthodox Christianity. Angelika Schrobsdorff, Du bist nicht so wie andere Mütter.

Chapter 4

Ruma: The Town From Which All Jews Perished As well as big cities such as Belgrade and Zagreb, many Jewish refugees ended up in Northern parts of Yugoslavia, in the regions of Srem, Slavonija, Bačka, and Banat, whose towns had big Jewish communities along with ethnic Germans, the so-called Volksdeutsche, the largest and most powerful Yugoslav ethnic minority.1 In addition to family and business connections, the German language must have been a deciding factor for some in opting to settle even temporarily in these towns. It was an apparent paradox, as these towns radiated comfort in terms of language, general infrastructure, and housing capacity, but also fear because of political and/or racial tensions. When Csokor wanted to visit Pančevo, near Belgrade, where some of his émigré Viennese friends had settled, he was warned: ‘There the Germans live. Open your eyes and shut your mouth.’2 Unfortunately, much less is known about the fate of the refugees in these smaller towns compared to big urban centres, and this chapter is an attempt to shed some light on their mostly tragic fate. Previous attempts include David Clay Large’s book on the Schohls, one of the families which came to the town of Ruma in Srem as refugees. Based on family correspondence, and the recollections of daughter Käthe Schohl in her conversation with Large sixty years after the events, the section on Ruma in Large’s book is rather limited and at times misleading, as mentioned in the introduction to this book. Carl Bethke provided additional and often corrective information, looking at the archival sources in Zagreb and finding significant documents on the Schohls in his seminal work on Germans and Jews in Slavonija (and Srem).3 In addition to Bethke, there are a few articles and patchy works touching upon the fate of Jewish refugees in other Northern Yugoslav towns.4 Inspired by the existing Among approximately six hundred thousand ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, the bulk belonged to the so-called Danube Swabians, who colonized near the banks of the Danube in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 27. Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache. See Slobodan Maričić, Susedi, dželati, žrtve – folksdojčeri u Jugoslaviji (Pančevo, Belgrade: Connect&Media Marketing International and Centre for Documentation of Vojvodina Germans, 1995); Teodor Kovač, ‘Banatski Nemci i Jevreji’, Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja 9 (2009), pp. 23–87; Aleksandar Stanojlović, ‘Tragedija banatskih Jevreja za vreme Drugog svetskog rata’, Jevrejski almanah (1959–1960). godinu, pp. 129–36.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_005

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investigation of the fate of the Schohls, this chapter will provide more contextual information from available archival records, the work of local historians, and the recollections of the few survivors. Its rather gruesome portrayal of the fate of Jewish refugees in Ruma is to a great extent typical for the rest of Slavonija and Srem, the lowlands of the Independent State of Croatia, where the Holocaust reached one of the deadliest dimensions in all of Europe with ninety per cent of its Jews murdered.5 Told by Large, the Schohl family story is one among many about deeply assimilated German Jews who refused to confront the reality of rising Nazism. Putting off his family’s departure from Germany, Max Schohl, decorated German war veteran, wealthy businessman, and president of the Jewish community of Flörsheim, believed that the Germans would eventually come to their senses and get rid of Hitler and his barbarous policies, especially discrimination against and persecution of some of Germany’s finest citizens. Born in 1884, Max Schohl studied chemistry in Munich and Karlsruhe, and volunteered in the First World War, in which two of his brothers lost their lives, while he distinguished himself with bravery. After the war, Max married Liesel, who converted to Judaism, and the couple had two daughters. In the 1920s, building on his entrepreneurship and inventions, Max Schohl founded a leather-dyeing business employing over one hundred and fifty people, with dependencies in Milan, Paris, and Sao Paulo. Cosmopolitan and an eager skier, Max Schohl never forgot his roots, and as a Jewish community leader he was behind many charitable initiatives for Jews and Gentiles alike. With Hitler’s rise to power, life for the Schohls began to change dramatically, yet even when his factory was taken over in 1935, Max Schohl refused to leave. After all, he was a German patriot, representing the right-wing German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei) at The Kyffhäuserbund (Kyffhäuser League), an umbrella organization for war veterans’ and reservists’ associations, which owes its name to the gigantic Kyffhäuser Monument, built to celebrate the rebirth of Germany and its power. Like many others, Jews and Gentiles alike, Schohl was under the delusion that Nazism was a short-term aberration, and he attempted to continue his life as normally as possible, albeit living on savings and increasingly deprived of rights and possibilities for his children. He even volunteered for the army, as did his four brothers-in-law. When their house was ransacked during Kristallnacht in 1938, Max Schohl was arrested and held for a short while in Buchenwald. It was only upon his return, deeply traumatized and on the verge of suicide, that his wife and young daughters persuaded Max Milan Koljanin, ‘Holokaust u Sremu 1941–1942. Godine’, Spomenica Istorijskog arhiva ‘Srem’, Sremska Mitrovica: Arhiv ‘Srem’, 2006), pp. 9–32.

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Schohl to flee Germany. As American, British, French, and other governments considered the persecution of Jews to be a German internal matter, they closed doors to immigration or drastically reduced the number of people allowed to immigrate. The same applied to British dominions such as India, New Zealand, and Australia, where only the wealthiest and most connected could reach, as bars were set very high and local contacts could not help.6 The Schohls first attempted to get to their cousins in the US, then tried with business contacts in Great Britain and Switzerland, all to no avail. After the war started, and having subsequently failed to get visas to Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay, the Schohls had no other choice but to escape to Yugoslavia in April 1940.7 They were able to ship their goods to Genoa, hoping that they would eventually sail from there to Brazil, but without visas, they ended up stuck in Yugoslavia, like many others. However, having arrived in Belgrade in spring 1940, the city seemed magical to them, especially after the horrors they had experienced in Germany. They sat at pavement cafés and walked the streets without fear. First, they booked themselves into a hotel, but soon they had to look for other, more affordable, options, and Max Schohl turned to the Belgrade branch of B’nai B’rith for help. In the years before the war, B’nai B’rith in Yugoslavia was one of the most useful networks to obtain visas for refugees, as many honorary consuls for European and Latin American countries belonged to the lodge and were able to issue them, as explained by Rudolf Kandel, banker and prominent member of the Zagreb branch.8 Yet by 1940, it was too late. Many of the consuls had emigrated themselves, and others could not issue any more visas. Instead, Max Schohl and his family, like many others, were advised to move to the country’s rural interior, where locals would provide room and board for a small fee. As long as they were away from major cities and paying for themselves, they were told that their visitors’ visas would be extended. Eventually, the Schohls were directed to B’nai B’rith contact Bela Hauser, a Jewish owner of an animal feed and seed store in Ruma, some fifty kilometres to the north-west of the capital.9

BL IOR: L/PJ/7/2542 Dr Max Baum, a dentist from Hamburg, was denied entry to India in 1939 despite financial and logistic assurances by the local Raja of Aundh. Visas were subsequently issued to members of the Fogges family (Kuffler), industrialists from Vienna. BL IOR: L/PJ/7/2537. Large, And the World Closed its Doors, pp. 190–215, describes their flight and time in Yugoslavia, including the eventual deportation of Max to Auschwitz, and his wife and daughters to a work camp in Germany, based on their perfectly preserved correspondence with cousins in the US, and the recollections of the younger daughter, Käthe. Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, p. 79. Bela Hauser (Hauzer), his wife and two sons will all be deported and murdered in 1942.

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Ruma and neighbouring towns and villages in Srem became the sought after location away from the capital, especially after February 1940, when the Yugoslav Ministry of the Interior desingated Sremska Mitrovica and Ruma as towns for the internment for Jews without residence permits. In May  1940, sixty Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia and Poland were housed in Sremska Mitrovica. The refugees in group internment established a canteen and reading hall in the inn of Filip Vidaković.10 By the end of 1940, the Federation of Yugoslav Jewish Communities had assisted two hundred Jewish refugees in Ruma, mostly from Austria and Czechoslovakia. Among them we found the scion of the wealthy Weinberg family from Vienna. The Weinbergs first sent their son Hans, a student of electrical engineering at Vienna’s Technical University, to Switzerland, but the following year his visa was not extended, and instead Hans was arrested by the Basel police and deported back to Germany. Incarcerated for a year in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Hans was only released with the help of Shanghai visas. Once back in Vienna he followed the only route possible and in December  1940, he was eventually smuggled into Yugoslavia, where the Zagreb Jewish community placed him in Ruma with a Gentile family.11 Šime Spitzer, the Secretary General of the Federation of Yugoslav Jewish Communities also sent his Viennese in-laws, Paul Lutzer and his wife, artist Johanna Lutzer, née Schermann, to Ruma, rescuing them from the boats stranded in Kladovo.12 These desperate late escapees were housed in Ruma and Sremska Mitrovica with wealthy Jewish or Gentile families. Yosef Morgenshtern recalled how his family had provided housing to two Jews who fled Germany, and how that was very common in this area with significant German and Jewish populations.13 In her memoir The Dream of Youth, a Holocaust survivor from nearby Čurug, Magda Bošan, recalled how in these late days, her father put ‘an old-fashioned Jewish sign’ on their gate, a miniature Torah, so that the refugees would know

Jovanka Dražić, Jevreji u Mitrovici (Sremska Mitrovica: Kulturno-prosvetna zajednica Sremske Mitrovice, 1998), p. 47. In 1997, the Canton of Basel paid to Weinberg, who in Israel changed his name to Elli Carmel, a symbolic compensation for the arrest and deportation. Interview with Eli Carmel, Accession Number: 1995.A.1272.30 | RG Number: RG-50.120.0030 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. Rajner, Fragile Images, pp. 328–31. Interview with Yosef Morgenshtern conducted by Nathan Beyrak in Israel on 10 September 1992, for the Israel Documentation Project. Morgenshtern lost his whole family in the Holocaust. He was imprisoned in Jasenovac for almost the entire duration of the camp, and he was among the few who managed to flee in April 1945, when he joined Partisans and later the Yugoslav Army. He emigrated to Israel in 1948.

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that they could find shelter and food.14 Several people found refuge with the wealthy Jewish Popper family in Ruma. The wealthy Schlesinger family, which ran a wholesale business in nearby Šid took in the Jafa family from Poland, employing the father as a bookkeeper. When they were threatened with expulsion for overstaying their visas, the Schlesingers and their Serbian friends in Belgrade assured them residence permits.15 All the above indicates that Ruma and the Srem region, like Zagreb’s surroundings, were considered a privileged resort for latecomers among the refugees. Yet, according to Large, the move to the Yugoslav countryside was a shock for the wealthy Schohls, who originated from the westernmost parts of Germany. It is impossible to say whether this impression remained in Käthe Schohl’s memory, or if Large exaggerated to fit in with his romanticized and Orientalized account describing Ruma as dusty and ramshackle, with houses infested with bugs, women wearing long skirts, with kerchiefs over their hair, and local Jews living as if in a Polish shtetl, not wanting anything to do with the exotic refugees from Germany.16 This could not have been further from the truth, as Ruma was a prosperous town nestled near a famous wine-growing area, with a majority German population, which had moved there in the eighteenth century after the Habsburg Empire conquered the area from the Ottomans. In 1933, Ruma acquired the status of town, and it was Yugoslavia’s thirty-fifth largest in terms of population and twenty-fifth largest in terms of economic power, boasting the biggest wheat market in the country, and a horse-racing ground, hospital, and gymnastic hall, among other amenities.17 In 1931, Ruma had 13,398 inhabitants – 6952 Germans, 4434 Serbs, 1299 Croats, 424 Hungarians, and 221 Jews. By the beginning of the war, there were around seventy Jewish families and between two hundred and fifty and two hundred and sixty souls, not counting the refugees. The Jewish community boasted a kindergarten, school, sports society with handball and tennis club, choir and

Krinka Vidaković Petrov, ‘Memory Mediation by First- and Second-Generation Survivors: Why They Said Nothing: Mother and Daughter on One and the Same War by Magda Bošan Simin and Nevena Simin’, Studia Judaica, 21 (2018), nr 1 (41), 31–54, p. 42. Both Schlesinger and Jafa family members were deported by the Ustaša in 1942 and found death in Jasenovac camp. From the testimony of Nada Jovanović, daughter of Bogdan, ‘Righteous among the Nations from Šid’, in Jevreji u Šidu ed. by Sremac and Klajn, p. 62. Large, And the World Closed its Doors, p. 195. Large’s narrative is full of other inventions, such as Ustaša threats and attacks before the war began described on p. 204, which undermines the whole account. Đorđe Bošković, Ruma: istorijski pregled (Ruma: Zavičajni muzej, Gradska biblioteka, ‘Atanasije Stojković’, 2011), p. 90.

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women’s association, and its own Zionist organization.18 Local Jews spoke German and Hungarian, although the official documents of the Jewish community, only partially preserved, were written in German in Gothic alphabet. Thirteen Ruma Jews died fighting for the Habsburg Monarchy in the First World War. A few Jews played a prominent role in the wheat trade and milling industry (Steiner and Wesel), while others were teachers or doctors, or ran small businesses.19 Testimonies of the local Jews, and other information, fiercely contradict Large’s description. Dina Rajs grew up in Ruma, and she left us a detailed description of life before the war and in its beginning, before she fled with her mother to neighbouring Novi Sad and then Budapest, where they survived the Holocaust partially thanks to the intervention of Raoul Wallenberg. According to these testimonies, inter-ethnic relations in Ruma were good, no anti-Semitic incidents were reported, and Jews were fully integrated in the town’s life, and in many aspects spearheaded it.20 In 1937, Ruma acquired a modern synagogue – one of the most opulent of those in provincial towns in Yugoslavia, and a pride of Yugoslav Jewry. Its consecration in November 1937 was attended by over two thousand people, including 54 representatives of various political and cultural associations. Led by the Chief Rabbi Alkalaj, the ceremony was attended by representatives of the royal family, the Serbian Orthodox Church, Serbian and Croatian associations, and even the pro-Nazi German Kulturbund, although representatives of the Roman Catholic Church were absent.21 German Jewish refugees could not be that exotic to a well-established German-speaking Jewish community, especially since there were at least two hundred other German, Austrian, Polish, and Czechoslovak Jewish refugees in the town and the surrounding villages, not a negligible number for a small town.22 Moving beyond these misrepresentations, we learn that the Schohls settled well in Ruma, and rented a house in the town centre. Their biggest problem was that, as a refugee, Max Schohl could not get a work permit, so they had to get by with his temporary and illegal work. As a learned chemist, Max Schohl was producing and selling a fungicide to local farmers, and he even worked as a consultant for a local explosives factory of the Yugoslav army. From Ljiljana Dobrovšak, Židovi u Srijemu: Od doseljenja do Holokausta (Vukovar: Državni arhiv, 2017); Milan Fogel, JOM HAŠOA ŠOREŠ, Most 63–3 (2015); Rajs, Ein Riss war im Netz, gives the figure of 249 local Jews. Bošković, Ruma, p. 86. Rajs, Ein Riss war im Netz. ‘Osvećenje nove sinagoge u Rumi’, Židov, 49, 19 November 1937, p. 8. Petar Erak was able to establish most details of the destruction of the local community and over two hundred refugees at the hands of Ustaša in ‘Rumski Jevreji u Drugom svetskom ratu’.

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correspondence, we realize how acutely aware of the impeding dangers Schohl was, as he continued to enquire about a more permanent arrangement for his family. After meeting the American consul in Belgrade, Max Schohl got certain promises, but the situation soon worsened as the American government placed a freeze on their dollar accounts held by Dutch banks, and their plans to sail across the ocean come to nothing. Affidavits that their cousins sent from the US never arrived, and even if they had done, they would not have been able to get American visas once the war started. When Germany and its allies attacked Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Schohls fled in panic to the nearby Fruška gora hills, but they soon returned, only to discover that the street on which they were renting a house had been renamed as Adolf Hitler Street. Yet, there were more surprises on the way. Soon after, a group of German soldiers was quartered with them. According to Käthe Schohl, the Germans soldiers treated her father with respect because he was a retired German officer and war veteran, bestowing them with presents of tobacco and sausages.23 We learn from other sources too that the Wehrmacht soldiers and officers were very respectful – a far cry from the local Nazis and Ustaša. In nearby Sremska Mitrovica, too, German officers were housed in Jewish houses and protected the Morgens(h)tern family.24 The Rosenbergers, who fled to Sisak, were warned by the Wehrmacht soldiers to flee further, and that only the US was safe.25 In Zagreb, the Selinger family were pleased and calmed when they were forced to host a Wehrmacht Major in their apartment, who was absolutely unmoved by their display of Jewishness.26 Instead, the German officer, originally from Cologne, invited Bertha Selinger to the opera, and reassured them that he had nothing against Jews. The Polić family was also politely removed from their Zagreb home by the Wehrmacht, with soldiers asking where to find London on their Blaupunkt radio.27 Medea Brukner described German soldiers as being respectful to Jewish property to which they were assigned, and to Jews themselves. She recalls how a German officer protested and removed Jewish signs from children and baby buggies, which was introduced as obligatory soon after the Ustaša takeover in Zagreb.28 Dr Lavoslav Leo Kraus also wrote about the food and support he got from a German Feldwebel (sergeant) while in prison at the same time. The sergeant confessed that he was Large, And the World Closed its Doors, p. 211. Interview with Yosef Morgenshtern. Interview with Alex Redmountain (Rosenberger). Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, p. 119. Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 384. Paul Schreiner, Spašeni iz Zagreba: Sjećanja troje preživjelih srodnika na hrvatski Holokaust (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2014), pp. 180–84.

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a Social Democrat, but he had been mobilized into the army, and he felt the need to apologize to Jews and others.29 Durieux also had a surprisingly friendly welcome by a certain Herr Göring in the German Consulate in Zagreb.30 Zeev, who also witnessed this friendly attitude of German officers who stayed in Jewish homes and who professed leftist rather than Nazi sympathies, concluded that the mentality of obedience and strict army discipline prevented this friendliness from having any effect on the later policy of extermination.31 Even when the Wehrmacht introduced forced labour for the Jews in Ruma, mostly to clear the rubble from the April war, according to all testimonies from this area, there were no beatings or humiliation. This was also the period when a few escaped with fake Italian papers. Hans Weinberg fled via Sušak to Rijeka, where he was arrested but eventually transferred to Ferramonti camp, like most of the Rijeka internees.32 The Lutzers also escaped once the Germans marched in, first to Belgrade, and later, again with the assistance of Šime Spitzer, by train to the Adriatic coast. For fear of being discovered, they did not speak for the entire journey.33 In the meantime, the Wehrmacht left, and the Schohls and other remaining Jews faced the terror of the new Ustaša regime and the former Kulturbund activists turned into full-blown Nazis. The local ethnic Germans in fact ran the town administration (after Serbs and Jews were disenfranchised) during the entire war, but they cooperated with the central Ustaša authorities in Zagreb as long as their interests were not harmed. Because of their numerical prevalence in Ruma, local Germans had more control and power than the Ustaša. Particularly notorious was Anton Bauer, the new head of Ruma police.34 Marko Lamešić, a lawyer in Ruma and previously an activist of the right wing of the Croatian Peasant Party, became the highest Ustaša official, ‘povjerenik’ or governor for the region of East Slavonija and Srem, directly responsible for deportations and execution orders. Before the war, he was regularly playing cards in the restaurant Imperijal in Ruma with wheat merchant Misha Weiss, Jewish pharmacist Garai, and Serbian teacher Popović, the latter three perishing in the war at the orders of their former comrade.35 Already in April, the grand Synagogue of Ruma, or the ‘temple’ as it was called, was raided for the first time, while in subsequent months, both local Kraus, Susreti i sudbine, p. 351. Durieux, Meine ersten neunzig Jahre, p. 359. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 43. Interview with Eli Carmel. Rajner, Fragile Images, p. 331. Koljanin, ‘Holokaust u Sremu’, p. 21. Rajs, Ein Riss war im Netz, p. 19.

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Germans and Croatians plundered all its movable property. As in the rest of Croatia, the Jews were placed beyond the law on 30 April by the new racial law. Other measures included the imposition of yellow armbands with a Latin letter Ž (for Židov – Jew in Croatian), bans on free movement, public transport and bathing, confiscation of all radios, and forced labour ordered for all Jewish men and women aged from sixteen to sixty. The attempts of some Jews to approach the amicable local Catholic priest and convert were unsuccessful, as Ustaša-ruled Croatia already adopted similar ‘Aryan’ laws to Germany. Instead, late April and May saw the first arrests of Jews in Ruma, Sremska Mitrovica, and Ilok (where there was a large Orthodox Hassidic community), with some Jewish men being taken to Osijek, while others were terribly beaten by the local Ustaša. The plundering of Jewish homes, forced labour, humiliation, and torture of local and refugee Jews continued. According to all testimonies, this was orchestrated and conducted by local German and/or Croatian fascists, until almost all Jews were deported in summer 1942. Dina Rajs tells how their neighbour, a certain ‘Onkel Mannheim’ led the other Germans into her grandparents’ house to hunt for valuables. As the search went on, they broke all the glass and porcelain, and destroyed all the food that was already on the table. Others, such as Görke from Bačka Palanka, tried to help the Jews.36 By summer 1941, all Serbs who had settled in the area in the interwar period were expelled to Serbia. Yet these horrendous crimes did not pass without frictions, as we learn from an Ustaša official from Ruma, who complained about Volksdeutsche to his headquarters in Zagreb: They see first themselves and their interest. They never have enough of theft. They took everything that was worth taking. All Jewish and Serbian shops, all storages. They are commissars of everything where there is some capital, everything is in their hands and now they want even the little remaining which is necessary for us.37

Survivors recall arrests, forced labour, humiliation, and persecution of Serbs, Jews, and Roma throughout Srem and Slavonia. Only Serbs and Slovaks offered some help, while local Germans and Croats stood by and watched, if they did not directly participate, in plunder and beatings. Jews were humiliated by being forced to draw carriages instead of horses.38 Ibid., p. 12. Cited in R. Mitrović, ‘Sudbina Jevreja u krajevima gde su folksdojčeri preuzeli vlast aprila 1941’, Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja 2 (1973), pp. 265–71 (p. 270). Testimony of Abraham Kišicki given to the Yugoslav State Commission for the Determination of Crimes of the Occupiers and their Collaborators in 1945, published in Jevreji u Šidu, ed. by Sremac and Klajn, pp. 98–103.

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The first round of arrests of Jews ended when they were ordered to pay ‘contributions’ based on the estimated value of their holdings and savings. This in turn was divided between local Nazi Germans and Ustaša.39 It was local Ustaša who arrested Max Schohl for the first time in July 1941, and, according to testimonies in Large’s book, his wife Liesel rushed to the local Wehrmacht post with his war medals. Explaining that she was an Aryan, she persuaded the local commander to release her husband. Archival evidence specifies that Max Schohl was released by the Jewish Department of the Ustaša government in Zagreb because of local demands for his chemical knowledge, and that the local Wehrmacht intervened on his behalf.40 At the same time, most other Jews were arrested and placed in a temporary camp in nearby Sremska Mitrovica, and released only after a ransom of 200,000 dinars (or kuna) was paid.41 Despite paying ransom or contribution, all Jewish shops, enterprises, and property were transferred to the state and entrusted to Ustaša or to local Germans appointed as commissars. All Jewish movable property, and what remained of synagogues and Jewish organizations was also plundered. This included kitchen sets and crockery, cutlery, bedding, watches, goose fat, and so on.42 While the first wave of deportation avoided most local Jews who paid the demanded contributions to the Ustaša state, most refugees were deported in mid-August from Ruma and Sremska Mitrovica to Gospić and surrounding camps, where they were all killed.43 Local Jews who escaped this first wave of terror were enlisted for forced labour, including clearing up the partially demolished synagogue. For some time, the synagogue was turned into a temporary prison for Ruma’s Jews between two waves of deportation. Its rabbi, Willim Goldstein, was also deported to Jasenovac with his wife and nine children in 1941. Shlomo (Salomon) Fingerhut, Ruma’s kantor, fled to Serbia across Sava with his wife and children. By August, the resistance flared up in Serbia, and Fingerhut was arrested with other Šabac Jews, and placed in detention along with more than a thousand foreign refugees. He was executed alongside them not far from Ruma in October.44 Previously, a twenty-year-old student, Lazar Hauz(s)er from Ruma, who also escaped to Šabac, was arrested along with another young man, Berthold Hauser, a shop assistant from Munich and Kraus, Susreti i sudbine, p. 336. Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache, pp. 363–64, for the original archival evidence. Erak, ‘Rumski Jevreji’. Dobrovšak, Židovi u Srijemu, p. 271. Ibid., p. 282. Koljanin, ‘The Last Voyage of the Kladovo Transport’, p. 446 wrongly describes him as a rabbi. It is not known where and how his wife and children died, but most probably they were gassed along with other Jewish women and children from Serbia.

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refugee in Šabac. While spellings of their names in some reports differ, they seem to have been related. Accused of being Communist supporters, they were taken to Belgrade prison and executed a few days after the rest of Šabac’s Jewish men.45 Back in Ruma for the time being, the Schohl family was safe, as Max’s expertise secured him a job in a tannery in the mornings, while in the afternoons he worked for a local German farmer, Franz Wagner, whose son was in the SS, which was also helpful. They were producing blue stone used in many vineyards around Ruma, mostly in the hands of local Volksdeutsche. This time, however, it was one of them, a certain N.  Buschbacher, who denounced Ruma’s deputy in Croatia’s Assembly, Toma Rakić, for protecting Schohl, calling him a ‘Judenfreund’. This denunciation went all the way up to the central administration of Germans in Croatia (Deutsche Volksgruppenführung).46 The stakes were much higher, but the German Plenipotentiary in Zagreb, approved Max Schohl’s exceptional status with a special agreement made between the head of the Croatian Trade Chamber and the head of police in Ruma. For the other few remaining Jews, the ordeal continued. Many were heavily beaten, including the leader of the local Jewish community, Max Heitler, as recorded in the remarkably preserved document he wrote in his resignation in March 1942, to confirm that he was unable to perform his duties: I Max Heitler, president of [Ruma] Jewish Religious Community, which I led until today. After  I was beaten today by German youth in Skopal [a house of a wealthy local Jewish family which was immediately requisitioned for Ustaša police headquarters] I am left incapable to work. I thank you for your confidence until now. I ask the Town Administration to accept this. In addition, I submit the list of those able to work among Ruma and émigré Jews with the request to German Youth to submit it to you and do not address me any longer. With lot of respect, [signed].47

From this document, we know that on 20  March  1942, apart from Max and his family, there were still twelve adult refugees alive and registered as able to work, together with their addresses: Ibid., p. 441. Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache, p. 364. Max Heitler, ‘Jewish Religious Community (registered as document 39, 1942)’, published in Erak, ‘Rumski Jevreji’, footnote liii. Max Heitler and his parents will be deported and murdered in the same year. Filip Skopal and his wife and daughter, in whose house the incident happened, were shot in Ruma in the same year. His other son died in battle as a Partisan, his wife was captured and, together with their two daughters, murdered in Jasenovac.

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1. Ambrus Sharlote, Neuer Marktplatz (reported to Yad Vashem by her brother Dr Severin Briar as Ambrus Lotte born in Vienna in 1902, and deported to a concentration camp, probably Auschwitz) 2. Haiker, Rudolf and Rosa, who were hosted by the Poppers, one of the biggest and wealthiest Ruma Jewish families, extinguished with the rest of the town’s Jewish population in 1942. 3. Kramer, Ernst and Betti 4. Kransz, Alexander and Gabriele 5. Löwy, husband and wife (probably Irma Loewy née Pulgram from Schoenkirchen in Austria, born in 1900, and deported to Auschwitz and listed in the Auschwitz death register) 6. Löwestein, Ludwig and Ruth 7. Klara Taenzer or Tänzer from Austria, who is a subject of another preserved document issued by the Jewish community in Ruma, certifying that she had no movable or immovable properly (born in 1899 and deported to Auschwitz).48

At the end of July  1942, a new wave of deportations began, including those above and all remaining Jews in Ruma, Srem, and Slavonija under the leadership of Ivan Tolj, previously head of Ustaša police in Sarajevo. Before being transported to Auschwitz, Jews from Srem were taken to a football stadium in the town of Vinkovci, where some were left out in the open for up to six weeks, exposed to the elements, and forced to work while being constantly humiliated. Many died there or during the transport, and, according to survivors, many became mad in these conditions.49 The Ustaša Police Chief of Ruma reported that all orders concerning Jews were applied, and that all Jews were deported on 17 July 1942.50 The same fate was bestowed on Jews in all the surrounding towns and villages with large Jewish populations – Sremska Mitrovica, Ilok, Šid, and Vukovar. Unlike the previous year, when Jews from Ruma and its surroundings were deported to Ustaša-run concentration camps, around five thousand Croatian Jews arrested in early summer 1942 were deported to Auschwitz in accordance with the deal between Croatia and Germany that allowed the former to keep Jewish property, while paying 30 Reichsmarks to Germany for each person deported.51 After this second wave of deportation, there seemed to be no Jews left in Ruma except for three women, two married to Christians and one Justus Juliane, born Rosenzweig, who escaped and joined Partisans, See Erak, ‘Rumski Jevreji’, footnote xxxi. The exact fate of other people from this list could not be verified, but persons with the same names are listed among those deported from Austria. Testimony of Abraham Kišicki, ibid. Dobrovšak, Židovi u Srijemu, p. 257. There is still disagreement among historians about whether Ruma Jews were sent via Vinkovci to Auschwitz or Jasenovac. Koljanin, ‘Holokaust u Sremu’, p. 28.

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as reported in another Ustaša local administration document.52 Of those five hundred local and refugee Jews deported to concentration camps from Ruma in two waves, no one returned.53 Vandalized and plundered, the grand Temple still stood and in 1942/43 a lively debate ensued between local authorities and the government in Zagreb, which claimed its right over the property and building material.54 Croatian military authorities complained that local civilian authorities were completely in German hands, and that they only obeyed German orders, displaying a negative attitude towards the Ustaša and the Croatian state, who claimed rights on synagogue bricks and so on.55 The remaining immovable property of the deported Jews was administered by the State Treasury of Croatia, department for property, debts, and fraud. Houses were colonized by Croat refugees, whereas the department for nationalization sold Jewish companies for its own budget.56 By the same summer of 1942, Ruma and its surroundings became the target of almost daily attacks by Partisan resisters, who hid in neighbouring villages and in the Fruška gora hills. Besides sabotage, the Partisans killed local Germans, Croats, and anyone who collaborated with the authorities, who in turn exercised retribution, killing mostly local Serb villagers, but also any Jews who had somehow escaped the previous deportations, such as young Andor Unterberger, who was shot with Serbian villagers from Stejanovci and Ruma on 12 August 1942.57 Terror and executions were commanded by the special Ustaša envoy and chief of security for the Ustaša leader Pavelić, Viktor Tomić, whose cruelty was so notorious that even local Germans wanted him removed.58 Erak, ‘Rumski Jevreji’, footnote lxxxv. Female members of the Wessel family survived the war, fleeing to Dalmatia and later via Rab to Bari. Rajko Draganović identified 227 Ruma Jews murdered. See ‘Spisak Stradalih Ruma’ [accessed 21 October 2021]: 24, 37, 35, 32, 38, 36, 10. Mladenko Kumović, Stradanje sremskih Jevreja u holokaustu (Novi Sad: Muzej Vojvodine, 2007), lists 212 names from Ruma. In both cases, only Yugoslav Jews are included. Dražić, Jevreji u Mitrovici, pp. 48–49. Izveštaj Zapovjedništva Kopnene Vojske Zapovjedništvu Vojske i Ministarstvu Domobranstva o vojno-političkoj situaciju u NDH 1-10.7. in Zbornik dokumenata Zločini Nezavisne države Hrvatske 1941–1945 (Belgrade: Vojno-istorijski institut, 1993), pp. 300–03. The synagogue at the former Ivanova Street is today remembered with a bilingual memorial plaque. Ibid., p. 268. Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodnooslobodilačkom ratu, BORBE U VOJVODINI 1941–1944. (neprijateljski dokumenti), Vol. 1/10 (Belgrade, 1955). Also, Bošković, Ruma, p. 117. Other individuals from Ruma who personally participated in the torture and killings of Jews were identified by the Yugoslav state commission for the crimes against Jews in Vojvodina, led by Dr Julius Dohanyi in December 1945, including Rodina Willi; Sop from

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Max Schohl remained the only male Jew in Ruma, thanks to his ‘German’ connections. But not for long. He was arrested again in September  1942. According to testimony in Large, this time around his wife’s intervention with the Wehrmacht worked again, and Bethke publishes correspondence between the German Plenipotentiary in Zagreb and the Reich Ministry of Economy, whose representative, Dr Arnold, stated that he had nothing against Schohl’s further employment and connection to German businesses ‘as long as Schohl does not exercise any major influence’.59 Yet, in early 1943, Max Schohl was arrested again, along with ten local Serbs, again by the Ustaša, on charges of having aided the Partisans, which we know from his daughter were true. Liesel’s German background saved him again from certain death by Ustaša firing squads in nearby Sremska Mitrovica, a fate which awaited all imprisoned Serbs, as there were no more Jews around.60 On 15 August 1943, Max Schohl was arrested for the final time, this time by the Gestapo, on orders from Heinrich Himmler, Reich Minister of the Interior. This was the last call on all remaining Jews in Croatia, organized and implemented by German forces, with all the remaining Jews deported to Auschwitz. This time, Liesel’s interventions did not work. Major Rank, Wehrmacht Commander in Ruma sent her to Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau, Reich General in Command in Zagreb. According to her testimony, von Glaise-Horstenau was sympathetic, but he said that there was nothing he could do, telling Liesel that her husband was being deported to Auschwitz, and that he would be lucky because he was sixty years old. Indeed, after a short stay at a camp in Tyrol, Max Schohl seems to have died soon after arrival in Auschwitz, with his death certificate issued on 1 December 1943. For reasons that are unknown, the Auschwitz death certificate records Max Schohl as Catholic. Bethke provides the original denunciation from 5 August 1943 filed by Drassl, economic adviser for NSDAP (National Socialist Party) in Croatia to their interior department in Zagreb, who claimed that Wagner, as a simple farmer, had no capacity and skills to run the factory, making it wholly dependent on Schohl and not economically viable. It was only, Drassl claimed, because the blue stone they produced was sold on the black market that the factory survived. Therefore, he asked for the removal

Hrtkovci; Janderić, tailor from Ruma; Takacs Matija, baker from Ruma; Peischl Erich; Müller; Drecher Josip Klejić; Kolarić brothers from Ruma, who were prison guards in Auschwitz; Altrich, an SS member from Ruma; Deranić from Zagreb; Janković Josip and Servacie Kurt, merchant from Ruma. The report is available in Muzej Vojvodine, AK23410, nr 228. Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache, p. 365. Large, And the World Closed its Doors, p. 213.

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of Schohl in order for the factory to be closed.61 In any case, it was the Nazi Germans, both local Volksdeutsche and officials from Germany, who sealed Max Schohl’s fate, and who were responsible for the deportation and deaths of all the remaining Jews in 1943 and later. Liesel Schohl as Aryan, and her two ‘Mischlinge’ daughters, Käthe and Hela, were deported a year later and assigned to forced labour in Wiesbaden, near their home town of Flörsheim. They were scarred for life, but survived. Hela bore a child to her Serbian Partisan lover Bogdan, who perished together with hundreds of other Ruma Serbs, Jews, and Partisans, victims of Ustaša and Nazi terror. Back in Germany, Käthe and Hela also found out that their grandmother, who they could not take on the flight, was deported to Theresienstadt, where she soon died. The Schohls’ town of Flörsheim today has a street named after Max Schohl, and a plaque commemorating its brutally murdered virtuous citizen. Ruma’s beautiful synagogue was raised to the ground in spring 1943, obliterating the last remnant of the once vibrant community, and today a memorial plaque on the site of the former synagogue is the only reminder of the thriving community. There are no Jews in Ruma now, and besides the abandoned Jewish cemetery, with some imposing monuments in German and Moorish style, which still stand, there is no other remnant or memorial to approximately five hundred of its Jewish inhabitants and refugees murdered in the Holocaust. Interestingly enough, two leaders of the local German community and Nazi party, Carl Bischof and Franz Wilhelm, survived the war and published histories of Ruma after the war in Germany, without mentioning what happened to Ruma’s Jews, which is common to all publications by Volksdeutsche, who were expelled and found new homes in Austria and Germany.62 The lengthy German-language Wikipedia entry is still based on their books, and it does not mention the fate of five hundred Jews who perished from Ruma.63 The Yugoslav inquiry into war crimes in the area of Srem around Ruma, published in 1945, estimated Jewish deaths at over one thousand six hundred, or around Bethke, (K)eine gemeinsame Sprache, p. 365. Carl Bischof, Die Geschichte der Marktgemeinde Ruma (Freilassing: Pannonia-Verlag, 1958), Donauschwäbische Beiträge, Heft 25; Franz Wilhelm, Rumaer Dokumentation 1745– 1945 – Mittelpunkt der deutschen Bewegung in Syrmien, Slavonien und Kroatien (Stuttgart: Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung, Reihe IV: Beiträge zur donauschwäbischen Volks- und Heimatgeschichtsforschung, 1990). Similar for Bela Crkva/ Weisskirchen see Heimatbuch der Stadt Weisskirchen im Banat (Salzburg: Verein Weisskirchner Ortsgemeinschaft, 1980–1985). ‘Ruma’ [accessed 21 October 2021].

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90 per cent of the pre-war population, one of the highest casualty tolls of the Holocaust in Europe. It also estimated that around 72 per cent fell victim to Ustaša, and 21 per cent to the German authorities or armed formations.64 Besides Ruma’s Jewish community, which was annihilated, another three hundred mostly Serbian citizens of Ruma were shot in acts of repression or punishment for Partisan attacks, and ninety-five died as Partisans. Before the advancement of Partisan forces in autumn 1944, most of Ruma’s seven thousand Germans fled to Germany. Yet  1,047 remained, believing in their innocence, including Catholic priest Johan Nepomuk Lakajnar, who throughout the war did all in his power to help members of all faiths.65 Most were shot in acts of retribution by the Partisans, including Lakajnar, or died from malnutrition and mistreatment in prison camps established for ethnic Germans from November 1944, with only 244 surviving. Today, the database on civilian victims of the Second World War in Ruma municipality lists 2052 names.66 Like the previously mentioned lists of Jewish victims in Ruma, it does not contain the names or whereabouts of an estimated three hundred Jewish refugees living in Ruma at the time of occupation.67 In Ruma, and throughout most of former Yugoslavia, ascertaining the names of all Jewish refugee victims and their destinies is still to be done. Similarly, at least one hundred and fifty Roma from Ruma were deported by the Ustaša and perished in Jasenovac camp. While the census of war victims mentions their names, there has been no research on their destinies, nor any specific commemoration.68

Zločini okupatora i njihovih pomagača u Vojvodini protiv Jevreja (Novi Sad: Pokrajinska komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača u Vojvodini, 1945), p. 6. Bošković, Ruma, p. 120. The list is the result of the special commission for establishing civilian victims of the Second World War in Vojvodina province, but it was made defunct during the writing of this chapter. The official report by the Vojvodina Commission for determining crimes of occupiers and their collaborators in 1945 Zločin okupatora i njegovih pomagača u Vojvodini protiv Jevreja (Novi Sad, 1945) does mention the issue, and in its special section Elaborat o domaćim Nemcima za srez Rumski (p. 33) estimates that three hundred were taken to prisons in Sremska Mitrovica and concentration camps in Stara Gradiška, Loborgrad, and Jasenovac. The War Victims’ Census was conducted in 1964 by the Federal Statistics Bureau. It was further revised in 1995–99, and amended by the research conducted by the Museum of the Victims of Genocide in Belgrade 2002–08.

Chapter 5

Italian Rescue The dramatic landscape of the eastern Adriatic coast and its islands has changed hands countless times in history, leaving very visible scars. For centuries, armies, churches, and empires clashed over this tiny strip of coast, causing destruction, displacement, and misery. Paradoxically, under the Italian partial annexation and occupation between 1941 and 1943, Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands offered one of the most remarkable sanctuaries for thousands of Jews and others at the time of the worst massacres in the rest of Europe.1 After this short respite, Dalmatia and its hinterland became the site of some dramatic escapes, and also witnessed one of the most notable examples of Second World War Jewish resistance, when around three thousand Jews fled the internment camp on the Rab/Arbe island and joined Tito’s Partisans in the mountainous regions of Banija and Kordun in Croatia. This paradox and its epilogue are the key topics of this chapter. The paradox of Jewish rescue requires explanation, given that the Italian occupation and rule over Dalmatia (the provinces of Zara/Zadar, Spalato/Split, and Cattaro/Kotor) and other parts of Yugoslavia (the province of Ljubljana, the enlarged province of Fiume in the northern Adriatic, and the governorate of Montenegro) was characterized by forced assimilation/Italianization, deportation, and military terror against the civilian, overwhelmingly Slavic, population. This was also the continuation of Italian interwar policies in Istria and other areas inhabited by Slavic minorities, but it was a far cry from the extermination and genocidal policies of the Nazis, Ustaša, and other belligerent forces before and during the Second World War.2 Combined with the traditionalism There is no consensus on the numbers of Jews who survived by fleeing to areas under Italian control. Most authors agree that at least five thousand Yugoslav Jews found safety in Italian-occupied Dalmatia, while another seven thousand were protected in Italy and Albania. The number of Jewish refugees from other countries among them has not been ascertained. For the summary of various reports and research, see Marica Karakaš Obradov, ‘Prisilne migracije židovskog stanovništva na području Nezavisne Države Hrvatske’, Croatica Christiana periodica, 37 (2013), 153–78. The most quoted study on the role of Italy in the war in the Mediterranean is Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation During the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); the whole of Chapter 11 is dedicated to ‘Policy Towards Refugees and Jews’, pp.  367–402. Jonathan Steinberg in All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941–1943 (London: Routledge, 1990) reiterates the views of Daniele Carpi in The Rescue of Jews in the Italian Zone of Occupied Croatia (Jerusalem: Proceedings of the Second

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of the Italian military and civilian authorities, their ruthless conquests in the Mediterranean smacked more of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism than biological racism emerging from Nazi Germany and elsewhere.3 Besides the military presence and new civilian administration, there was barely any colonization of Italian speakers to the area, so its ethnic composition and local attitudes towards Italy never changed, dooming the whole project from the very start. Italian fascists propagated the notion of Italy as a legitimate heir to both the Roman Empire and the Venetian Republic, which had ruled over the Mediterranean, and of Latin culture as superior to the barbaric, Slavic one. Therein lies one of the aspects of what emerged as a particular treatment of the Jews. The majority of Jews along the coast were Sephardi or Ladino (based on Latin) speaking and, as the Italian Consul General in Dubrovnik insisted, they were deemed much more acceptable by the Italian fascists than the ‘barbaric Croats’.4 There was a multitude of economic and cultural connections between Jews in the occupied territories and Italy. Another simpler explanation for the sympathetic Italian attitude, given by Sarajevan Jasha Levi, was that the Yugoslav Jews looked exactly like the Italians.5 To delve into the extremely rich and complex historical rapport between Jews and Italians would go much beyond the topic of this chapter. Here it Yad Vashem International Historical Conference – 1974, 1977), pp. 465–525, and Menachem Shelah, Un debito di gratitudine: Storia dei rapporti tra l’Esercito Italiano e gli Ebrei in Dalmazia (1941–1943) (Rome: Stato maggiore dell’esercito. Ufficio storico, 2009, original in Hebrew in 1991). Both Steinberg and Shelah were witnesses to the events they describe. More recent are Gino Bambara, Židov: il salvataggio degli ebrei in Jugoslavia e Dalmazia e l’intervento della II Armata: 1941–1943 (Milan: Mursia, 2017), which publishes the key Italian sources, and Karlo Ruzicic-Kessler, Italiener auf dem Balkan: Besatzungspolitik in Jugoslawien 1941–1943 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg,  2017), with its chapter ‘Die Shoa und die italienische Besatzung’, pp. 172–208. Other works which provide more general context or case studies include Italy and the Second World War: Alternative Perspectives, ed. by Emanuele Sica and Ricard Carrier (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Benjamin Wood, Defying Evil: How the Italian Army Saved Croatian Jews During the Holocaust (New York: History Publishing Company, 2012); James  H.  Burgwyn, Empire on the Adriatic: Mussolini’s Conquest of Yugoslavia (New York: Enigma, 2005); Eric Gobetti, L’occupazione allegra. Gli italiani in Jugoslavia (1941–1943) (Rome: Carocci, 2007); and Alleati del nemico, L’occupazione Italiana in Jugoslavia (1941–1943) (Rome: Laterza, 2013). The colonial interpretation is suggested by Teodoro Sala, ‘Guerra e Amministrazione in Jugoslavia 1941–1943’, in L’Italia in Guerra 1940–1943, ed. by Bruna Micheletti and Pier Paolo Poggio (Brescia: Fondazione ‘Luigi Micheletti’, 1992), pp. 83–97. Nevenko Bartulin, ‘Politiche etniche italiane e croate nel territorio annesso di Dalmazia e nello Stato indipendente di Croazia (1941–1943)’, Geschichte und Region: Storia e Regione, 18/2 (2009), 129–54 (p. 144). The Italian Consul in Dubrovnik, Amadeo Mammalella, was the key protagonist of the Italianization of the entire Adriatic coast. Although a fervent fascist, his greatest enemies were the Croatian Ustaša. Levi, The Last Exile, p. 92.

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suffices to point out, as stressed by Primo Levi, that modern Italy, and Italians for that matter, were created during the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence (1815–70), which also brought about the emancipation of Italian Jews and their full integration into Italian society.6 Importantly, newly created Italy escaped the wave of political anti-Semitism that plagued most European countries in the late nineteenth century.7 Moreover, Jews in Italy and beyond eagerly embraced and supported the nationalist movement, especially so in the contested areas inhabited by both Italians and Slavs (and Germans and others), such as Trieste and Fiume in the northeast Adriatic. In a short span of time, the Jews were not only well integrated, but also took social and economic leadership, while also promoting Italian culture.8 After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, when Italy gained some of these territories, the Jews continued to prosper, while places such as Fiume and Abbazia continued to attract Jewish migrants, mostly from the lands of the old Empire. Another indication of the integration of Jews was the high share of marriages with Gentiles by Italian Jews, which in the mid-1930s stood at 43 per cent, compared to a meagre 11 per cent in Germany.9 While far from explaining the attitude towards Jews of the Italian military and civil administration, or Italians in general, during the war, it would be very short-sighted to ignore this prehistory, as many authors writing on the Italian rescue of Jews have done. Still, further explanations are needed, given that Italy was the original fascist state, and Hitler its closest ally. First, anti-Semitism was a latecomer to Italian fascism and was never fully appropriated. As already noted in Chapter 2, until anti-Semitic legislation was passed in 1938, Italy was a favourite destination for Jewish students from Hungary or Poland, where they were banned from studying, and especially for Jews fleeing Germany after 1933. Not surprisingly, Nazi propaganda often condemned Mussolini’s Italy as philosemitic, and pointed out numerous Jews as Fascist party members or sympathizers.10 Second, once Primo Levi, interviewed in Nicola Caracciolo, Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews During the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 76. Adriana Goldstaub, ‘L’antisemitismo in Italia’, in Leon Poliakov, Storia dell’antisemitismo 1945–1993 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996), pp. 425–27. For Rijeka/Fiume, see Simper, Židovi u Rijeci; Teodoro Morgani, Ebrei di Fiume e di Abbazia (1441–1945) (Rome: Carucci, 1979); Silva Bon, Le Comunità ebraiche della Provincia italiana del Carnaro: Fiume e Abbazia (1924–1945) (Trieste: Società di studi fiumani, 2004). For Opatija/Abazzia, see Alex Baenninger, Good Chemistry: The Life and Legacy of Valium Inventor Leo Sternbach (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), pp. 11–12. Ruzicic-Kessler, Italiener auf dem Balkan, p. 173. Interestingly, Nazi Germany’s second most important ally and, along with Italy, the third member of the so-called Tripartite Pact, Japan, also decided not to expel Jewish refugees from territories it occupied in China and Manchuria, or from Japan itself, which greatly

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it emerged, Italian fascist anti-Semitism was not biological, but cultural or identitarian. Fascist ideologues and anthropologists underlined that Italians were racially related to Jews and Africans, not Aryans, contributing yet another factor to a very ambivalent attitude towards Jews, different from Nazism or East European fascisms.11 Currents of anti-Semitism thrived, especially in some Catholic circles, and they were later exploited, once Italy passed its anti-Semitic laws. At the same time, throughout the war in Italy, as Susan Zuccotti emphasized, ‘(Catholic) churches, monasteries, convents, and other religious houses opened their doors to thousands of Jews, and Italian men and women of the Church stood nobly and courageously in the forefront of a rescue effort …’.12 Again, the nature of Italian religious or rather confessional socialization, only mentioned here, deserves further elaboration that would go beyond our topic. Another factor, clearly reflecting the subjective nature of sources used for this book (given the harsh treatment of Slavs), is what their authors perceived as the Italian lack of propensity to violence. Theodor Csokor described his firsthand experience of violence of warring parties in occupied Yugoslavia, distinguishing between ‘a terror of a dull minority imposed by outsiders to one young people (Ustaša to Croats) and a people who became human due to their long history and were no longer capable of decisive bestiality despite Fascism, except if frightened (Italians)’.13

increased once the Mediterranean escape route was closed by Italy in late 1938. In 1941, the Japanese Consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, saved thousands of refugees, issuing them with transit visas through Japan. See Yutaka Taniuchi, The Miraculous Visas – Chiune Sugihara and the Story of the 6000 Jews (New York: Gefen Books, 2001). Standard works on the topic in English are Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2006); Jews in Italy Under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945, ed. by Joshua  D.  Zimmerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews. German–Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy 1922–1945 (London: The Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1978). In Italian, Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Torino: Einaudi, 1961), and recent overviews in Ilaria Pavan, ‘Fascism, Anti-Semitism, and Racism: An Ongoing Debate’, Telos, 164 (2013), 45–62, and ‘Gli storici e la Shoah in Italia’, in Storia della Shoah in Italia Vol. 2, ed. by Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci et al. (Torino: UTET, 2010). About Jewish (and other) refugees in Italy, the most comprehensive work is Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf. Susan Zuccotti, ‘Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust’, in The Italian Refuge: Rescue of Jews During the Holocaust, ed. by Ivo Herzer (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), pp. 254–70 (p. 266). At the same time as Zuccotti and before her, Mae Briskin duly observed that priests in every occupied European country behaved toward Jews similarly to their countrymen (p. 269). Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 231.

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After the war, for a long time, the uniquely Italian phenomenon of institutional rescue of Jews involving the highest echelons of the Italian Army and Foreign Ministry, but also common Italian officials and people on the ground, was praised.14 In recent decades, however, the Italian historiography and public has moved beyond the myth of the so-called ‘good Italian’ versus the ‘bad German’, which was established by the Italian elites after 1943 in order to downplay Italian culpability for events during the Second World War. Newly published books demonstrate the complexity of Italian military and civil actions during the war in the occupied areas, emphasizing a number of war crimes committed against the domicile, almost exclusively Slavic, population.15 While the Italian rescue of the Jews in both Italy and its occupied territories remained for the most part uncontested, in the undoing of the ‘good Italian’ myth, a new debate emerged about whether the Italian authorities acted out of true humanitarian concern or sheer political calculation.16 One of the protagonists in this debate, historian Davide Rodogno, claimed that Fascist Italy’s protection of Jews during the war, while undoubtedly true, was somewhat misleading.17 Fascist authorities were reluctant to hand over Jews under their jurisdiction, but, according to Rodogno, they acted from 1940 The most comprehensive elaboration of all the evidence regarding Italian policies on Jews has been by Mary Felstiner, ‘Refuge and Persecution in Italy, 1933–1945’, originally published in Italian in Storia Contemporanea, 16/1 (1985), 45–87. English translation is available on the site of the Simon Wiesenthal Center [accessed 28 May 2022]. Filippo Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2013); Davide Conti, Criminali di guerra italiani: Accuse, processi e impunità nel secondo dopoguerra (Rome: Odradek, 2011), and L’occupazione italiana dei Balcani: Crimini di guerra e mito della “brava gente” (1940–1943) (Rome: Odradek, 2008); Alessandra Kersevan, Lager italiani: Pulizia etnica e campi di concentramento fascisti per civili jugoslavi 1941–1943 (Rome: Nutrimenti, 2008); Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2005); Tone Ferenc, La Provincia ‘italiana’ di Lubiana – Documenti 1941–1942 (Udine: Istituto Friulano per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione, 1994). Ruth Nattermann in her summary of the existing historiography and discussion of the role of Luca Pietromarchi, ‘Humanitäres Prinzip oder politisches Kalkül? Luca Pietromarchi und die italienische Politik genegüber Juden im besetzten Kroatien’, in Die ‘Achse’ Im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie Und Kriegführung 1939–1945, ed. by Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010), pp.  319–39, situates Jonathan Steinberg in the first, and Davide Rodogno in the second group, while Michele Sarfatti takes the middle ground. For Davide Rodogno’s arguments, see his ‘“Italiani brava gente?” Fascist Italy’s Policy Toward the Jews in the Balkans, April 1941–1943’, European History Quarterly, 35/2 (2005), 213–40.

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to 1943 not primarily to save Jews, but to defend their position as a sovereign nation, and their prestige, against the Nazis, the Vichy regime, and Croatian fascists. Discussing the role of the Italian Army, Burgwyn also dismisses any humanitarian impulse, and explains it as a policy of resisting German dictation and intrusion in territories it controlled.18 Elsewhere, such as in Greece, Rodogno reduces the Italian rescue to economic concerns. Furthermore, Rodogno and other Italian historians point out that, despite awareness of the ongoing Holocaust, Italian military and civilian authorities turned away many fleeing refugees to their fate of deportation and death. As will be detailed later, there was only one documented case of Jewish refugees officially being handed over by the Italians. True, a chaotic situation in Croatia in early summer 1941 resulted in individual Jewish refugees being unable to cross into Italian territory, or being sent back while attempting to escape to Fiume and possibly elsewhere. During the same period, Jews in Dubrovnik in particular were exposed to Ustaša anti-Semitic measures, and some were deported before the Italian Army took over. These cases clearly point to a lack of Italian strategy of rescue, rather than to a strategy of discrimination, let alone deportation and death. If there was no strategy of rescue, and there could not be one in a country which in 1938 adopted anti-Semitic laws, the question arises as to why and how so many Jews survived in Italy and in the Italian-occupied areas. In the case of occupied Yugoslavia, Rodogno and some Yugoslav survivors, such as Altarac, stress that the favourable conditions for the Jews should be attributed not to the Italian humane disposition, but to their fear that any surrender of Jews to the Ustaša or Nazis would result in Serbs being next, and they find evidence in the letters of General Mario Roatta, the commander of the Italian Second Army in charge of Dalmatia, to the Supreme Command in Rome.19 Many of Rodogno’s arguments are meant to overturn a judgement by one survivor, Zagreb-born Israeli historian Menachem Shelah, made over thirty years ago – and reiterated recently by others – who claimed that the Italian government, the Italian military commanders in Yugoslavia, and the Italian foreign ministry officials together worked out a policy to protect the Jews from the Germans.20 H. James Burgwyn, ‘General Roatta’s War Against the Partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9/3 (2004), 314–29 (p. 326). Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci’, p. 776. Menachem Shelah, ‘The Italian Rescue of Yugoslav Jews, 1941–1943’, in The Italian Refuge, ed by Herzer, pp. 205–18. Recent additions to Shelah’s arguments were made in Bambara, Židov, which also published some survivors’ testimonies. One of them, Milo Zeev (alias Vladimir Müller), published a volume based upon his experience of Italian rescue, Der italienische Widerstand gegen den Holocaust in Kroatien: Geschichte und persönliche Erlebnisse 1941–1945 (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre, 2013).

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According to Shelah, there were several reasons for this stand: opposition, in principle, to the murder of the Jews, or the powerful moral imperative as he defined it; the desire to safeguard Italian prestige and standing in occupied Yugoslavia; and the growing realization that the war was turning in favour of the Allies. A more nuanced view is offered by David Roberts, who clearly refutes any notion of a concerted effort at rescue on orders from above, or systematic defiance by those on the ground by helping Jews, stressing instead a genuine Italian revulsion against Nazi (and Ustaša) policies, based on humanitarian rather than just instrumental and pragmatic reasons.21 Esther Gitman suggests that the Catholic church and its prelates played the key role in the Italian rescue of the Jews, but provides only anecdotal evidence, with a couple of letters and interventions.22 However, the focus of most historians rests on the Italian high officials and army generals, while their research deals with archival evidence from the Italian capital, where all military and civil institutions had their headquarters. In an attempt to contribute to this already impressive research and vociferous debate in Italian and international scholarship, this chapter draws on numerous personal testimonies that shed light on some aspects of these debates, namely the anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy, and, more specifically, the rescue of Jews in areas under Italian rule where, they argue, different rules applied. In addition, I consulted local Italian military and civilian administration reports kept in Split, Zadar, Rijeka, and Korčula. Pooling more resources revealed that the benevolent treatment of Jews by the Italians was noted and discussed already in contemporary reports. The Jewish Community of Dubrovnik speculated in its reports about whether Italians protected the Jews because of their calculations to shift sides in the war, or because they were more humane than the Germans and Ustaša. Another contemporary theory implied that the local Italian administration was greedy for the aid received by the American Jewish organizations. Given that the aid was two dollars per day per refugee at best, and that it was impossible to transfer the money to benefit directly the military and internment camps run by the Italians, this argument could easily be dismissed.23 According to an Italian doctor at the Rab camp in 1943, Italy was getting only one dollar per day per refugee from American Joint, and thus very little could be provided in terms of care.24 Rodogno insists that what appeared David Roberts, ‘Italian Fascism: New Light on the Dark Side’, Journal of Contemporary History, 44/3 (2009), 523–33 (p. 531). Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, pp. 127–57, and more specifically in numerous appearances in Catholic or Croatian nationalist publications. Report of the Dubrovnik Jewish Community. Archive of JIM, 2973, K.27-1-1.1. Danko Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno (Sarajevo: Džepna knjiga, 1956), p. 92.

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to be humanitarian effort resulted from the corruption of Italian soldiers and officials, but as they could not count on any material profit from the aid, we are only left with bribes.25 Indeed, Fascist Italy, despite the image that it projected, was a massively corrupt state.26 Yet, as noted in other chapters, paying for obtaining documents, for crossing the border, and for transport was a paramount refugee experience, or simply the way to go, in Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. The few places that accepted Jews, such as Shanghai and some countries in South America, also charged high sums per head. Many survivors describe paying for rescue or other help as per default. Jews were often the first to offer bribes, even though this strategy did not always bring favourable results.27 Any help with documents, transport, food, and so on was considered more binding if done in exchange for payment or bribe. Testimonies reject the notion that the Italians or Italian institutions were more susceptible to corruption than others, and this chapter will provide more information about how corruption worked. Finally, personal reminiscences of refugees on the run recount experiences with rank-and-file soldiers, and with Italian civilians employed by the state, army, or various private companies during the occupation, along with lower ranked clergy, officers, and officials, providing a multitude of relevant cases. Based on their rich experience with common people, many Jews attributed their salvation to what Zeev summarized as the ‘Italian mentality’.28 This is extended to all levels of Italians in a contemporary report by Susman, who was puzzled that an Axis partner, boasting of racial legislation, treated Jewish refugees so liberally: ‘I was told officially that Italy has no intentions of discarding humane conduct’, as this would represent ‘treachery against its ancient culture’.29 In fact, according to Rochlitz, the refugee Jews were so overwhelmed with the positive reception from the Italians that many ‘felt after the war that the Italians, who were the allies of the hated Germans and who had little to gain from protecting us, were more concerned for our well-being and did more to ensure our survival than the Allies.’30 In order to fully appreciate survivors’ testimonies, so far only marginally present in the historiography, this chapter, as well as the two subsequent ones, will consider the decisions of highranking generals and politicians, such as well-described decisions to refuse Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire, p. 402. As demonstrated in Paolo Giovannini and Marco Palla, Il fascismo dalle mani sporche: Dittatura, corruzione, affarismo (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2019). This was the experience of Francis Ofner in relation to transports organized by HeChalutz and, later, Betar. Interview with Francis and Eili Ofner. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 140. Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee, p. 12. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 117.

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deportations, along with the actions of common soldiers and officials, and everyday policies and behaviour. Instances of refusal to take in any refugees, as happened in Rijeka under its prefect Temistocle Testa, and a single case when refugee Jews were handed over to the Germans from Italian-controlled Kosovo, and eventually deported to their deaths, will also be analysed. But first, let us examine how the refugees arrived in the territories annexed or occupied by Italy, how they were treated, and how they lived and survived. In the following chapter, we will take a closer look at Korčula, one of the Adriatic islands annexed by Italy, which held up to one thousand Jewish refugees. Finally, the chapter on Albania will further illuminate the role of Italy/Italians in saving the Jews there.

Flight to the Italians Many Jews from Zagreb fled to Split in the hope of reaching Italy, even before Yugoslavia was attacked, as testified by Medea Brukner, describing screams and cries at the main railway station as they parted from their loved ones.31 According to the diary and letters of Samuel Alcalay, written during the April turmoil, many Jews from Belgrade (including specifically refugees from Germany) similarly headed to Italy or the Adriatic coast, immediately upon the attack, based on widely circulated knowledge about the treatment of Jews in Italy, despite the anti-Semitic legislation introduced in late 1938.32 In the first chaotic couple of months of occupation and division of Yugoslavia, it was possible to reach the Italian zone or even islands without much control. This is how most of at least five thousand Yugoslav and foreign Jews, and numerous other refugees, reached the coast. The numerous Weiss family from Vienna, who spent two years in exile in Zagreb, headed towards Italy immediately after the German invasion and the declaration of the Ustaša Croatian state. On 23 April, they travelled to Ljubljana, and further to Kanal on the Soča-Isonzo river, where they were told by friendly Italian border guards that they could not cross officially, but were advised to look for a farmer with a boat and pay him to cross into Italy. Eventually, the local Slovene woman fishing nearby rowed them over for free. Others managed to cross by offering Italian soldiers cigarettes.33 Italians in Cividale del Friuli, on the other side of the border, were Schreiner, Spašeni iz Zagreba, p. 180. Letters and diary of Samuel Alcalay, published in Albert Alcalay, The Persistence of Hope, p. 95. Weiss, Out of Vienna, pp. 165–66.

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equally friendly to incoming refugees. Fleeing to Dalmatia from Belgrade, Theodor Csokor encountered a large group of Gipsy musicians, who exclaimed: ‘We are riding to the South, to Italians, good people for Gipsies, better than Croatians.’ Csokor wondered whether they were aware that Italy was one of the occupying countries that had just declared war on Yugoslavia: ‘We don’t care about this war. The one who doesn’t belong anywhere has thousand ways to go. We know the Italians …’, replied an old Gipsy called Vajda.34 Finally reaching Herzegovina and its biblical landscape of karst stone and Mediterranean macchia, Csokor encountered another group, this time of urban and finely dressed Jewish people carrying their bulky luggage, oddly moving among Yugoslav peasants and soldiers in the same direction towards the Italians.35 They all seemed to heed the advice given to Belgrade youngsters Ivan Singer and Paja Ciner (Zinner) by an elderly Austrian Jewish couple fleeing from Zagreb, where they had already spent three years as refugees: ‘Children, if you cannot manage to get away, be sure to be captured by the Italians, not the Germans’.36 Yugoslav Communist Jews, who had particular reasons for fear, also headed to the Italian zone in April 1941. Ivan Kreft, Pavle Breyer, Oskar Davičo, and the Lederer sisters all congregated on the island of Lopud near Dubrovnik, from where they would later move to Split, Korčula, and further.37 Split was a famous Communist bastion, already known as Little Moscow, so it was no surprise that many Jewish Communists headed there.38 For the first couple of months, the Italians were not strict, and anyone could easily enter Italian-occupied areas. Excaping the destruction of Belgrade or Sarajevo, Pollatschek was in shock to discover: Well-dressed, laughing people strolled the streets of Dubrovnik. I admired the changing of the guards and the flag-raising with music, the shops were full, I enjoyed the southern sun, the orange blossoms and the white villas by the sea.39

Initially, the only obstacles were a lengthy train ride from Zagreb to Split, or a bumpy bus ride from Mostar or Ploče on the coast, where the Sarajevo railway to the Adriatic ended. When Joy Levi’s Viennese family came from Sarajevo, they simply registered with the authorities, rented an apartment, and procured Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 75. Ibid., p. 94. Singer, My Father’s Blessings, p. 48. Ivan Kreft, ‘Otok Lopud u Nob’, in Dubrovnik u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi i socijalističkoj revoluciji 1941–1945 (Split: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1985), pp. 968–73. Kraus, Susreti i sudbine, p. 353. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 44.

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food with Italian ration cards that they were given.40 Hundreds of refugees from Belgrade stranded on the Montenegro section of the Adriatic coast after the failed British evacuation simply found lodgings with the locals and kept a low profile, while Italian officials seemed unbothered. The Italians even provided many with the so-called foglio di via (travel permits), which were intended for local travel, but which were used by some to go all the way to Belgrade and back, before stricter controls made it impossible to move.41 The exodus to Italian-occupied areas was possible because the status of Dalmatia (or Montenegro) was not established for the first couple of months. The Rome agreements between Mussolini and Ustaša leader Pavelić on 18 May, saw southern Dalmatia (Dubrovnik province and a few islands) assigned to the newly established Ustaša-ruled Croatian state, while the rest of the coast went to Italy.42 While initially thousands of mostly Sarajevo and Belgrade Jews reached the coast, from June 1941 only documented movement was allowed. German authorities also initially issued permits for people to return to where they lived prior to bombing and war turmoil. Since these were issued in name and without a photograph, many (Jews and others) used them to travel to Dubrovnik or Split.43 The influx of people in the Italian-occupied parts was so great that already on 25 May 1941, the Command of the Italian Sixth Army Corps under General Dalmazzo ordered all its subject units to prevent ‘the arrival of Jews, Orthodox Serbs, Greek-schismatics [sic] and in general all elements that do not want to subject themselves to the authority of other states and seek refuge and protection in our territory’.44 Days later, the Italian Interior Ministry send a similar message to all provincial authorities and the Command of the Second Army, which was placed in what was Yugoslavia, reiterating the orders banning immigration of Jews and others.45 Following reports of a massive influx of Serbian and Jewish refugees, the Italian Governor of Dalmatia, and notorious fascist, Giuseppe Bastianini warned police prefects of Zadar, Split, and Kotor to allow in only Jews with sufficient means, ordering them to be housed away from strategic places, and asking for a census of both local and

‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, 104–12 (p. 107). Interview with Bozo Rafajlovic. Franko Mirošević, Dubrovački kotar u NDH (Dubrovnik: Udruga antifašista, 2016), p. 116. Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, pp.  19–24; Dr Isak Aškenazi, ‘Doživljaji Jevreja u vreme Nacizma’ (New York, 1955) (typed manuscript), JIM 3332, K. 22-7-b-1, p. 19. Italian language order published in Narodnooslobodilačka borba u Dalmaciji 1941–1945. Zbornik dokumenata knjiga 1 1941 godina (Split: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1981), p. 447. Quoted in Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf, vol. 2, p. 203.

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newly arrived Jews, an investigation into their finances, and reports on those deemed detrimental to national interests.46 However, the initial bans were not respected during peacetime, let alone during the turmoil of war in summer 1941. Almost a month later, on 22 June, Ustaša authorities from Zemun, just opposite Belgrade, reported on many Jews escaping from Belgrade via Croatia to Split, which was allegedly full of Belgrade and Zagreb Jews, as well as many Serbs, warning: Before Italian eyes they engage in propaganda against Croatia and Axis powers. The Italians should be notified, and strict controls introduced on all Croatian rail tracks to stop this exodus of Jews as soon as possible because we have information of big trade of Italian passes among the Jews.47

For some time, those escaping from Belgrade continued to use this route, provided they had previously secured fake documents. Haim Pinkas bought falsified papers in Zemun identifying him as a Volksdeutscher and, with a bit of luck, made it to the Montenegrin coast.48 Yet the route to Montenegro’s coastal area for those fleeing Belgrade or Sarajevo was soon the first to become inaccessible due to German controls, and then the Partisan armed uprising in Montenegro at the beginning of July. There were contacts between the resistance and Jews on the coast, but the Partisans could not organize evacuation or vouch for their security. As a result of the uprising, and fearful of contacts between refugees and the resistance, the Italian authorities on the Montenegrin coast decided to register all the Jews and then, on 22 July, transfer them to internment in Albania. Two hundred and sixteen mostly Belgrade and Sarajevo Jews, along with three families from Zagreb (79 per cent were Yugoslav Jews and the rest foreign), were taken by boat from Kotor to Durrës/Durazzo, and then by trucks to a camp already in use in nearby Kavaja. They were treated fairly and allowed to bring all their possessions. In Kavaja, they encountered Montenegrins imprisoned for suspected support for the uprising, and conditions in the camp were terrible. The Jewish refugees were all housed in one building, made to sleep on lice-infected beds, and given food from military cauldrons to the consternation of previously well-to-do Belgrade and Sarajevo urbanites. Yet, according to Italian original from 17 June 1941, as published in Verfogung und Ermordung, p. 349. The original Croatian language report published in Zločini na jugoslovenskim prostorima u Prvom i Drugom svetskom ratu. Zbornik dokumenata tom 1: Zločini Nezavisne države Hrvatske, 1941–1945 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institute, 1993), p. 125. Haim Mile Pinkas, ‘Full Speed Ahead Across the Atlantic’, We Survived  …, pp.  188–208 (p. 194).

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testimonies, they were allowed internal autonomy, and cultural and religious life, and even the Fascist camice nere (black shirts) guards shared milk with the children.49 The Jewish interment in Kavaja set the pattern for all subsequent internment camps along the Dalmatian coast (Crikvenica, Rab, and so on), with internees deprived of freedom of movement and forced into miserable living conditions. Yet they were treated humanely, in clear contrast to the treatment reserved for Slavic prisoners. The Jewish refugees were told that the internment was temporary and for their own good, and promised transfer to Italy as soon as circumstances allowed. Three months later, they were eventually transported to the Ferramonti camp in South Italy.50 In the meantime, in Zagreb, as we have seen, during the first couple of months of Ustaša rule, the Jewish Department of Police led by Vilko Kuehnel was issuing (selling) permits to leave. Some tried using the permits to go to Hungary, but most were turned away at the border by the Hungarian guards. In contrast, most of those who travelled to the Italian-occupied Adriatic coast made it through, despite the ban in place for Jewish immigration to Italy. According to Milo Zeev, among more than two thousand Jews in Zagreb who obtained permits during the summer, there were many refugees from Germany, Austria, and elsewhere. This relatively easy escape remains inexplicable to date, as it took place at the same time that hundreds of Jews, both local and refugees, were already being incarcerated and brutally murdered in the Gospić system of camps.51 Despite this brief window of opportunity, many did not dare apply or simply could not afford to pay their ‘contribution’. Furthermore, danger lurked at every stage of the process, especially as time dragged on. Stjepan Spitzer, the owner of the first Croatian candy factory, attempted to escape Zagreb with his mother, but they were taken off the train in Karlovac by their alleged assistant and escort, only to be later deported to Auschwitz, where they perished.52 In Sarajevo, the trade in documents from the areas under Italian control was Mile Pinkas, ‘Što Pre Preko Atlantika’; interview with Boza Rafajlovic; Italian sources record 196 names; see Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, ‘I profughi ebrei rastrellati in Monenegro nel Luglio 1941 e il Loro Internamento in Albania e in Italia’, in Gli ebrei in Albania sotto il Fascismo: Una Storia da ricostruire, ed. by Laura Brazzo and Michele Sarfatti (Firenze: Giuntina, 2010), pp. 153–67. Francesco Folino, Ferramonti, Un Lager Di Mussolini: Gli Internati Durante La Guerra (Cosenza: Edizioni Brenner, 1985), pp.  59–105, records 170 Yugoslav Jews arriving from Kavaja internment, whereas Capogreco, ‘I profughi ebrei’, traces 187 of them. The rest succeeded in transferring to free confinement. From the group in Ferramonti, few were able to emigrate from Italy or move to free confinement. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 20, Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 245–65. ‘Španić, Miroslav (Spitzer)’, in Židovski leksikon.

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in the hands of Ustaša or police agents, meaning that the Ustaša could and did stop people and rob them without letting them pass.53 How treacherous these could be, and how those who sought them ended up in Ustaša hands, is evidenced in the fate of artists Daniel Ozmo and Slavko Bril, who attempted to flee Sarajevo and Zagreb respectively. Both were set up by their contacts, arrested by the Ustaša, and later deported to Jasenovac concentration camp, where they perished.54 Young violinist Erich Eliša Samlaić (Somlei) and his wife Ljerka (née Blau, born in 1920) were arrested at the Sarajevo railway station, as they were traveling from Zemun to Split, and then deported to Jasenovac and Đakovo camps respectively, where they found their deaths.55 Vukovar wine merchant Edmund Bier sent Italian passes from Rijeka by courier to his friends, the Steiner family. By the time the passes arrived, the Steiners had been expelled from their home, which was taken over by Otmar Schildt, vice-chief of the local Ustaša police. The courier knocked on the Steiners’ door, only for it to be opened by Shildt, who then had the whole family deported to Jasenovac, where they perished.56 The closest escape route to Zagreb was via Sušak (Sussa). It was separated from Rijeka/Fiume only by a bridge, and both had sizeable Jewish communities. There was also a lively market of travel passes.57 Yet here the situation was the most perilous because of the local Italian governor, the Prefect Temistocle Testa, already notorious for overzealously applying Italy’s anti-Semitic laws and denying or removing citizenship to some Fiuman Jews, who had acquired it after 1921.58 Fiume was the town in interwar Italy with the highest percentage of Jewish population, with many having their citizenship stripped. After Italy entered the war, already in June 1940 over two hundred and fifty ‘foreign’ Jews were arrested and the following month around seventy former German, Polish, or Czech citizens were interned. In April the following year, another 317 people were taken from Fiume into internment, but the worst was yet to Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, pp. 32–33. Rajner, Fragile Images, pp. 253–79. As reported in Chapter 2, a similar thing happened to Viennese painter Walter Kraus and his twenty-year-old pregnant wife, Vera, née Klein. ‘Samlaić, Erich’, in Židovski leksikon. ‘Steiner, Aleksandar’, in Židovski leksikon. Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, p. 63. In the interwar period, Sušak belonged to Yugoslavia, while just across a small river (river is Fiume in Italian) stood Fiume, in Italian hands. Sušak was then annexed to Italy by the so-called Rome agreements between Fascist Italy and Ustaša-ruled Croatia. Arminio Klein Report, 6. December 1945, HR-DARI-106 Box 3 (State Archive of Rijeka, Commission for War Crimes). After the war, Testa was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for war crimes, but soon after, he committed suicide. Simper, Židovi u Rijeci i Liburnijskoj Istri, pp. 203–345.

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come with the invasion on Yugoslavia and the arrival of hundreds of Jewish refugees, mostly through people-smuggling channels. Some smugglers were arrested and interned, and at least 367 refugees were removed or brought back to the border.59 Contemporary witness Susman reported three thousand refugees in Sušak facing a hostile attitude, as the authorities questioned the authorization of the Italian Jewish Aid Agency DELASEM (Delegazione Assistenza Emigranti Ebrei), and any other assistance.60 In November 1941, another several hundred refugee or stateless Jews found in Sušak and Fiume were transferred and placed in free confinement in Italy, with Prefect Testa reluctant to let in more Jews, who remained stranded in the vicinity.61 Even the Rabbi of Sušak, Otto Deutsch, in charge of the distribution of DELASEM aid, was arrested and accused of being Anglophile, anti-Italian, and anti-fascist, although Deutsch claimed he was only providing assistance to refugees. According to some testimonies, the passes were indeed procured with the help of the Jewish Community.62 Eventually, Rabbi Deutsch was deported to the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp in Calabria, along with many of the local and refugee Jews. Unlike the provinces of Split and Ljubljana, the evidence and testimonies point out that Italian border guards at Sušak-Fiume turned back some Jewish refugees to Croatia.63 The exact numbers are unknown, but Voigt calculated that one thousand four hundred Jewish refugees attempted to enter Italy via Sušak, estimating that up to half were turned back.64 Most recently, Rodogno has written that up to eight hundred Jews (and Orthodox Serbs) were escorted back by the prefecture of Fiume from July 1941 to May 1942, although it is unclear whether the same people were removed more than once, as many made several desperate attempts to flee the Ustaša.65 From testimonies, we know that the Ustaša controlled and arrested some refugee Jews in the village of Hreljin, close to Sušak, where they installed a border check. Others managed to continue to Sušak, while some decided to return to Zagreb, and their later destiny remains unknown.66 Some, like Zdenko Bergl and his parents, failed to cross to Sušak, Simper, Židovi u Rijeci i Liburnijskoj Istri, pp. 382–89. Susman, Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee, p. 10. Most were transferred to villages in nearby Veneto, which held over one thousand three hundred Jewish refugees. The Centre for the Study of Internment and Deportation Marina Eskenazi provides the information [accessed 28 May 2022]. Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, pp. 49–53. Teodoro Morgani, Ebrei di Fiume e di Abbazia 1441–1945 (Rome: Carucci editore, 1979), pp. 69–73; Klaus Voigt, Il rifugio precario, vol. II. Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf, vol. 2, p. 210. Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire, pp. 369–71, and p. 461. Propusnica za koncentracijski logor Kraljevica, p. 49.

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but then managed to successfully cross into Ljubljana province, and eventually ended up in free confinement in Modena. Bergl explained their perseverance: ‘We knew our best chance for salvation was Italy.’67 Despite Governor Testa, the border around Fiume was porous too. Zdenka Novak, née Steiner, and many others managed to enter and remain in Sušak or Fiume, only carrying fake documents.68 Local fishermen organized smuggling by boats over the bay of Bakar, which separated the Croatian from the newly Italian annexed territories. A report from the carabinieri admitted that it was the poor who suffered, as those with money or valuables could bribe their way through.69 The families of prominent Zagreb lawyers and Jewish officials Makso Pscherchof/ Pšerhof and Bernard Loewinger bought their way through Fiume, and eventually settled in Asti in Piedmont.70 Others crossed if they had an ‘Italian connection’, like the newly wed Salvatore Konforti and his wife Olga Hamburger.71 The Herzer family were saved by an Italian sergeant who personally escorted them past the Ustaša on the border to Sušak.72 Italian soldiers also helped Mira Hoffman and her husband, who were fleeing Zagreb without valid documents. As they were taken out of the train by Ustaša guards, they ran to an Italian control booth and were saved.73 Italian Colonel Bonamici rescued the whole family of renowned mathematician and professor Vladimir Vranić, who were facing arrest and deportation back to Zagreb, even though they had been baptized Catholics for decades.74 The Weinberger family from Osijek was

Interview with Zdenko J. Bergl. Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked, pp. 38–43. Cited in Zločini fašističkih okupatora, p. 118. Weiss described how his family crossed the bridge from Sušak to Rijeka, and were initially stopped by the carabinieri, only to be later allowed to pass. Out of Vienna, p. 178. In 1943, both fled to safety in Switzerland. ‘Loewinger, Bernard’ and ‘Pscherhorf, Maksimilijan’ in Židovski leksikon. Having escaped from Zagreb to Ogulin, they met Colonel Antonio Bertoni, who organized Italian soldiers to escort them to Fiume, where he recommended them to one of the police chiefs, Giovanni Palatucci, who issued them residence permits and found them a place to stay for a year. Their daughter was born in Fiume before they could move further to Italy and reunite with Olga’s parents, who had escaped before them via the same route. See Drudi, Un caminno lungo, pp. 36–37. Both Bertoni and Palatucci were later declared ‘Righteous among the Nations’ in 2006 and 1990 respectively, but Palatucci’s role has been widely questioned. Interview with Ivo Herzer. Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, pp. 139–40. Mladen Vranić, ‘Odyssey Between Scylla and Charybdis, Through Storms of Fascism, Communism, Immigration and Aging’, excerpts from the unpublished manuscript.

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transported over the border in an Italian diplomatic vehicle.75 Others, who could not make it to Fiume, had to settle in nearby places which belonged to Croatia, such as Kraljevica, where the Ustaša could only exercise civil power, while the Italians held military power. Later, in the wake of the Partisan resistance attacks, Italians introduced curfews in places such as Kraljevica, and made it impossible to move from one town to another, but generally their presence offered safety from deportation.76 Eventually, Split became the primary location of flight from Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade, as the biggest city in Dalmatia, the province with the most porous borders. It was also the most populous of the Italian annexed areas, with many of its inhabitants traditionally studying and working throughout Yugoslavia. As already noted in previous chapters, Jews attempting to reach Split had to procure passes that carried the names of real people from Dalmatia. These were the most valuable fake documents, as they certified that someone was born or was a resident of Split or another place in the newly annexed Italian territories, which would later also save one from internment, checks, and other measures directed at refugee Jews.77 A letter from the Ustaša governor of Omiš, near Split, to Ustaša authorities in Zagreb described how the Italian authorities in Split were issuing these passes in the false belief that they were for people born and resident in the areas they had annexed. While corruption was ubiquitous, there are other testimonies that Italian authorities could often be persuaded to issue these certificates or lasciapassare (travel passes) on purely humanitarian grounds, or if they were begged for them. The files now held at the Jewish Museum in Belgrade contain letters which family members and friends sent to those left behind, with detailed instructions (accompanying the documents) on how to deal with different authorities, what to wear, and how to avoid controls by getting on trains or buses outside of Sarajevo.78 From the letters, we learn that, similar to Sušak/Fiume, the Jewish community leadership in Split and its rabbi were also involved in procuring passes. Money and photographs were transferred by couriers to bribe local officials in Italian-annexed areas to issue certificates with real names, but with photographs of Jews in danger. A trade in passes in Split boomed, and by August the prices for these documents had skyrocketed, as it was widely known that those who came illegally could be arrested at worst, but were never deported back by the Italians.79 JIM, br. 1860, K-24-4-1/6 (Testimony of Pavle Weinberger (later Vinski) to the Yugoslav Commission for the Crimes of Occupiers on 13 September 1945). Polić, Vjetrenjasta klepsidra, p. 423. Kraus, Susreti i sudbine, p. 354. Archive JIM, 3031. K.27. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, pp. 63–64.

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The letters surveyed were all addressed to Sarajevo Sephardi Jews, and clearly foreign-speaking Jews could not benefit from them once firm controls were established. Documents of deceased people (especially those dead or unaccounted for in bombing at the very beginning of the war) were also used, with photographs exchanged and stamps copied using a boiled egg.80 Some Jewish women crossed into the Italian-controlled area wearing traditional Muslim clothes (Zar or feredža), along with fake documents or, rather, real documents of Muslim women from Mostar and other places.81 Initially, it was relatively easy. After being released from imprisonment on 22 May, the famous Zagreb lawyer and community activist Ziga Neumann fled to Split with his son-inlaw Joseph Konforti and twenty-seven other family members on false documents procured in Zagreb.82 As the summer progressed, one had to rely on ever more skill or bribery to reach Dalmatia. Some made it almost all the way, like Gabi Deleon and his mother, only to be discovered by the Croatian police at the Metković control point. It turned out that the Italian army commander in charge of Metković overheard their screams and crying when being questioned by the Ustaša, and his intervention saved them from being sent back to Sarajevo or, worse, directly deported to Ustaša death camps.83 Others never got their passes, as is evident from the Croatian police report on the arrest of a merchant, Mate (Stipe) Videk, during the regular control check of the bus from Split to Sarajevo on 1 October 1941. Videk was travelling as a courier, with eleven letters and travel passes for Jews of Sarajevo.84 Another major escape destination was the Italian-occupied part of today’s Slovenia, or the so-called Ljubljana province.85 In early June  1941, Rudolf Kandel paid a Zagreb macher dressed as Ustaša, who provided him with a fake document and even carried his suitcase and stayed on the train until they reached Italian-controlled Ljubljana.86 Some days later, the whole extended family Selinger travelled by train to Ljubljana with fake passes. Kandel’s parents

Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, pp. 55–56. Zoran Mandlbaum, ‘Holokaust nad Jevrejima Mostara’, Most, 205 (2006), 65–70. Their story is told in Emilio Drudi, Un cammino lungo un anno: Gli ebrei salvati dal primo italiano “Giousto tra le Nazioni” (Florence: Giuntina, 2012). Gabi Deleon, ‘Born Three Times’, Mi smo preživeli … 3, 211–20 (p. 215). The Letters of Kotorska Oblast Dubrovnik 753/1941, Archive JIM, 3031. K.27-2-1. For an overview of the Holocaust in Slovenia, see Gregor Joseph Kranjc, ‘On the Periphery: Jews, Slovenes, and the Memory of the Holocaust’, in The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, ed. by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), pp. 591–625. Lahnstein, Massel und Chuzpe, pp. 130–35, pp. 148–49.

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also escaped weeks later, but this time the ‘escape’ services cost much more.87 Desperate to save his family of Viennese Jews in Zagreb in summer 1941, Robert Weiss bought Bolivian passports from a certain Samuel Weisberg, which helped them get to Italy and further.88 Edmund S. Berger escaped with fake papers, mingling with Slovenes who had been expelled from German-occupied parts of Slovenia via Zagreb to Ljubljana province.89 Throughout the summer, there were no difficulties as long as one could afford to buy passes. It was even possible to transfer money to Italy and have it available in Ljubljana. Moreover, the Kandels could buy baptism certificates in Ljubljana, which renamed them as Kadeli, and obtain lasciapassare to travel further to Italy. A cheaper option was the green border. The people of Bela Krajina, a border area between Croatia and Slovenia on the Kupa river, saved up to one hundred and twenty Jews in 1941 and 1942 from among more than a thousand who fled across this border. Refugees usually crossed the border in mountainous regions, but in Bela Krajina they had to cross the river with their luggage. This was mostly at the river’s shallow point, near the villages of Primostek, Otok, and Donji Zalog. Local people helped and gave them food, mostly bread, and took them to nearby railway stations, from where they could travel further to Ljubljana or into Italy.90 The five-member German/Yugoslav family Reiss-Pollak paid to cross from Zagreb to the Italian zone in an ox-cart on village roads during a freezing night in January 1942.91 Their long and hazardous journey from Zagreb to Ljubljana, with many stops in barns and villages along the way, took two weeks – a trip which is now possible in an hour or two on a highway. To deal with the huge influx, the former sugar factory in Ljubljana, Cukrarna, housed hundreds of refugees, supported by DELASEM, the Red Cross and the Catholic Church under the Ljubljana Bishop Gregorij Rožman.92 The reminiscences of Trude Binder, who was among the first to arrive when there were still no controls, are full of praise for Ljubljana’s Bishop Rožman’s generous support to the refugees, although after the war, he was condemned as a war criminal for his collaboration first with the Italian, and then the German occupying

Ibid., pp. 136–37. The Kandel and the Selinger families eventually arrived in Arezzo and Milan respectively, and they described their journey and survival in Italy with heartfelt thanks to the Italian people in their memoir. Weiss, Out of Vienna, p. 172. Interview with S. Edmund Berger. The Slovenian Righteous, ed. by Šumi and Luthar, pp. 142–49. The family was later placed in free confinement in Mombercelli, near Asti. Interview with Erika Reiss Kinel. Mirjam Cajner, ‘One Good Turn Deserves Another’, We Survived … 2, pp. 242–47.

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authorities.93 Foreign Jews in Ljubljana remembered the Italians as benevolent occupiers. Young Lisa Heilig recalled how young girls fell in love with the handsome Italian soldiers, and especially very handsome officers, but if they crossed the line the girls had to move quickly to Italy as these relationships were not viewed kindly.94 Yet, starting in autumn 1941, and in order to ease the pressure on their newly acquired territories, the Italian authorities began ordering the refugees from Ljubljana province to the camp of Ferramonti, and other internment camps and towns in Italy, with the support of the DELASEM. Most travelled on their own and then reported to Ferramonti camp or to Italian towns, where they were placed in confine libero.95 Due to the Partisan guerrilla attacks around Ljubljana, and the possibility of Germans overtaking the city, DELASEM also advised leaving Ljubljana and proceeding to Italy. This was implemented in the best-known case of escape through Slovenia to Italy, involving forty Jewish children from Germany, who were stuck in Zagreb without Palestine immigration certificates after the HeChalutz leader, Recha Freier, and the organizer of Youth Aliyah left with another ninety teenagers just days before the occupation of Yugoslavia. Among those who arrived too late to procure certificates, or who were simply too sick to travel, was Arnold Weininger from Leipzig, whose father was among the first victims in Sachsenhausen, and whose mother and younger brother also later perished in the Holocaust. Arnold got sick while being smuggled by Schleich’s organization along the well-known mountain route. Once in Zagreb, he could not be brought to hospital, and instead was taken care of by the Levi family.96 Left in the care of young Zagreb Hashomer Hatzair activist Josef Joschko Indig and Professor Boris Jochvidson, the group including Weininger and others was transferred to a castle near Ljubljana in early summer 1941. By early 1942, Ljubljana was no longer idyllic, due to the mounting Partisan armed resistance to Italian occupation. In the summer, the children were moved to Nonantola, Modena, with the explicit approval of the Italian government and the assistance of the Red Cross. As this story has been widely written about, and even turned into films and plays, it is only mentioned here because no money for transfer was paid to Italian

Binder, Memoirs, p. 6. Bishop Rožman fled the Partisans to reach Austria, and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1959, having been sentenced to eighteen years in prison in absentia. De Curtis, Unpublished memoir, pp. 53–54. Interview with S. Edmund Berger. Wininger, Arnold. ‘Segment  62–66’. Interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1996.

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officials, or anyone for that matter.97 There were other examples where assistance from Italian officials or soldiers was neither secretive nor involved bribery. Aleksandar Licht, President of the Zionist federation of Yugoslavia, who, along with many other prominent Zagreb Jews, was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Graz in April 1941, also fled to Italian-held Ljubljana in March 1942, after his release. With his wife and daughter, Licht was then evacuated to Italy along with the Nonantola children.98 Belgrade surgeon and court doctor Leon Ko(j)en travelled to Italy with four family members on the direct intervention of the Italian queen. In Zagreb, the Ustaša held him, but the Italians intervened with the German authorities, so eventually he was allowed to continue to safety.99 Others travelled to Italy by plane, despite the ban.100 All the cases above, and many other testimonies and records, evoke how Italian soldiers and officers hid and transported Jews against the instructions and official bans.101 Some refugees paid to get transported by Italian military vehicles, or to get those stationed on borders to close their eyes, but in most cases Italian soldiers were simply helping and asking nothing in return. Even if a financial transaction was involved, testimonies do not describe it as an extortion. Personal testimonies and available evidence undermine any notion that the Italian authorities were institutionally corrupt and benefiting from saving the Jews. Issuing documents was mostly done by local officials, and cost relatively little compared to other costs of supplying documents, mostly done by local criminals (macher), and transport, which presented the highest risk of all. Summer 1941 was plagued by the ongoing confusion over administration and control in Croatia between Italy and Germany, as supervising Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust, p. 67. For more on the Nonantola children, see Klaus Voigt, ‘The Children of Vila Emma at Nonatola’, in Joshua D. Zimmerman, Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945, ed. by Joshua  D.  Zimmerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 182–98, and, more extensively, in his Villa Emma: Jüdische Kinder auf der Flucht. 1940–1943 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002). The principal carer for the children, Josef Indig, alias Josef Ithai, published his memoirs as Yaldei Villa Emma (Tel Aviv: Sifriat-Moreshet, 1982). Parts of it were integrated into the English-language recollections of one of the survivors as Joshko’s Children by Robert R. Weiss in 1998 (available on CD). Robert Weiss and Arnold Wininger were also interviewed for the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation. Vulesica, ‘“What Will Become of the German Jews?”’, pp. 45–70 (p. 53). Via Italy and Switzerland, Koen arrived in England, where he worked as a doctor for the Red Cross. See Prof. Leon Kojen, osnivač urologije u Srbiji i osnivač Urološke klinike. 50 godina urologije u Srbiji:  40 godina rada Urološke klinike Medicinskog fakulteta u Beogradu ed. by Branko Ostojić (Belgrade: Urološka klinika Medicinskog fakulteta, 1972). The family of Stevo Singer from Belgrade travelled by plane to Rome and then Lisbon, where they took a boat to Cuba. See Weiss, Out of Vienna, p. 190. Voigt recounts a number of other cases in his Zuflucht auf Widerruf, vol. 2, pp. 205–15.

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powers, and the Ustaša, who embarked on a brutal persecution and massacres of Serbs and Jews. Contradictory reports have emerged about the attitude of the Italian army and individual soldiers/officers, who witnessed or could have learnt about these massacres. Based on the testimony of Edo Neufeld and Emil Freundlich kept at Yad Vashem, Zvi Loker concluded that, while there was no doubt that the Italian soldiers protected many Jews in areas they occupied or annexed, there were cases where Italians behaved with indifference, as in Gospić and the island of Pag. As the Ustaša paraded (and beat) thousands of Serbs and Jews (made up of arrested Maccabi club youngsters and lawyers from Zagreb) through Gospić on the way to the execution sites of Jadovno and Pag, the Italian Army initially did not react.102 Having received the news, the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy wrote to the Vatican on 14 August, asking it to intervene.103 Elsewhere, during early summer 1941, it is known that the Ustaša arrested and deported several Dubrovnik Jews, along with suspected Communists and hundreds of local Serbs, who later perished in Jasenovac and other camps.104 Others were slaughtered in and around the town. Dubrovnik Synagogue and Jewish shops were attacked and looted as well. Laura Landau Steinz threw herself to her death from the cliff overlooking the walled town after her shop was taken by the Ustaša, leaving her destitute and begging for food. Both examples come from Ustaša-controlled areas of Croatia during a prolonged period of political uncertainty over the relationship between the Italian Army and the new Croatian Government, which ended on 21 August, when Italy decided to re-establish military control over large parts of the new Croatian state, referred to below as Zone 2. Ustaša leader Pavelić had to agree to new terms, as a massive uprising by victimized Serbs threatened his state. In Dubrovnik, the Italian Army’s reaction was swift, as the Ustaša were reprimanded and their leader, Ivo Rojnica, removed, while Italians also took civil rule.105 But even before the Italian takeover of responsibility on 21 August, many testimonies point to individual Italian soldiers and officers helping the Jews. In Zvi Loker, ‘Documentation: The Testimony of Dr. Edo Neufeld: The Italians and the Jews of Croatia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7/1 (1993), 67–76. The letter from Vice-President Lionello Alatri to Cardinal Maglione was published in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, p. 365. Stulli, Židovi u Dubrovniku, p.  86; Nikola Anić, Dubrovnik u Drugom Svjetskom ratu (1941–1945), Od okupacije do oslobođenja (Dubrovnik: Udruga antifašista, 2013); Franko Mirošević, Dubrovački kotar u NDH (Dubrovnik: Udruga antifašista, 2016), p.  115. Cf. Alberto Becherelli and Paolo Formiconi, La quinta sponda: Una storia dell’occupazione italiana della Croazia. 1941–1943 (Rome: Stato Maggiore della Difesa, 2015). After the war, Ivo Rojnica was sentenced as a war criminal for the murder of many Serbs and Jews in Dubrovnik, yet he managed to escape to Argentina, where he became a businessman and important Croatian émigré leader. After Croatia became independent in

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places such as Gospić, according to Morgens(h)tern, regular Italian soldiers intervened and ripped off their Židov (Jew) armbands, gave them something to eat, and attempted to liberate them from the Ustaša.106 Medea Brukner gave a detailed testimony of how Italian soldiers and officers handed out food and attempted to rescue Jews from the first Ustaša camps in Metajna and Slano on the island of Pag in summer 1941, when there were no strategic reasons to do so.107 What clearly emerges is that there was no official Italian rescue policy for the Jews. However, testimonies indicate that the Italian soldiers and officers were trying to find out what was going on, attempting to inspect Ustaša transports and ferries, taking photographs, and reporting to higher command on what they saw. Eventually, as Shelah ascertained, this early Ustaša brutality motivated Italians to take their protective attitude.108 In fact, following the territorial agreement between the two countries, the Ustaša abandoned the camps in Gospić and Pag, and transferred the remaining inmates to Jasenovac. Subsequently, a Commission was set up by the commander of the Italian army in Yugoslavia to inquire into the Ustaša atrocities on the isle of Pag, which exhumed 791 corpses. Its findings were sent to the Government and Royal Court, and influenced the subsequent policy of the Italian army and state in the annexed Dalmatia and other Italian-controlled territories. Once the scale and ferocity of Ustaša persecution of Jews and Serbs became widely known, and provoked an uprising of Serbs, the Italian military also began to exercise policing wherever they were, and, according to testimonies below, took steps to transfer refugees to areas where they were in full control.109 This is paradoxical as Italy was Nazi Germany’s foremost ally and, as we have seen, initially made efforts to stop the exodus of refugees into their territories. Officially, the Commander of the Second Army, Vittorio Ambrosio, still insisted on Italian neutrality in the conflict between Croats and Serbs, and banned transport of Jews and Serbs in Italian military vehicles to Italian-annexed territories.110 But even then, the local carabinieri would escort the Jews to the first station and then disappear, allowing them to find another entry. Whether this was 1993, its first president, Franjo Tuđman, appointed Rojnica as Croatia’s ambasador in Buenos Aires, where he died in 2007, aged ninety-two. Interview with Yosef Morgenshtern conducted by Nathan Beyrak in Israel on 10  September  1992 for the Israel Documentation Project, held at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Schreiner, Spašeni iz Zagreba, pp. 195–97. Shelah, ‘Italian Rescue’, p. 208. Muhamed Kreso and Ivica Černješeš, ‘The Fate of Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in Holocaust in Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Jewish Community Zemun, 2013), pp. 16–20. Original document quoted in Zločini fašističkih okupatora, ed. by Zdenko Levental, p. 121.

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a deliberate policy or, more likely, the attitude of individual carabinieri, it is impossible to verify, but this and all other testimonies insist on the humanity and eagerness to help displayed by common Italian soldiers and civilians in almost all circumstances.111 Once Italy had reoccupied large parts of Dalmatia and Herzegovina, the very same General Vittorio Ambrosio reiterated the Italian commitment to the safety of Jews on 7 September.112 On the other hand, once the Ustaša authorities established themselves in Bosnia and Croatia, travel and crossing into Italian-held areas became extremely difficult. By autumn 1941, the eruption of Partisan resistance throughout Bosnia and Croatia, and German and Ustaša reprisals, shut down any possibility of escape. The Palestinian Post reported that in summer 1941 alone, around three thousand Yugoslav Jews had escaped to Italy.113 Now we know that the numbers were much higher, and included many European Jews who had previously escaped to Yugoslavia. After autumn 1941, the number of new arrivals in Dalmatia dropped to very few. Ina Juhn, one of the teachers in the children’s home of Annemarie (Wolff-Richter) Husadžić in Zagreb, and sister of Vera Stein, described how she managed to reach Split in early 1942, on Annemarie’s Aryan documents, relying on the two women’s similar physical appearance, which was remarkable.114 Most did not dare, or did not make it, like the Breslauer family from Vinkovci, captured by the Ustaša in Karlovac in May 1942, on their way to the Italian zone with fake documents, and deported to Jasenovac, where they perished.115 During autumn 1941, there remained one last escape route to Italian-controlled territories through Kosovo and Albania, at least for those who were still in Serbia and Macedonia. We saw Belgrade doctor and an important witness Isak Eshkenazi and his extended family and friends procuring Italian lasciapassare and making this journey.116 Once in possession of the documents, Serbian Jews headed south towards the border town Kuršumlijska Banja, where they filled up the few local inns while gauging how to cross into Kosovo, now officially an Albanian territory occupied by the Italian Army.117 The local gendarmerie was Aškenazi, Doživljaji Jevreja u vreme Nacizma, p. 28. Alberto Becherelli, ‘L’occupazione italiana di Dubrovnik (1941–1943)’, Annali: Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra, 28 (2020), 37–85 (pp. 53–58). ‘Refugees from Croatia’, The Palestinian Post, 9 July 1942, p. 4. Heuss, Mit dem Kinderheim auf der Flucht, p.  225. Ina’s son, Aleksandar Savić (Alel Schwarz), and her second husband, leftist politician Miroslav Ju(h)n, were among the first victims of the Ustaša. ‘Bresslauer, Albert’, in Židovski leksikon. Aškenazi, Doživljaji Jevreja u vreme Nacizma, p. 19. Ibid., p. 20; Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 34.

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ordered to identify and apprehend any Jews trying to cross into Kosovo, but the gendarmes accepted everyone at face value, according to the proof they submitted and the fake papers they could show. After passing controls, the Jews all crossed on horse-drawn carts, without much control by the Italian border guards.118 Among hundreds of Serbian Jews in Pristina, some had paid the Italian Consulate for the authorisation of their fake documents demonstrating their origin or residence in Kosovo or other Italian-held areas, others had completely forged documents, and some had none, and entered clandestinely. But by 25 November, the Information Service of the Italian Military issued a warning about the mass arrival of ‘undesirable elements’ in Albanian-held Kosovo, and urged the intensification of border vigilance. In January 1942, the Jewish Community of Pristina wrote to DELASEM about the dangerous situation for hundreds of newly arrived Jews. Around that time, an Italian liaison officer in Belgrade officially transmitted to the Italian command the German request for the return of the ‘fugitives’, described as financing the Communist-led rebellion. The harrowing tragedy that followed illustrates how deeply intertwined the fate of Yugoslav and foreign Jews was. Before the war there were at least sixty-six Polish Jews interned in Kuršumlijska Banja in South Serbia.119 Stationed next to the border with Kosovo, most (forty-five) of the Polish Jews in Kuršumlija fled immediately after the April invasion from what became German (Serbia) to the Italian occupation zone (Kosovo). The Gestapo investigated their disappearance, as their names were found in the records of the Belgrade Union of Jewish Communities, and eventually, demanded from the Italian authorities in Pristina, Kosovo, their return to Serbia. By that time, the Polish Jews had disappeared, most probably into Albania and further to Italy, so they could not be returned. In the most meticulous Italian investigation Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 132. The report of the Polish Committee for Refugee Aid from Belgrade to the Ministry of the Interior sent on 4 April 1941, AJ, MUP 16–516 lists them as Amster Abraham and Liza, Apel Mozes, Arbeit Dan, Baumwollspiner Mayer, Bander Chaim, Bucher Sina, Chajke Abraham, Dym Hersz Szlim, Elsner Eryk, Feingold Henryk, Fefer Chaim, Feiner Ignacy, Feit Gerszun, Freiman Rubin, Fremi Izak, Geber Izrael, Geldzahler Ellimelech, Jozef, Gerstner Markus, Gruen Izydor, Herschfeld Wolf, Hirschbein Mozes, Immerglueck Rafal, Jakubowicz Leopold, Kacengold Dawid, Josef Leon, Katz Israel Juda, Kempler Zahariusz, Kirszner Natan, Klein Jaob, Kroll Hersz, Lejzersen Jadu Leib, Lidzki Notel, Lithauer Bernart, Sara and Leon, Machtynger Jozef, Maslowski Leib, Meskowicz Marian and Owadia, Rand Joel, Reiss Dawid, Rottenberg Majer, Rottenberg Abraham, Rosenfeld Mozes, Rubinstein Nosch, Rubinfeld Hirsz Jozef, Ruszanski Teodor, Sacarge Szymon, Schnaper Abraham, Sedlecki Mozes, Silberzweig Jozef, Singer Bernhard, Schlag Margit, Slenger Uszer, Szafir Szymon Hersz, Steiner Adolf, Torbel Jakob, Wertheim Szmul Dawid, Wiener Aron and Szyfra, Wildman Dawid, Majer Wolf and Rytel, Zimmerman Jakob.

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of this tragedy, Sarfatti wrote that the Polish Jews were initially transferred to Pristina by the Germans themselves.120 According to Sarfatti, the German request to extradite the ‘Polish’ fugitives came in February 1942, when both the Albanian government and the Italian Army insisted on the prohibition of illegal entry to Kosovo. Carabinieri Colonel Andrea de Leo was sent to Belgrade, where he agreed with the Gestapo chief Ernst Weinmann on various points of reciprocity and collaboration regarding Communist activities.121 Although the reciprocal action was pending on the arrest of some Albanian fugitives hiding in Serbia, as stated by De Leo on 11 March 1941, the deportation took place only six days later, including fifty-one illegal Serbian Jewish men, women, and children (the youngest of only a dozen identified, Judith Barta, was born in 1932) found in Pristina, although the exact circumstances remain unclear. According to Susman, a Jewish traitor, Marko Benijaminović, a rare but not unique case, as we saw with Kurt Koppel and Margaret Kahane, accompanied by one of the Belgrade Gestapo chiefs called Straki, came to Pristina to identify the Belgrade Jews.122 There is no exact information as to the further whereabouts of the deported, but most probably they were transported to the Staro Sajmište concentration camp, and executed in gas vans, together with the rest of Serbian Jewish women, children, and elderly, in the next couple of months.123 This tragic case coincided with the peak of the mass murders and deportations in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb, which sealed the fate of Yugoslav Jews. There would be very few escapes to Italian areas after 1942, as there were few if any Jews left to escape. Furthermore, the news about the deportation of fifty-one Jews from Kosovo under the Italians, and their almost certain death, spread both among the Jews and the Italian military and Albanian civilian authorities.

Michele Sarfatti, ‘Tra Uccisione e Protezione. I Rifugiati Ebrei in Kosovo nel Marzo 1942 e le Autorita Tedesche, Italiane e Albanesi’, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 76/3 (2010), 223–42. Sarfatti, ‘Tra Uccisione e Protezione’, reveals all points of agreement as per Promemoria written by De Leo. Susman, Experiences of a Yugoslav Refugee, p. 8. Benjaminović contributed to the arrest and murder of hundreds of Belgrade and Kosovo Jews, including his own parents, for which he was sentenced to death as a war criminal by the Yugoslav authorities after the war. However, he fled to Uruguay, where he died a natural death in 1962, as researched by historian Miloš Damjanović. Michele Sarfatti, ‘I volenterosi alleati di Hitler: Cosi gli Italiani in Albania consegnarono 51 ebrei ai nazisti’, Corriere della Sera, 16 April 2010; Aškenazi, Doživljaji Jevreja u vreme Nacizma, p. 20; other authors claim they were deported and killed in Banjica Prison in Belgrade. See Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945, pp. 153–54; cf. Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine, pp. 459–460.

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The former knew that they had to get as far as possible from border areas; the latter seemed to strengthen their resolve against any further deportations.

Life Under Italian Protection The areas controlled by the Italians employed two different regimes, usually referred to as Zone  1 and 2. The first embraced today’s Croatian territories of Central Dalmatia, with the main city of Split and several islands such as Korčula. This area was annexed, and thus became part of Italy by the agreement of Mussolini and Ustaša leader Pavelić on 21 May 1941. The Ustaša leadership sacrificed part of the Croatian territory to gain Italy’s tutelage, necessary to confront the Serbs, who they viewed as the main enemy, and to incorporate Bosnia and Herzegovina into the newly created Croatian state.124 In addition, Italy annexed a large part of today’s Slovenia, including its capital, Ljubljana, as well as Gulf of Cataro (Kotor) in today’s Montenegro. However, following the massacres of Serbs, and the ensuing resistance, the Ustaša lost control of large swathes of territory, while their relationship with Italy (and Germany) soured. By the end of August, Ustaša patrons took action, and the so-called Zone 2 of Italian control emerged, occupying further Dalmatian hinterland, the southern Adriatic islands, all of south Dalmatia with Dubrovnik, and Herzegovina with the city of Mostar. Formally remaining part of the Ustaša-led Croatia, military power in Zone 2 was wielded by the Italians, who deemed the Ustaša incompetent and a threat to the stability and security of the area, and its adjacent Italian territories. At first glance, the extension of Italian control seemed to be rewarding Mussolini territorially, yet most of Zone 2 was mountainous and arid, devoid of much natural and other wealth to exploit, in contrast to the rest of Croatia and Bosnia, which was placed under German military, political, and economic supervision and use. Zone  1 was clearly more secure for Jews and others seeking protection, even though the Italian anti-Jewish laws were automatically extended to the annexed territories. In Zone 2, there were only a few Jewish communities, of which only Mostar and Travnik numbered more than two hundred, with a total of approximately one thousand Jews in the interwar period. Despite their low numbers, which had increased with the influx of some refugees, Italian officers and civil authorities repeatedly and explicitly gave Jews in Zone 2 guarantees of freedom and safety, as we saw that General Vittorio Ambrosio did in Mostar on 7 September 1941. Yet the fear of Ustaša units and uniforms on the streets Bartulin, ‘Politiche etniche’, p. 133.

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prompted the Mostar Jewish Community President, David Hajon, to appeal to Ambrosio for renewed protection at the beginning of December, or for evacuation of both local and refugee Jews to Italy or Italian internment camps.125 In January 1942, another General, Vittorio Ruggero, commander of the Italian ‘Alpine Hunters’ division, which controlled Mostar, received a delegation of Jewish refugees, providing an up-to-date and detailed report on the systematic repression visited by the Ustaša on Jews, including the destruction of their places of worship, community buildings, and private businesses, the plunder of Jewish property and houses, bans on movement, brutally enforced labour for both sexes, executions as hostages, mass deportations to concentration camps, with hundreds dying due to inhuman conditions during transport and in the camps, and the mass rape of Jewish women in Kruščica camp. Presenting this first-hand report of one of the most brutal acts of destruction of Jewish communities in Europe, the representatives of Jewish refugees explained why they had embarked on ‘a perilous journey to surrender themselves to the care and protection of the Italian Army and people, whose deeds and culture enriched and civilized not just Europe, but the whole of humanity.’126 The report was duly transferred to Rome, and the General himself was painfully aware of extra measures needed in Mostar, as well as of the evacuation of the Jews to the Adriatic coast. David Hajon, who played the key role in assisting the escape of many Jews from Sarajevo to Mostar, and in providing funds and accommodation for their survival, would subsequently organize and lead the evacuation of all Jews from Mostar to the coast.127 By that time, most refugees had converged on the coast, toward the bigger centres of Dubrovnik and Split, which offered better protection, as well as material aid from local Jewish communities and DELASEM (which in turn received funds from the Joint and Red Cross), in addition to daily food allowance for refugees provided by the Italian Government. On the coast, there was also schooling for children. Besides providing aid and education, the Split and Trieste Jewish Communities dealt with Italian authorities, represented the refugees in their administrative dealings (mostly transfer and reunification of families), and provided news and communications between war-torn Jewish communities and families in the Balkans and further afield. The Jewish Community of Split was led by engineer Viktor Morpurgo, whereas his nephew These guarantees were repeated in December that year upon the request of David Hajon to be evacuated to Italy, as specified in the comments to Document 134 of the collection Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, p. 406. This long Italian-language report was published in German translation in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp. 415–22. Bambara, Židov, pp. 176–82.

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presided over the Jewish Community of Trieste. Furthermore, Trieste’s wealthiest Jewish family, Stock, were the Morpurgo family’s business partners. The wealthy and well-connected Morpurgos and Stocks were not only the largest donors for the upkeep of refugees, but also important interlocutors with the Italian Government, with whom they worked on all levels, demonstrating a great mutual respect. Arriving in Dubrovnik, Viennese Pollatschek was pleased that its Jewish community, headed by Josip Mandl, was able to offer financial help, along with advice about how to get permission from the Italians that would allow further travel to Italy.128 However, it was the Split Jewish Community, headed by Viktor Morpurgo, that bore the heaviest burden, as most refugees naturally headed to Dalmatia’s capital. Morpurgo and his associates worked tirelessly, issuing travel passes or IDs showing the origins of their holders to be in one of the two Italian zones, organizing welcome, registration, and, in most cases, transfer of refugees to Italy. They travelled to Rome to lobby on behalf of refugees, took care of those confined on the islands or away from Split, prepared and sent packages to those incarcerated in concentration camps in Croatia, and organized Jewish schools in Split and the islands. The Jewish school in Split was led by Professor Sigmund Šteg from Split High School, although teachers were recruited from everywhere, and many were found among the refugees. While schooling was private, the students were allowed to take exams in front of Italian school commissions, and their grades and diplomas were later recognized in Italy.129 Refugee doctors were employed, together with a couple of local doctors, in establishing a ‘Jewish ambulance’ under the leadership of Dr Milan Zon, and with the approval of the Italian authorities. Today it is almost hard to believe that small Jewish communities such as those of Split, Dubrovnik, or Mostar, and a few dedicated individuals, such as their leaders Viktor Morpurgo, Josip Mandl, and David Hajon, did so much.130 For refugees and locals alike, only the first couple of summer months in Split were relatively quiet. After the annexation, the Italians allowed for the use of Yugoslav dinars, so goods were cheap while they lasted. During the summer, a curfew applied to civilians from midnight to five in the morning, but in the evenings, there were many dance parties. The only restriction that Viennese Joy Levi recalled was that Jews had to bathe on a separate beach section in Split.131 This all changed in autumn, as thousands of Jewish and other refugees Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, pp. 44–46. Andreja Preger, ‘Jevrejska škola u Splitu školske 1942/43. Godine’, Mi smo preživeli  … 5, pp. 17–20. Morpurgo repeatedly refused to evacuate with his family, and indeed would pay with his life once the Germans took over the Italian-controlled areas. Kečkemet, Židovi, pp. 175–78. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’ in Voices from the Holocaust, p. 107.

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congregated in Split, and resistance to Italian rule spread.132 Despite the efforts of the Jewish community, financial aid turned out not to be adequate for survival, as accommodation was scarce and costs were rising. Young Yugoslav Jews were joining forces with local anti-fascists, first splashing bottles of red ink over the black-stencilled heads of Mussolini on the walls of every piazza. In another action, a Yugoslav flag was hoisted on the cathedral spire.133 At the beginning of August, the Croatian authority of Omiš near Split reported a rampage by a group of Italian Fascists led by an officer in the villages of Kaštela in the immediate vicinity of Split. The group of fascists beat up everybody on their way, including Croatian policemen, sculptor Marin Stuđin, merchant Veljko Šarica, and others, and they entered the Hotel Palace in Kaštel Stari, where they beat up the refugee Jews housed in the hotel, threatening to return if they remained there.134 More ominously, the attack on the police band marching in Split was followed by retaliatory executions. The overpopulation, and frequent incidents also prompted an extension of the curfew. Meanwhile, hundreds of refugees slept on the floor of the Split Jewish cultural centre, ‘Jarden’ (Jordan). After an attack on Jarden by the Blackshirts (Camice nere – the paramilitary wing of the Fascist party), the Italian authorities decided to displace refugees away from the city, a common strategy regarding refugees that we already saw applied by Yugoslavia. In September 1941, the first refugees were transferred from Split to Curzola/Korčula, the biggest of all translocations, with four hundred Jews dispatched to Korčula town, and around three hundred to Vallegrande/Vela Luka, greatly increasing the number of the Jews who had already found shelter there. A large group of 656 refugees were also sent to the camp in Ferramonti in autumn 1941. Others, around three hundred of them, ended up being sent to camps near Valona in Italian-occupied Albania.135 Knowing the right people in Split could help obtain residence there for a small sum, and save one from deportation to Korčula, other Adriatic islands, Albania, or the Ferramonti camp in Calabria. A larger sum would be required if you did not know the right people.136 The wealthier bribed the authorities to be spared from relocation, and would only accept Italy. They were transported from Split to Fiume by Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, pp. 44–46. Levi, The Last Exile, pp. 80–81. Detailed Croatian-language report published in Narodnooslobodilačka borba u Dalmaciji 1941–1945. Zbornik dokumenata Knjiga 1, 1941 (Split: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1982), p. 821. Zvonko Maričić, Luka Spasa: Židovi u Veloj Luci od 1937 do 1943 (Vela Luka: Matica hrvatska, 2002), pp. 36–41. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 153–57.

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boat, and then by train further to Italian provinces. Men were chained together during the night part of the transport, as Pollatschek recalls. Eventually, bribes or connections secured transfer of several thousand Yugoslav and foreign Jews to towns and villages of Central Italy, where they were allowed to stay in the so-called confine libero, which allowed them freedom of movement in a place of confinement. Among them were Fritz Becker and his mother Anna, who we saw as Austrian refugees in Sarajevo, who were sent to Roana, near Vicenza, a small community of old German dialect speakers (Cimbri), where they are registered on 22 November 1941 as part of a large group of over fifty refugees that arrived from Split, made up of Yugoslav, German, Czech, Romanian, and Polish Jews. The Italian military brought over six hundred Jewish refugees to Vicenza from Split, and the village of Roana accommodated the most, displaying an enormous solidarity and welcome, which is still recorded by survivors and their descendants, who regularly return to the village to celebrate and thank the villagers.137 Another Viennese family, Nadai, who arrived in Split from Zagreb, were able to transfer to Sienna and later Rome, thanks to the help of Italian friends.138 Those who had no money for relocation begged.139 Others looked for escape nearby. The ferroalloys factory built by the SOLFAC company owned by Herman Fischbein (Fišbajn) employed members of several Jewish families exiled in Split in nearby Šibenik.140 Understandably, all refugees dreamed about going to Italy, which felt safer and more removed from the Balkans. Furthermore, transfer to Italy offered a possibility to continue their journey further, to Spain or the Americas. Most of those who fled to Ljubljana province ended up in Italy soon afterwards. Yet, after thousands congregated in Dalmatia, this became difficult. Refugees were asked to prove family or other connections and justifications, as the Italian government deemed the country full. Applications were made to Dr Ungari, the head of the Office for Foreigners (basically Jews). Archives do not hold clues as to why some refugees were allowed and others not. Medical treatment was cited in almost all applications, and yet only some managed, giving rise to suspicions that bribes played their part.141 Sarajevo lawyer Julius Rothkopf, who arrived in Split with his wife Zora (Ilić) and his mother Antonietta, demanded Paolo Tagini, Le poche cose – gli internati ebrei nella provincia di Vicenza 1941–1945 (Verona: Cierre, 2006). AHC interview with Agathe Nadai, LBI AV Collection (Tapes) (AHC 1743). The family is missing from Italian databases. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, p. 107. Đorđe Alpar, ‘My Vow to Stay out of German Hands’, We survived … 2, p. 100. Reports of Split Police Prefecture in AJ, 110-402-452, DOS br. 3701, 40246; Raisky, La matassa, p. 114.

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to be interned in Italy in a place with a hospital, because of his diabetes. When rejected, Rothkopf claimed that he worked as an agent for the British Consul in Sarajevo, which persuaded the Italian authorities, and eventually the whole family was sent to Vicenza.142 Others were approved well into 1942, with no justification except proving that they could finance themselves.143 According to research by Voigt, by the spring of 1943, there were 6386 Jewish refugees in Italy proper, with almost half entering Italy from Croatia and Slovenia. The Yugoslav Government in London estimated six thousand Yugoslav Jews were interned in Italy, and another two thousand in Italian-held Dalmatia in 1943.144 Anna Pizzuti provided the most precise and complete database of names and trajectories, based on official Italian documentation.145 However, many, if not a majority, of people mentioned in this chapter are non-existent in the database. Furthermore, Voigt claims nine tenths of Jewish refugees in Italy to be exYugoslav citizens, whereas the rest were from Central European countries.146 Yet another thorough piece of research into the origins of the Jewish refugees interned in Italy shows that up to a half of those coming from Yugoslav territories were in fact German, Austrian, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian Jews.147 Away from Split, we find another big group of mostly German Jewish refugees, previously interned in Samobor, near Zagreb. After a short relocation to the Ustaša-run Kerestinec camp immediately after the invasion, they were transferred to a camp in Gacko in Herzegovina. A rare, first-hand document about their situation was preserved in the archives of Dubrovnik Jewish Community, and is now held in Belgrade Jewish Historical Museum. In a letter dated 5 July 1941, signed by 117 German Jewish refugees in Gacko, they seek help from the nearest Jewish community in Dubrovnik, describing their precarious situation, made more dramatic by fighting that erupted nearby. (The area of Gacko was one of the centres of the uprising against the Ustaša at the end AJ, 110-401, 446–55. Rothkopf, and many other wealthier refugees, would later contribute to the DELASEM fundraising campaign for those remaining in Dalmatia in poverty. The list is reprinted in Maričić, Luka Spasa, p. 100. Aron and Rachela Albahari escaped from Bosnia in April  1942 and were interned in (Herceg) Novi until their transfer was allowed, after hesitations, in September the same year, AJ, 110-402-452, DOS br. 3701, 402–77; Alexander and Vera Rechnitzer were transferred to Montereale in December 1942, AJ, 110-402-452, DOS br. 3701, 402–124. ‘Yugoslavian Prime Minister promises help to interned Jews’, The Sentinel, 13 August 1943, p. 8. Ebrei stranieri internati in Italia durante il periodo bellico a cura di Anna Pizzuti [accessed 28 May 2022]. Voigt, Il rifugio precario, p. 37. Nicoletta Fasano, ‘Il rifugio precario: Gli ebrei stranieri internati ad Asti (1941–1945)’, pp. 173–92 (p. 188–89).

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of June.)148 Among those stranded, there were many elderly and sick people, and children. The accommodation was miserable, with up to twenty people sleeping on straw in one room. Food provision was extremely poor, and, on some days, there was none. Initially helped by Mostar Jews, they were in total distress after the Ustaša authorities imposed severe restrictions and harassment, including the compulsory wearing of the Jew sign, and they asked to be moved out of the war zone.149 Soon after, according to Herma Barber’s testimony, the Italians brought them to the premises of an abandoned Serbian Monastery, Žitomislić, whose monks had been slaughtered by the Ustaša in June 1941.150 With the introduction of the Italian Zone 2 protection, the area was safer, but nevertheless the Barbers decided to move away to Split on their own, escaping from poor conditions and provisions. The rest of the group sent their representative, engineer Gerhard Zeilinger from Vienna, to Sarajevo and Zagreb to ask for assistance from their Jewish communities. Yet the situation in Zagreb and Sarajevo was more precarious, and they were unable to help.151 According to the letters of the Viennese Dr Alois Schwarz and his wife, fifty of them remained in the monastery, including Alois’s brother Oskar, his wife Irma, and daughter Susane Schwarz. They believed the monastery was somewhere in the mountains of Serbia.152 Given the uncertainty of the correspondence at the time, they might have misplaced their hideout on purpose, but most likely, as foreigners they simply mistakenly believed it to be in Serbia because the monastery was Serbian. Reporting the Ustaša bestialities that they experienced clearly indicates that they were still in Croatia, or rather on the border between Herzegovina and Croatia. The next letter from the Schwarzes, from April 1942, reported them nearby in Čapljina, where they

Archive JIM, 3013, K.27-2-1/6. These measures were later abolished by the Italians, Raisky, La matassa, p. 100. Interview with Herma Barber, USHMM, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. It is unclear how Zeilinger managed to travel, but he did. Steckel, Destruction and Survival, p. 62 reproduces original letters written by Ustaša commissioners of the Jewish communities in Sarajevo. According to Gerhard’s father, George Zeilinger, he was later working for the British mission, and was accused by the Partisans of sabotage and was missing afterwards . According to the source presented to Yad Vashem, Gerhard Zeilinger and his wife Elsa were murdered in the Shoah [both accesed 28 May 2022]. Schwarz, Züge auf falschem Gleis, p. 125. Their sons, Fred and Fritz, escaped from Vienna to Holland, where they were interned in Westerbork, and then, in September  1944, deported via Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Fortunately, they survived as forced labourers in KZ-Meuselwitz.

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were placed with local inhabitants.153 Under Italian protection, the Schwarzes were recovering from months on the run from Germans, Ustaša and, as they say, Partisans.154 Again, this is not clear, unless they believed that the Partisan resistance undermined their safety. Or were they simply so traumatized that they ran from every armed group? We will never know. Eventually, the Italians brought the rest of the group, now numbering 147 people, to various resort villages and islands around Dubrovnik.155 The Jewish Community of Dubrovnik, led by Josip Mandl, assisted them financially for translocation, travel to Split, or various other needs, as hundreds of receipts for aid bearing the names of Rechnitzer, Pollak, Fred Ashermann, and others demonstrate.156 By that time, Dubrovnik had become the second largest centre for Jewish refugees, with around 1600 to1700 congregating in and around the ancient city.157 Yet, just like in Split, the number of refugees increased to the extent that it burdened the Italian authorities, especially regarding additional food provision. Finally, due to the difference in the treatment of Jews, the very relationship between the local Croatian authorities and the Italians was increasingly conflictual. As a result, the Italian Army began resettling the refugees outside Dubrovnik. They were housed in Hotel Wregg in Gruž (port of Dubrovnik), the nearby resorts of Kupari and Mlini, and the islands of Lopud (Hotels Grand, Glavović, and Pracat), and Šipan. Each refugee was entitled to food provision and a daily allowance set at eight lire per person (variously interpreted as one or two US dollars). One of the Samobor group, who went through the ordeal of Gacko and Žitomislić and eventually landed in Dubrovnik, was Werner-Joachim Jacobson from Hamburg, who had already experienced a dramatic escape to Yugoslavia, as detailed in Chapter 2. Having previously studied art and ceramics, Jacobson found work in Dubrovnik making wreaths for the Italian Army, especially for funerals. On the island of Šipan, where he was housed, he also worked harvesting olives for a local contessa.158 In a hotel previously owned by Schwarz, Züge auf falschem Gleis, p. 131. Menachem Shellah shows that this group was under the protection of the Italian General Amico from November 1941, when they were the first to be threatened by expulsion to the Ustaša territory and subsequent deportation, in ‘Kroatische Juden zwischen Deutschland und Italien: Die Rolle der italienischen Armee am Beispiel des Generals Giuseppe Amico 1941–1943’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 41/2 (1993), 175–95. Duško Kečkemet, ‘Transit Camps for Jews in Areas Under Italian Occupation’, in Anti-semitism, Holocaust, Antifascism, Zagreb Jewish Community, ed. by Ivo Goldstein and Narcisa Lengel Krizman (Zagreb: Židovska općina, 1997), pp. 117–28 (p. 118). Archive of JIM, 3027, K.27-2-1/20-52. Kečkemet, ‘Transit Camps for Jews’, p. 118; Stulli, Židovi u Dubrovniku, p. 85. After the Italian capitulation, Jacobson would be among those refugees who managed to reach Southern Italian, Allied-controlled territories, presumably paying for transfer.

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a Czech trade union, in Kupari, the largest of all Dubrovnik riviera internment centres, we find the Barber family and two hundred other Austrian, Czech, and German refugees, many previously interned in Samobor.159 Isolated on the riviera, and having been on the move for a long time, the group seemed unaware of what was going on in Croatia. They removed their leader, engineer Zeilinger, for not doing enough, and appointed Rudolf Bier, but they kept sending requests for aid to the Zagreb Community up until 1943. The intended recipients, the Zagreb Jewish leadership, were by then either annihilated or on their way to annihilation.160 The Italian army provided for maintenance and food, but the Barbers were envious of the Yugoslav Jews, as they could buy extra food from local peasants. Herma Barber was also knitting to make some extra money to buy beans or whatever food she could find. As to how the refugees were treated by the Italians, she insisted: They all, the Italians at that time, they were very nice to us. Even, being and going through what we went through, I still think they were very nice […] The Italian soldiers, all the time, whenever they saw children, they gave them some of their food, part of it, really.161

In Split, too, refugees embarked on all sorts of other entrepreneurial ideas, from tutoring to making shoes out of rope to gambling. Olga Njemirovski, who escaped from Zagreb without documents in summer 1941, on a train posing as the daughter of a businessman from Split, made a living in Split by teaching various languages to all sorts of people, even though some of the languages she could barely speak herself. She taught Italian to Yugoslav, and Croatian to Austrian Jews.162 The Italian treatment of Jewish refugees was clearly different to that of Yugoslavs. Starting in summer 1941, hundreds and thousands of Dalmatian Slavs were arrested and taken to concentration camps in Italy (the Lipari islands and elsewhere), accused of what was dubbed ‘resistance to Italian political penetration’.163 In most cases, sentencing took place without proper legal proceedings, while sentences lasted ‘for the duration of conflict’, and were often at their own expense in the case of the wealthy. People were usually deemed dangerous for their previous political activities as Communists, Interview with Jacobson, Werner-Joachim. ‘Segment 3’ Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1999. Bambara, Židov, p. 207. JIM, 6492 60.9-2-5. Interview with Herma Barber. Olga Njemirovski, The Holocaust and the Jews of Yugoslavia (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1996). AJ, 110–399, 1–180.

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Anglophiles, freemasons, Yugoslav (or mostly Croat or Serb) nationalists, activists of pre-war political parties, or for being engaged in visible acts of defiance of the new rulers. Among them were some of the most influential and wealthiest Split citizens, the former Mayor and Ban (Governor), Dr Ivo Tartaglia, and his brother Oskar, who left the most detailed accounts of this grossly failed Italian policy.164 Sometimes the only accusations were frequenting the Hotel Belvedere or Café Bellavista in Split, known as gathering places for anti-fascists and Anglophiles. Even Split Perfect Paolo Zerbino, a life-long fascist, who was later executed as Interior Minister of the Republic of Salò, admitted that the Italian occupation and policies only created antagonism.165 The resistance to the Italian occupation organized by the Communist-led Partisans through acts of sabotage and attacks on Italian soldiers and officials from autumn 1941 was followed by an increased and more widespread repression, with hundreds sentenced to death or executed as hostages. Yet, no matter how harsh or unjustified the treatment of Yugoslavs in Italian prisons was, it was also considerably better than what was exercised by other warring parties. Their families often had the right to provide financial and food aid, and sometimes prisoners were released through the intervention of their family members, or the Ustaša authorities in the case of Croatian nationalists. Another absurd aspect of the Italian regime was that the prison bread rations remained as they had been before the war, and were thus higher than allowances for common Split inhabitants at large. The Italian police did pursue some Jewish refugees, but most cases belonged to the category of ‘non-dangerous Jews, removed from Split in order to lower the numbers of their race’ by the government order of 11 December 1941, as communicated by the Prefect of Split, Zerbino.166 An in-depth look at their records shows great lenience. We learn about Hildegard Simon from Koenigsberg, who, after divorcing, moved with her mother to Zara/Zadar in 1931, then part of Italy, and bought the Hotel Bristol (or Excelsior in some documents). In 1938, she was denounced by fascist activists in Trieste for offering accommodation to suspicious persons/refugees. Hildegard claimed to be Protestant, but the Italian Interior Ministry made enquires to the German secret police, and found out that she was Jewish. Hildegard was ordered to leave Zara on 30 June 1939, and she transferred to nearby Split/Spalatto in Yugoslavia, where she was also AJ, 110–399, 767–843. Bartulin, ‘Politiche etniche’, p. 141. ‘Ebrei non pericolosi, allontanati da questa citta per ridurre il numero degli appartenenti alla detta razza, giusta disposizioni impartite da codesto Governo con telegramma’ N.3358-397 P.S. dell’ 11/12/1941, AJ, 110–401, 467.

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investigated, as reported in Chapter  2. In 1941, Hildegard, now married to a local, Milan Vunić, was again the subject of an Italian investigation as being politically suspicious. At the end of February  1942, she was sent for internment in Pollenza camp in Macerata in Italy, just to keep her away from the politically volatile Dalmatia. The police documents also stressed the fact that she could maintain herself financially, which eased the decision to transfer her.167 It is the outcome that most other refugees desired. Another investigation focused on Emilio (Milan) Ronski(y) (Rosenfeld). Ronski, a textile merchant from Subotica/Szabadka with business in Zagreb, arrived in Split prior to the beginning of the war to avoid military mobilization, and was arrested in October 1941, after the Germans alerted the Italian Police that he was responsible for many false documents fabricated in Split. Kept in prison in Zara until July 1942, Ronski was investigated by the Italian civilian and military authorities for his alleged involvement, but eventually released for lack of evidence and interned in Grosseto in Italy, with travel costs covered.168 Haim Montiljo (Montiglio), born in 1905 in Sarajevo, was denounced and arrested in Split in November 1942, charged with Communist propaganda among Jews and, more specifically, for financing the Partisans, and interned on the island of Brač/ Brazza. Furthermore, Montiljo was denounced for visiting a bar in Split, a gathering place for suspicious political activity, where he allegedly met other Communists of Jewish origin. Prefect Zerbino demanded that he should be interned in a concentration camp in Italy to eliminate potential danger, but the Interior Ministry replied in February 1943 that there were no more places for internment. As a result, Zerbino released Montiljo in March 1943.169 A group of refugees in Split had the idea of putting up their capital to create a cinematographic society which would allow them to travel to Italy and show films, but the idea spectacularly failed, and some of the protagonists were jailed. It took weeks before the Italian police discovered that they were not an international network of spies, and released them.170 Several Jewish refugee women, such as Iby Tenzer, were also accused by Prefect Zerbino for going out with Italian officials, and possibly acquiring information.171 Other refugee women engaged in intimate relationships with Italian officers or civilian officials. Two explicit testimonies admit to gaining AJ, 110-402-452, DOS nr. 3701, 402-131-136. His wife, Wilma Hafner, and sixteen-year-old son, Fedor, were allowed to join him, but the authorities claimed his family could maintain themselves, so no further budget funds were dispensed for the Ronskis. AJ (State Commission for War Crimes) 110–401, 408–431. AJ, 110-402-452, DOS nr. 3701, 402-381-385. Raisky, La matassa, pp. 138–42. AJ, 110–399, 335.

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some benefits from such relationships, but insist that their Italian officers were marvellous persons and lovers, and that the reason for their relationships was love rather than self-interest.172 The most complex case of intimacy intertwined with resistance was that of Vera, born Rechnitzer in 1915, from Zagreb. Vera was denounced by two young women from Split (Vera Ciaković and Darinka Vela), who had known her as students in Belgrade. There, Vera had married Vladimir Raspopović, a Yugoslav Army Captain, who was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans. After allegedly spending time with Četniks in Montenegro, where she left her daughter with the family of her husband, Vera arrived in Split in June 1941. Her denouncers described her as anti-Ustaša and being against the German and Italian occupiers and in favour of the Četnik and Partisan resistance of her husband and his family and friends. Yet, according to her denouncers and later investigation, Vera maintained close relationships with several Italian high-ranking officers and officials, and was procuring and trading in documents which allowed entry to Italy. She was also denounced for maintaining contacts with artists who escaped to Korčula, and various other people linked to the Partisans. Briefly detained in summer 1941, Vera was released upon the intervention of her key contact and patron, Mayor Carlo Giamminola of ‘Bergamo’ division, with whom she communicated in German, and who introduced her to several other officers. According to the investigation, she later obtained and traded in documents for refugee Jews, and various other goods, with the pretext of saving her Jewish parents from Zagreb (Alexander and Irma, née Brull). Vera travelled to Zagreb with a certain Giuseppe Capudi, another Italian official investigated in relation to the case, to successfully rescue her parents from the Ustaša. Back in Split, Vera maintained a relationship with a Yugoslav naval officer, Bruno Smoje, who was also arrested due to his involvement. Vera was detained again in May 1942, together with her parents, who were released a week later and transferred to Italy. During Vera’s second arrest, two photographic documents for a certain Altarac were found, as well as her correspondence with Giamminola, documenting their dealings and her contacts with Četniks around Split and other Italian officials. In her defence, Vera claimed that she was only teaching them German. That was indeed very common, as many Jewish refugees used their German proficiency and gave private lessons to aspirational Italian officers, while Germany’s victory and domination in the future still seemed plausible.173 Two months later, Vera was released and transferred to Carzoli, in the province of Aquila, Njemirovski, The Holocaust and the Jews of Yugoslavia, pp. 22, 24, 35; Raisky, La Matassa, pp. 119–44. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 77.

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to join her parents. Zerbino deemed them financially able to cover their own expenses.174 Police archives do not show whether there was a separate investigation of Giamminola by the Italian Army. The final available document on this case dates from December 1942, and is signed by Zerbino, allowing for the budget to cover Vera and her parents’ expenses; such a claim must have been made and sent from Aquila, testifying to the ultimate victory of Vera’s skills and temperament. Other arrests were made due to illegal trade and the black market. In order to cease his dependency on the Split Jewish Community, Pollatschek found a job painting/writing new shop signs, needed because of the Italianization of Split under Italian rule. He later moved to sell textiles on the Split black market, which was the largest in all the eastern Adriatic and hinterland.175 A brief brush with the law only persuaded him to seek his future elsewhere, in Italy. Like Pollatschek, teenagers Paja Ciner (Zinner) and Ivan Singer also joined the Split black market, trying to supplement their meagre rations, but all ended up in a set-up with crooks, from which they had to escape and look for help among local Communists.176 They were eventually arrested on 13  June  1942, after being denounced for spreading Communist ideas. Ciner denied all the accusations, but he was found guilty of having false documents in the name of Boris Sojka. Therefore, Prefect Zerbino recommended that they be transferred to Italy, and, three months later, they were sent to a castle turned prison/ internment camp in Scipione in Salsomaggiore, near Parma, being awarded financial aid as well.177 They had only words of praise for their treatment by the carabinieri along the way.178 When arrested as Communist suspects, Ciner and Singer realized that they would be treated better if they disclosed their Jewishness.179 Communists were beaten and tortured, whereas the worst that could happen to Jews was to be deported away from Split. Singer discovered that prisons were indeed dominated by Communists or their sympathizers, who turned them into hotbeds of learning and dissemination of their ideas. The party organized food distribution, order among inmates, and political work. With many Yugoslav Jews already sympathizing with Communist ideas,

The extensive investigation of Vera Rechnitzer was conducted by the Inspector General of the Italian police in Split, Ciro Verdiani, AJ, 110–401, 349–380. Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p. 48. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 155. AJ, Fond 110–401, 994–998. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 186–95. Ibid., p. 179.

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it comes as no surprise that in Split many liaised or joined with the Communist resistance, as widely celebrated in Communist-led Yugoslavia after the war.180 By early 1942, Italian lasciapassare were being sold in Split for an exorbitant five thousand lire. Refugees continued to arrive, but numbers were much smaller, and the wealth necessary to legalize one’s stay much higher.181 Eventually, the costs of bribes and organization of transfer to Split reached up to twenty thousand lire, or more than a good annual salary, for the whole process, with no guarantee of success.182 Delays and problems in communication meant that many Jews in Ustaša-ruled Croatia were deported to death, even though their relatives in Split paid huge amounts for their escape. With war raging, funds drifting, and Italy already overwhelmed with Jewish refugees, it also became almost impossible to get a permission to transfer to the Italian peninsula, except for family reunions, which also took time to achieve.183 The cases of people escaping to the Italian zones in the Balkans or Italy became extremely rare. Alexander Klein (later Arnon), the secretary of the Zagreb Jewish Community, and the person in charge of refugees before the war, stated that he fled with his family in May 1942, after bribing Gestapo officials, who took him to Ljubljana on the false arrest warrant issued by the Italians.184 Klein did not say how much money was involved, but this was certainly only a possibility for very few. Klein himself was later the subject of an extradition request from Croatia, but the Italian District Government in Ljubljana dismissed it as it was not passed via the official channel of the Foreign Ministry, which must have involved more bribery. The Kleins proceeded from Ljubljana to Italy and then Switzerland. The absolute low point for refugees was reached in summer 1942. DELASEM funds were dwindling, leading to the cessation of transfers from Italy, which was followed by rumours about deportations to Ustaša-run Croatia, or directly to Nazi Germany. As signs of deterioration multiplied, Victor Morpurgo met Governor Bastianini in Zara (Zadar) on 25  May  1942, stressing the long history and contributions of Jews in Dalmatia, and the key role Italy played in safeguarding and maintaining numerous Jewish refugees from Yugoslavia and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 442–53. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 157–58. Raisky, La matassa, pp. 146–47. For example, Radmila Haim (Heim) from Belgrade, who was held in Ljubljana from November  1942 to March  1943 before she was finally allowed to join her parents on Korčula. AJ, 110-402-452, DOS br. 3701, 402-387-395. The Adolf Eichmann Trial – The District Court Session 46, Part  4, pp.  5–6 [accessed 28 May 2022].

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other parts of Europe. The latter were said to be the remnants of Jews being persecuted and slaughtered, and suffering the loss of their loved ones. In his official plea, Morpurgo expressed his gratitude for freedom-loving and noble Italy for its toleration and support for refugees up to then, but warned that the cessation of food distribution sent a frightening signal that the refugees might be deported. He finished by addressing his prayers to Bastianini, appealing to ‘the sweet Italy, Italy of martyrs, saints, poets …’.185 Morpurgo pleaded with Bastianini to transport the refugees to Italy, if he could not provide for them in Dalmatia and occupied areas, and, most importantly, reminded him of the case of Jews deported from Pristina to the Germans, who were subsequently executed in Serbia. On the other hand, he praised the Italian Army for halting the Ustaša’s bestial attacks on Jews in Mostar. This document is of extreme importance as the best testimony of how aware all the actors were of the ongoing Holocaust. Despite the war and interrupted communication, both the authorities and the remaining Jews under Italian protection knew details about massacres and deportations in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia under German or their collaborators’ control. Both DELASEM and the Split Jewish Community conducted investigations into the whereabouts of missing relatives and friends, and reported on many massacres and disappearances, mostly from Croatia. Viktor Morpurgo personally wrote many letters informing relatives of the sad fate of their loved ones. Sometimes delayed, the news about massacres was slowly filtering into town, such as when Dr Milan Herzog arrived from Belgrade sharing the news of the annihilation of Serbian Jews.186 Morpurgo and the Split Jewish Community also played a crucial role in rescuing thirty-four orphaned children from Croatia and Bosnia. In April 1943, after months of tireless lobbying and organizing, these children and their adult leaders were allowed to travel to Italy and join forty German children, previously transferred from Zagreb via Ljubljana to Nonantola, Modena. Communities in Fiume and Trieste helped along the way.187 The Italian authorities made another exception by not registering these Jewish children and their adult escorts as interned, which allowed them to move about freely. Another initiative, which Morpurgo was most enthusiastic about, was to evacuate children from Zagreb to Istanbul, with guarantees sought and secured for several

DAS (State Archive Split) ŽO-K-4/II, I-31/42-II. Singer, My Father’s Blessings, p. 157. Kečkemet, Židovi, p. 177.

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hundred of them. Unfortunately, this biggest rescue attempt of children did not bear fruit after the first successful pilot, when eleven children were rescued.188 Open and amicable communication between the Jewish representatives and the Italian authorities, and the reassurances by the latter, continued, but this did not prevent the most frightening attack by the so-called Camicie nere (Blackshirts), which took place on Sabat of 12 June 1942. Provoked by a desecration (allegedly by ‘Communist Jews’) of the marble plaque commemorating the Italian Army’s entry into Split, Blackshirts led by Giovanni Savo, the most fanatical of Split fascists, broke into the Split synagogue, attacking and beating over fifty people who were praying at the time, then vandalizing both the temple and the nearby community building. A man named Romano, a Split Jew present at the prayer, was the most seriously wounded, with glasses cut into his eyes. All moveable objects were broken, while the temple was ruined. From there, they moved to sack Morpurgo’s bookshop and various other Jewish shops. Important documents, precious books, and treasures were set on fire, while Fascists danced around it dressed in rabbinical garments. According to Zerbino, some firemen, policemen, and even soldiers joined the brutal raid, before the Italian Army intervened and calmed the situation.189 Blackshirts were known for their violence when drunk. Every day at seven o’clock in the evening, they played the Italian anthem, maltreating people to force them to observe it, and punishing those caught walking.190 Similar incidents of smaller magnitude occurred in Šibenik and other places in Italian-annexed Dalmatia, usually in the aftermath of Partisan actions against the Italian Army.191 Yet Jewish survivors insist that the offenders were random fascist sympathizers,

Having garnered certificates for evacuees, and support from important Catholic prelates such as Nuncio Roncalli (future pope and now Saint John XXIII), the Jewish Agency for Palestine in Istanbul, HICEM and DELASEM, the campaigners hit a wall of obstacles, including objections raised in Palestine and a transport across half of occupied Europe in 1943. See Ženi Lebl, ‘Kindertransport iz Nezavisne države Hrvatske februara 1943. Godine’, Zbornik 9: Studije, arhivska i memoarska građa (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2009), pp. 185–352; Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 375–78. Zerbino’s report to the Government of Dalmatia, quoted in Zločini fašističkih okupatora, pp. 118–19; Bartulin, ‘Politiche etniche’, p. 143; Kečkemet, Židovi, pp. 178–80. Giovanni Savo was later killed by Split resistance fighter Ante Čelina in front of the crowds, who stared silently, just as they had looked while he led the anti-Jewish pogrom. Raisky, La matassa, pp. 132–34. In Šibenik, Jewish shops were looted by the Fascists after Partisans blew up the power station and killed Italian soldiers in August and November 1942. Alpar, ‘My Vow to Stay out of German Hands’, p. 101.

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and by no means representative of Italian authorities or the Army, which they describe as devoid of anti-Semitism.192 Over the summer, the situation with DELASEM aid and food provision improved. However, more and more refugees were running out of funds, and were forced to ask the Jewish Communities in Split and Dubrovnik, and DELASEM, for help, or were listed for meals in a canteen. Aid distribution had always been a matter of hefty quarrels and exchanges of letters within the community, but it was suddenly sidelined, once rumours of deportation of Jewish refugees were revived, sending waves of panic among Jews in Italian-held Dalmatia and the islands. The rumours were based on the letter that the Government of Dalmatia sent to the head of DELASEM, Lelio Valobra in Genova, but it never materialized.193 It concerned the plans to deport all Jews, including the ones in Italian-controlled territories or Zone 2. According to the agreement that the Ustaša concluded with the Germans, the latter would pay thirty German marks per Jewish head transported to the east, and the Ustaša would get to keep all Jewish property.194 On 24 July 1942, Martin Luther, an undersecretary in the German Foreign Ministry reported to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that Croatia agreed to the terms of deportation, but that the Italians posed obstacles. The greatest pressure was mounting on the Italians regarding Croatian territories with an Italian military presence, such as the town of Mostar, where the Italian General Paride Negri, Commander of the ‘Murge’ infantry division, declared that he could not agree to the expulsion, since all inhabitants of Mostar had been assured equal treatment and any such action would be against the honour of the Italian Army.195 Other Italian generals, Commanders of its Second Army, Mario Roatta, Mario Robotti, and Vittorio Ambrosio, General of the carabinieri, Giuseppe Pièche, and Commander of the Marche Division, General Giuseppe Amico, (eventually killed by the Germans for refusing to surrender after Italian capitulation), followed suit in rejecting deportations, as reported from the German legation in Croatia, the Inspector General for the German Road Administration (the so-called Organization Todt), and, most frequently, telegrams from Siegfried Kasche, the German Minister in Zagreb.196 According to Kasche, the Italians Interview with Enriko Josif. Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 62–63. Shelah, ‘Italian Rescue’, p. 209. Original report published as dok. 154 in Verfolgung und Ermordung, p. 444. The Adolf Eichmann Trial – The District Court Session 46, Part 6, p. 5 http://nizkor.com/ hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-046-06.html [accessed 28  May  2022]. For the particularly poignant role of General Amico in saving Jews, see Shellah ‘Kroatische Juden zwischen Deutschland und Italien’.

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continued distributing assistance to local Jews from the Jews of America, and refused any interference or attempts by the Croatian authorities to seize Jewish property. Indeed, General Amico had been organizing accommodation and provisions for a new group of three hundred Jews on the Dubrovnik riviera, where it was deemed easier and more secure than in places such as Mostar.197 The pressure mounted when, at the end of August, Croatian Foreign Minister Mladen Lorković, with other top Ustaša officials, travelled to Dubrovnik to meet Italian Generals Roatta, Dalmazzo, and Casertano, and to assert Croatian sovereignty by demanding the removal of Jews from the coastal areas controlled by the Italian army. Two days of discussions stalled when Roatta claimed that he was indifferent to the issue, but insisted that the Jews in Zone 2 were under the protection of the Italian Army, and could be removed only under order from Rome, telling Lorković that the Ustaša had to resolve the issue via their Embassy in Rome.198 On  22  September  1942, General Roatta wrote to Army Headquarters to explain that there were three thousand Jews in Zone 2, whose origins and claims to citizenship needed to be established. Furthermore, Roatta believed that deporting them would do much damage to the Italian cause and, specifically, could lead to rupture in their reliance on Serbian Četniks.199 At the same time, Ustaša leader Pavelić met Hitler, Ribbentrop, and all top Nazi officials in their secret Werwolf headquarters on the Eastern front. Pavelić identified Jews in Mostar and Dubrovnik as key problems, pointing to the resistance of the Vatican and the Italian Army to their deportation. Hitler agreed, and described Jews as ‘underground phone cable and message distributors (Meldeköpfe) of the resistance’, personally taking charge to resolve the issue in direct talks with Mussolini.200 Given the difficulties of travel, German diplomacy took over the issue, as recounted by Daniele Carpi and Menachem Shelah. German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the staff of the German embassy in Rome, made up of the foremost German nobility, such as Hans-Georg von Mackensen and Otto von Bismarck, intervened with the Italian Foreign Ministry led by Count Ciano, who after several delays had to resort to Mussolini, who famously wrote ‘Nulla osta’ or ‘No objection’ on the memorandum demanding the surrender of Jews under Italian control. The Italian Foreign Ministry then embarked on prolonged correspondence with the German Embassy about problems with delivering this, reiterating Roatta’s The order to the Prefect of Dubrovnik to assist in the organization sent by General Amico on 17 August 1942, reproduced in Miroševic, Dubrovački kotar, p. 184. Miroševic, Dubrovački kotar, p. 185. Original Italian letter published in German translation as doc. 164 in Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp. 459–60. Report of the meeting published as doc. 165 in Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp. 460–62.

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difficulties with establishing the exact origins of the Jews, and adding further grounds on which Jews could claim Italian citizenship (origin, long residence, or relatives up to third degree in Italian-annexed areas; property ownership; special services for Italy; and so on). Roatta’s delaying tactic of obfuscating the criteria of what was an ‘Italian Jew’ was further extended by working on criteria to establish who was to be considered a ‘Croatian Jew’, and thus eligible for deportation. In the meantime, the Army decided to intern all, or approximately two thousand seven hundred, Jews in Zone 2, while the Germans were told that they would be informed about further developments.201 In this way, the Italian Army would allay any fears about Jews as a potential threat, spying for the Allies or supporting the Communists, as the German and Ustaša authorities claimed. Endangering the well-established relationship Italian forces maintained on the ground is taken as the main argument by the Italian historian Conti to explain the Army’s resistance to Mussolini’s decision to deliver Jews in Dalmatia to the Germans.202 Others too point to Roatta’s expressed concern about the possible consequential revolt of the Italian allies, the anti-Communist Četniks. Yet this seems very one-dimensional, and it could not account for the similar protection before the Četniks emerged as a force and allied themselves with the Italians. Considered by many survivors as ‘saviour of the Jews’, Roatta simply refused to play any role as ‘intermediary’ for what he described as the German– Ustaša issue, and only proposed internment as the first step in implementing or postponing the decision. Roatta, Pièche, Bastianini, and others were all aware that deportations would lead to extermination camps. Unlike the Allies at this time, the Italian sources clearly spelled out and debated the annihilation of Jews, and consequently refused to be part of it. Moreover, it would be wrong to assess the continued Italian protection of Jews in Dalmatia as a purely local military or political matter. When the Italians arrived in Višegrad, in eastern Bosnia, in November 1941, they halted the Ustaša harassment of its Jewish community. When the Italians left the city one year later, many of the Jews accompanied them, while Italian military mules transported their moveable property.203 The Italian authorities objected to the persecution of Jews well beyond their reach, as shown in the case of a Jewess, who was deported from Zagreb to Auschwitz, and who was already in Katowitze when the Italian Embassy requested from the German Foreign Ministry, on 4 February 1943, that Note from the Italian Foreign Ministry from 23 October 1942, published in Verfolgung und Ermordung, pp. 464–65. Conti, L’occupazione italiana, pp. 63–65. Friedman, Like Salt for Bread, p. 493.

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she should be returned to Italy.204 This, and numerous other interventions and policies to protect Jews that the Italian Army operated from summer 1942, culminated in the request of the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, to make all diplomatic representations for the return of all Italian Jews under German rule, including the Jews from Yugoslavia who could claim connection to Italy, as in the case above.205 Yet the German pressure continued, as is evident from another telegram from Minister Kasche to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, in which he raged about the Italians transferring Jews to the islands and Kupari resort, places they had previously refused Germany, when it had solicited them for the use of German soldiers in need of recuperation. Eventually, the Italian Army’s strategy of internment turned into the last and most significant part of its rescue of Jews.

Internment in Camps/Centres Along the Adriatic Coast With German and Croatian pressure mounting, as evidenced by the arrival of a Gestapo delegation in Dubrovnik to investigate deportations, and following frequent Ustaša raids into Italian Zone 2 resulting in the slaughter of Serbs, Jews, and others, the Italian military authorities felt that they could no longer guarantee security to Jews. Therefore, on 17 November 1942, the Italian military organized a special evacuation and concentration of refugees from Mostar, Čapljina, and Dubrovnik to three designated and protected internment camps in: (1) Gruža (Hotel Wreg and Petak) for one hundred and twenty people; (2) in Mlini, Srebreno, and Kupari for over one hundred foreign and six hundred Yugoslav Jews; and (3) on the island of Lopud for another four to six hundred mostly Yugoslav Jews.206 Another three hundred were transferred to the island of Hvar (Hvar town and Jelsa), and also to the island of Brač.207 From then onwards, newly arriving refugees were redirected to these centres, with almost no Jews left in Dubrovnik. Again, the circumstances of the internment matter greatly. The Kupari camp commander, Colonel Favoloro, was remembered as a very good and cultured man who spent most time in the company of refugee Jews. There were barely any guards.208 Marko Sprung, selected to act as a The German Ministry responded that there was no way of ascertaining their present whereabouts. For the case of Mario Sasson, see The Adolf Eichmann Trial – The District Court Session 47, Part 1, p. 2. Bambara, Židov, pp. 167–69. Report of the Dubrovnik Jewish Community. Archive of JIM, 2973, K.27-1-1.1. DAS, Ž0-K-4/VIII, 2665-42. Kečkemet, ‘Transit Camps for Jews in Areas under Italian Occupation’, p. 122.

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courier, also praised his predecessor, Riccardo Ricci, and Battalion Commander Fiammiferi, who all went out of their way to reassure the refugees that they would be protected.209 Italian officers took part in cultural events organized by the interned. Schooling was provided for the first four grades. There was a shortage of food and clothing, as was reported in the letter written by Jakob Kajon, representing Sarajevo refugees, and Rudolf Bier, the head of a group of around one hundred and forty German refugees, or the ‘Čapljina group’, who by 1943 had been interned for four years.210 But the refugees organized themselves to fetch what they could and supplement the Italian rations, and they eventually learned to cook Italian food with the help of their military chefs. In a picturesque environment and mild Mediterranean climate, the greatest worry seemed to have been the uncertain future. According to the letters of the Viennese family Schwarz, they were provided with good comfort in Kupari, and they have only the best words to describe the care of the Italian Army and authorities. Alois was teaching English (presumably to other German-speaking refugees) as before, while his wife found a job as seamstress for a contessa, who had a small chateau nearby. They enjoyed the climate and stayed in the vicinity of Dubrovnik until summer the following year, when most Jewish refugees from the Dalmatian coast were transferred to the island of Rab.211 According to an Italian report from 1 April 1943, there were 342 Jewish refugees on the island of Hvar. They were housed in clustered houses/hotels, and they could not move freely and interact with locals as in Korčula, where they were mostly in private accommodation. An overwhelming majority were from Mostar and Sarajevo, along with some foreign refugees previously interned in Metković.212 Basic staples were provided by the Italian army, and the internees could organize life on the premises, while the women prepared the food. There were up to ten or fifteen persons per room, so the conditions were extremely precarious. Finally, in four villages on the island of Brač, there were 211 mostly Bosnian Jewish refugees from November 1942, in free confinement. Most people stayed in hotels or private houses for rent, while the Italian Army provided food rations. Similar to Korčula, as we will see in the next chapter, in Brač, the refugees immediately connected with locals, and helped in whatever ways they could in return for fish and other supplements to miserable food rations. Samokovlija recounts Original testimony kept in Belgrade Jewish Museum. Published in Bambara, Židov, pp. 218–20. Rg 49. 007 M. Letter from Jakob Kajon to the Jewish Community of Zagreb, 13 January 1943. From the Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum Belgrade, USHMM Archives, Washington, DC. Schwarz, Züge auf falschem Gleis, p. 151. Archive of JIM, 4768, also contains Italian reports and other documents.

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how they worked to bring electricity to places around the island, and how they fixed fishing boats.213 Locals were often denied food rations by the Italians for alleged or real connections to the Partisans, whereas rations to Jews were more regular and unquestionable. Even on islands such as Brač, where the security situation was much better than on the continent, Partisan provocations (hanging red star flags on church towers), ambushes, and sabotages became more frequent, and refugees were clearly involved.214 On Lopud, according to Kreft, Yugoslav Jews immediately established a network with Communist Jewish activists and refugees who had arrived there earlier, allowing them to create a local party branch and to collect contributions for the imprisoned Communists in Dubrovnik.215 The situation was different along the northern Dalmatian coast, where mostly Zagreb Jews stayed in their own or rented houses with no difficulties, until the orders came for internment. The Italian Army resisted the attempts of the civilian Croatian authorities to impose any anti-Semitic restrictions. In Novi Vinodolski, Pavel Vinski, a lawyer who fled Osijek, praised in his testimony the military commanders, Colonel Michele Adabbo and Lieutenant Scotti.216 Among foreign refugee families in the area, there were the Rheinholds from Hamburg, the Steppers from Dresden, the Altmaiers from Frankfurt, the Fischls and Glasners from Vienna, the Hoffmanns from Prague, and so on. Food provision and accommodation depended on individual financial circumstances and connections. In Crikvenica, there was even an uproar among the locals about the luxurious lifestyle of some refugees, as recalled by Dorrit Reisner.217 The Fleischmann family from Zagreb was specifically forced into internment for displaying wealth contrary to their position as refugees, and for demonstrating their sympathy for Great Britain and hostility towards Italy.218 Others pleaded to be placed in the internment camps in the hope to be eventually interned

Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, p. 77. Another Croatian-language report from the Partisan command in Omiš, on the coast, complained that Jews were under the strict control of the Italian authorities, with limited freedom of movement and communication with the local population, Narodnooslobodilačka borba u Dalmaciji 1941–1945. Zbornik dokumenata, knjiga 5, 1943 (Split: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1983). Kreft, ’Otok Lopud’, pp. 970–72 names siblings Hajon from Sarajevo, Toma Engel, Božidar Štraus, and so on. Original testimony kept in Belgrade Jewish Museum. Published in Bambara, Židov, pp. 202–05. Interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg. AJ, 110–399, 335.

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in Italy.219 Unaware of the imminent danger of extradition to the Germans or the Ustaša, according to Polić, most Jews looked ill at the internment, and only accepted it in the hope of eventual confino libero in Italy.220 At the end of October 1942, around one thousand five hundred of those residing along the northern Dalmatian coast in Italian Zone 2 (Novi Vinodolski, Crikvenica, and Kraljevica, among other places) were transferred to a purposely made camp in Kraljevica or Porto ré, which had the poorest conditions of all the camps. On 9 November, just days after most refugees had arrived in the camp, they were addressed by General Roatta, Commander of the Italian Second Army, who offered guarantees of protection. Shortly after the war, Lucie Begov from Vienna recalled his explicit pro-Jewish attitude as he pleaded with them, ‘If it were up to me I would hide you in a submarine and not let you surface again until the war is over.’221 While Italian Army authorities named it Campo di concentramento, and Jews were considered civilian prisoners of war, internment camp would be a more accurate description. Refugees were forced to stay in the small area of the camp, and they could leave only for visits to hospital or for exceptional reasons. A few internees escaped from the camp to join the Partisans in the mountains, which was about the only place one could escape to. While living conditions were miserable, especially in terms of sleeping and hygiene facilities, and the food rations provided by the Italian army were meagre, the interned could communicate freely among themselves and with the outside world, receive and send letters and parcels, and, most importantly, organize and autonomously administer the camp. Recently, a collection of documents and artwork produced by the internees miraculously resurfaced and was published in Croatia, which, together with individual reminiscences, allows us to reconstruct the conditions of life in the camp. Despite numerous conflicts among the internees, there was amazing activity in maintaining childcare, schools at all levels, communal cooking, food provision in addition to that provided by the Italian army, health facilities, hygiene, performance, music, and arts.222 According to Berger, the atmosphere Dr Valentina Morpurgo, born Krasnoselesky from Soroca in Romania pleaded to join her husband, Aldi, in Lipari, together with her baby and Croatian governess. AJ, 110–339, 629. Similar was Moise Silberman (son of Elios, born in Krasnopul in 1905), Turkish citizen, although there is no information about how he ended up in Split. AJ, 110–399, 731. This was the case of Bertha Muller, born Mann, from Vienna, who was previously a refugee in Sarajevo, who was sent to Italy using these procedures. AJ, 110–400, 481–482. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 79–80. Begov, Mit meinen Augen, p. 12. Propusnica za koncentracijski logor Kraljevica: Lasciapassare per il campo concentramento Porto ré (Rijeka: adamić, 2007) was published by its editor, Mladen Kušec, who got possession of Hinko Gottlieb’s papers, which the latter entrusted to the Crnković family on

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in Kraljevica, as in the other Italian internment camps for the Jews, was not that of repression and suffering. The problems were caused by war conditions, rather than by anti-Semitism. Nutrition was the same, if not better, than for the civilians in surrounding areas, and rules for internment according to international conventions were respected to the same or to a higher degree than in internment camps run by the Allies.223 Some inmates even brought pets with them. Jewish religious services were allowed and performed, along with the Roman Catholic ones, as more than two thirds of internees had converted by then, or claimed to have done so. For Hinko Gottlieb, who headed the community of Kraljevica, this was the biggest point of contention and conflict, even though most conversions were purely opportunistic.224 Gottlieb was also a rare critic of the Italian command, especially their support for prevalently secular activities or the domination of the Catholic services. Other inmates in their memoirs only find words of praise for the protection they enjoyed under the Italian Army, calling their camp Buen retiro, while some even actively supported the Italian regime. Despite the extreme conditions of life, and the uncertainty, humour thrived along the promenade between the wooden barracks, which housed almost one hundred inmates each, and the communal buildings. Some called this promenade Avenue, while others named it Rue de la Caque, given that it led to communal latrines at the bottom, which in turn led to the sea. Winter cold caused many to suffer from bladder infections, so various means were invented to deal with these, and many other body fluids and needs, but with humour and goodwill, they were overcome, as Polić explained with the German proverb, Der Mensh ist ein Gewohnheitstier.225 Refugees were divided the island of Rab, who kept them in an attic for more than sixty years. They contain parts of Hinko Gottlieb’s papers as a judge, his son Vlado’s diary from 1941–42, and other camp documentation, including regarding the failed evacuation of children to Turkey that they planned. In addition, the folder contained numerous drawings of people and situations from the camp (mostly pencil and watercolours, including that of the celebrated Croatian Jewish painter Ivan Rein). Hinko Gottlieb (1886–1948), a writer and a lawyer, was a leading Zionist activist in Zagreb before the war. His older son, Danko, was murdered in Jadovno in summer 1941, while his younger son, Vlado, died in Italy on their way to Palestine in a traffic accident. After moving to Palestine, Gottlieb completed and revised his stories of the Holocaust period, including Ključ od velikih vrata (The Key to the Great Gate, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947). Interview with S. Edmund Berger. Converts were attacked, according to Pollatschek too, Die Kunst des Ueberlebens, p.  72. In order to marry an Italian, and thus go to Italy with her son, Sara Raisky and her future husband both had to convert to Orthodox Christianity first, as only an Orthodox priest in Split was willing to marry them, and thus use a loophole in the regulations that eventually saved them, in a rare case where conversion helped. Raisky, La matassa, pp. 152–56. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 45–56.

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politically among those who supported the Croatian or Serbian cause, and those who insisted on their Hungarian or German identity and spoke the languages of their background or chosen identity. But most conflicts arose among haves and have-nots. The camp management pressed the wealthy inmates to contribute more for additional food to supplement miserable army soup. A couple of internees even had stocks of food (wheat stores, for example) in the vicinity, but enforcing sharing was difficult, as available court proceedings testify.226 Socio-economic inequalities and envy even led to fights, so maintaining discipline became the key task of the self-established management structure – every barrack had a leader, there was a central leadership, and even a court, presided over by Gottlieb, with a long and expertly formulated and detailed codex of behaviour. Yet those who violated it could not be expelled or punished in any meaningful way, as they were all prisoners together.227 The most common punishment was denial of meals or ostracism by other inmates, as in the cases of theft that are recorded.228 Eventually, well-organized self-rule, active cultural life, and mutual support kept the spirits alive, despite terrible news about disappearances and deaths of loved ones reaching the camp.229 Preserved drawings and photographs from Kraljevica, poems, parts of plays, musical programmes, Gottlieb’s lectures, and correspondence all testify to the tireless efforts to maintain cultural life and Jewish identity in these precarious circumstances, where many only cared for food and some entertainment, as is evident from Gottlieb’s criticism of the New Year’s Eve celebration for 1943.230 Orchestra, singing, and theatre groups were formed, with a vocal quartet (Katarina Hoffmanova, Lucia Skopal, Željko Fritz, and Fritz Lunzer) performing a sophisticated opera repertoire, selected to reflect their position, such as the aria ‘In quelle trine morbide’ from the second act of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. Even more popular were theatre groups made up of inhabitants of individual barracks, with the most hilarious being the female trio Lady from Porto rè, which ridiculed how Central European bourgeois ladies adjusted (or not) to the camp conditions.231 The ability to laugh at themselves and their fate was frequently noted in many interviews. Paradoxically or not, humorous episodes related to cultural differences, hygiene practices, and, in general, the Propusnica za koncentracijski logor Kraljevica, pp. 212–16. Polić, Imao sam sreće, p. 50. Ibid., pp. 105–12. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 65–66. A handful of deaths were recorded, either as suicides or due to malnutrition/disease. Propusnica za koncentracijski logor Kraljevica, pp.  122–28. Gottlieb corresponded with Jewish officials in Budapest, Zagreb, Switzerland, Korčula, and elsewhere, as well as with the Italian military command. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 51–58.

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modest living circumstances that refugees had to endure and deal with collectively, eventually feature as the fondest memories of the years on the run. One can look in vain for archival evidence of what made refugees laugh or brought them joy. It is uniquely via personal narratives and oral histories that we find out. Following the internment of most Jews in Zone 2, the number of DELASEM aid dependents in the area was continuously on the rise. By February  1943, DELASEM reported fully supporting two hundred refugees in Split, three hundred in Vela Luka, two hundred in Korčula, two hundred on the island of Hvar, and one hundred on Brač. Because of malnutrition, new diseases began appearing. Additional appeals were made to all nineteen Jewish communities in Italy, but also directly and personally to Jews who could still donate. Donations came from Florence, Milan, Verona, Genoa, Parma, and Livorno, but mostly from refugees from Yugoslavia who had settled in Italy. Jews in Split made additional collections of money, clothing, and other items.232 The biggest donors remained the families Stock and Morpurgo from Trieste.

Rab General Roatta’s successor, Robotti, continued to oppose the surrender of Jewish refugees to Fascist Croatia or Germany. In spring 1943, after openly opposing Mussolini, the former Italian Governor of Dalmatia, and by then a secretary in the Foreign Ministry, effectively a Foreign Minister, Bastianini decided to intern all the remaining Jews in the areas under his control in one internment centre in Kampor on the island of Rab/Arbe in Zone 1, or on officially Italian soil.233 During May and June 1943, Jews from the Dubrovnik riviera, and the islands of Hvar and Brač, were brought by ships. In July, they were also joined by the largest group from Kraljevica. Victor Morpurgo met the Command of the Italian First Army Corps in Split, which reassured the Jewish community that this internment was for their protection if not benefit, as it was easier for the army to protect, and eventually evacuate, the Jews if they were congregated and in the area of Italian sovereignty.234 One of the reasons Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 97–111. Among the donors was also the group in Nonantola, transferring money they got from Nathan Schwalb, the emissary of HeChalutz for Switzerland, in order to support possible volunteers for Youth Aliyah. Franc Potočnik, Il campo di sterminio fascista: l’isola di Rab (Torino: Anpi, 1979); Alessandra Kersevan, Lager italiani: Pulizia ethnica e campi di concentramento fascisti per civili jugoslavi 1941–1943 (Rome: Nutrimenti, 2008). Maričić, Luka Spasa, p. 112.

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that Rab was selected was its northernmost position near the coast, and near the Italian heartland, which the Italian Army hoped easily to defend. According to the initial Italian records, there were 2661 Jews interned on Rab.235 Shelah writes about three thousand, and Romano uses a much higher figure, while Narcisa Lengel-Krizman’s recent research shows 3600 Jews interned on Rab alone, with approximately 15 per cent being children under the age of fifteen, 47 per cent women, and 38 per cent men.236 The conditions in the Jewish camp in Kampor on Rab island were described as decent, or an improvement compared to Kraljevica. Families were housed together, there was schooling and other activities, and food supplies were regular, despite the precarious economic situation. The sick were being catered for in the Italian military hospital, away from the camp. Transfer to Italy never stopped. The family Weiner/Bosnić (Max and Olga, and daughter Nada) were able to go from Rab to Italy only days before Italy’s capitulation.237 Victor Morpurgo wrote from Split to the Italian camp commander Cuiuli to express his gratitude for his and Italian soldiers’ humane and protective treatment of the Jews.238 Still, except for the inmates of Kraljevica, for all the others previously housed on various islands or the Dubrovnik riviera, the internment on Rab island was a deterioration. Movement was restricted, and there was very limited interaction with the rest of the island, which also meant no additional food supply.239 The camp was large, and less well-structured and organized than the one in Kraljevica, and the Italians certainly paid less attention to the welfare of the inmates, given the turmoil in the Army, and elsewhere in the country, during that summer. Nevertheless, conditions were infinitely better than those faced by Slovenes, who had been imprisoned in Rab from before.240 The Slovenes and Jews soon established close contact, and especially the Communists among them played the decisive role in taking over the two camps after the Italian capitulation, and in the creation of the so-called Rab Jewish battalion. The invasion of Sicily in July, and the events that evolved rapidly in Rome, which saw Mussolini removed from power on 25 July, brought relief to the refugees on Rab, Korčula, and elsewhere in the Balkans, although Kersevan, Lager italiani, p. 160. Narcisa Lengel-Krizman, ‘Koncentracioni logori talijanskog okupatora u Dalmaciji i Hrvatskom primorju (1941–1943)’, Povijesni prilozi: Zbornik radova Instituta za historiju radničkog pokreta Hrvatske (1983), pp. 279–80. ‘Weiner, Max’ in Židovski leksikon. Shelah, Un Debito di Gratitudine, p. 153. A long DELASEM report on the camp conditions after their inspection in early August 1943 is published in Bambara, Židov, pp. 317–35. Potočnik, Il campo, p. 120.

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all feared what might come next. Their evacuation was negotiated and prepared for by the Second Italian Army led by General Robotti, unrelentingly asking for the evacuation of both Jews and Serbs, who fought alongside the Italians, in his correspondence with the Interior and Foreign Ministry and Army headquarters.241 Yet nothing was accomplished before the Italian capitulation on 8 September. Eventually, during the month following the liberation of the camp, most Jewish inmates, an estimated three thousand of them, crossed over to the Adriatic coast or were evacuated by the Partisans to the mountains under their control, a story told in the chapter on resistance. Several hundred refugees stayed behind on Rab, trying to organize their own escape to Italy. Over the next four months, most reached the liberated southern Italian coast, hiring boats, the so-called trabakula(s), and paying local fishermen to take them.242 This could be done only by island hopping, and, besides being costly, was extremely dangerous.243 Dr Alois Schwartz and his wife, as well as his brother with his family, wrote to their sons that they sailed during the night and hid during daytime on some of the numerous islands, until they reached the island of Vis (Lissa) in the middle of the Adriatic, where they were picked up by a British war boat and taken to Bari, Italy, and eventually to Sinai, Egypt.244 Fred Reisner, former executive of the wagon factory in Slavonski Brod, organized and paid for a group transport of twenty to thirty German/Austrian Jews. Their journey lasted for days, always mooring in remote places, as some of the islands had already fallen into German hands, until they reached Allied-held Vis. Among those who still had some valuables after years of flight, and who managed this last escape leg, were the families Walter, Herzer, Neufeld, Gottlieb, and Vranić, according to written accounts of these perilous journeys that saved at least three hundred.245

Epilogue Around three hundred Jews remained on Rab and in nearby coastal towns, either not willing or not able to join the Partisans, or to afford transport to Bambara, Židov, pp. 236–43. Bernard Lerner, ‘They Were the First to be Freed’, The American Jewish World, 7 April 1944, p. 10. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 120–48; Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 119. AHC Interview with Zvi Basch (Herbert Walter), LBI Jerusalem Collection (LBIJER AHC 109). Schwarz, Züge auf faschem Gleis, p. 349. The Schwarzes wrote that they were evacuated to Vis by the Partisans, which was not the case. Interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg; ‘Neufeld, Edo’, in Židovski leksikon.

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Southern Italy.246 As testified by one of them, Lucie Begov, they were naive, even foolish, wishfully thinking that the Adriatic Sea would protect them from capture by the Germans. Lucie, with her sisters Lilly and Stella, and their exile friends, were also lured by the beauty of the island and the comfort of life, and the clean beds in the houses of their hosts, which they had missed for so long while in the internment camps, having already spent years on the run.247 After the capitulation of Italy, the Ustaša deemed their agreement over annexation and occupation of parts of Dalmatia and the northern Adriatic null, but Hitler and the Wehrmacht had other plans, and tensions between the two fascist states immediately arose. In order to prevent possible Allied landing, and due to intense Partisan activity, which the Ustaša were never able to put under control, Nazi Germany proceeded to occupy all the previously Italian-held areas.248 On 13 September 1943, Trieste-born SS officer Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was named by Himmler as Higher SS and Police Leader of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. Globocnik employed his previous experience, and the assistants he had gathered as one of the leaders in the notorious Reinhard operation in the Generalgouvernment in Poland, which saw over one million Jews murdered. He ordered the conversion of an old rice mill on the outskirts of Trieste into a concentration camp, known as Risiera di San Sabba, where thousands of Jews, Partisans, and other political dissidents were interrogated, tortured, and murdered. German forces gradually assumed complete control of military and civil affairs, and the management and exploitation of economic resources, and proceeded to arrest tens of thousands of Italian soldiers, transport them to Germany as prisoners of war, and then use them mostly as forced labour, although some ended up in concentration camps. On 18 March 1944, German forces took control of the island of Rab. Most of the remaining Jews ran away from their houses into the woods and gorges of the island, but escape was impossible on a small island, so eventually they resigned themselves to their fate and surrendered. They were arrested along with the Partisan sympathizers, who could still be found on the island. With their suitcases packed again, and tears in their eyes, the remaining Jews Zeev writes that living conditions on the island were much superior to those in the mountains, and many naively remained hopeful about not being found. Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 171. Begov, Mit meinen Augen, pp. 12–17. Lucie Begov and her sisters escaped to Zagreb from Vienna. Michael Wedekind, Nationalsozialistische Besatzungs- und Annexionspolitik in Norditalien 1943 bis 1945. Die Operationszonen “Alpenvorland” und “Adriatisches Küstenland” (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003), pp.  109–13; Cinzia Villani, ‘The Persecution of Jews in German-Occupied Northern Italy’, in Jews in Italy, ed. by Zimmerman, pp. 243–59.

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on Rab bid farewell to their lovely hosts, the beautiful island, and the wide sunreflecting sea, which for Begov remained forever an image of freedom, as they boarded a boat to Rijeka/Fiume, where the triple Nazi torture of hunger, dirt, and physical exhaustion began.249 From Rijeka, the Rab Jews were transported to the camp in Risiera di San Sabba. Eventually, 204 of them were deported to Auschwitz, with only six surviving, among them Begov, whose recorded experience is the only testimony about this group.250 Among the victims were many foreign (mostly Austrian) Jews who did not feel comfortable escaping to unknown mountain territories held by the Partisans. Begov recalled a Gentile woman called Grete, who would not leave her elderly Jewish husband, and who was sent to her death alongside him. Others, such as the Boran (Brucks) family and Zora Marić (Mayer), née Alexander from Zagreb, decided to stay along the coast, often in their summer homes, and were murdered when found, or transported to Auschwitz.251 The same fate met hundreds of mostly local Jews who remained in Split and Dubrovnik, including their community leaders, who saved and helped thousands while under Italian rule or occupation. The president of the Dubrovnik Jewish Community, Josip Mandl, was executed with his wife soon after Nazi German troops reached the city. At least twenty-four other members of his community were deported and perished. Viktor Morpurgo and Markus Finci, President and Vice-President of Split Jewish Community were deported, along with 121 other members and an unidentified number of Jewish refugees. At least 114 Split Jews joined the Partisans, and twenty-nine died fighting the Nazis and their collaborators, whereas a group of thirty survived by fleeing to the islands and further to Bari.252 A few Jewish refugees remained in Dalmatia or hiding with locals and in the Catholic convents for more than a year, before the Partisans liberated them.253 In Italy, Mussolini launched the so-called Italian Social Republic, or Republic of Salò, under the German umbrella, making Italian Jews and Jewish refugees subject to deportation. Out of 8566 deported Jews from Italian territories, Begov, Mit meinen Augen, pp. 21–41. Wedekind, Nationalsozialistische Besatzungs, p.  362; René Moehrle, Judenverfolgung in Triest während Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus, 1922–1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2014), p. 331, pp. 335–456; Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 308–09; Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 119. Polić, Imao sam sreće, p. 138. Kečkemet, Židovi, pp.  203–06; Silvana Mladinov, ‘Split: Port of Salvation and Port of Death’, in We Survived … 2, pp. 27–33. Among those who hid in Split were a young boy, Heinz Brecher from Graz, and Hugo Toch from Vienna. Interview with Henry Heinz Brecher, LBI AV Collection (Tapes) (AHC 2585); Michael Toch, ‘Gedenken und Gedäcthnis: Die Familienerrinerguen von Erna Strassberger’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 107 (1999), pp. 166–69.

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1820 were refugees, and less than 8 per cent, or 610, of the deportees survived. Fortunately, there was some time before the Nazi takeover, allowing most Jews to flee further south and eventually find safety in the areas soon taken by the Allies, or to hide in Central Italian regions. Others were closer to Switzerland, but it was anything but easy to escape there. Despite the Yugoslav Government in exile’s guarantees to the Swiss authorities that Yugoslavia would provide for the maintenance of the children and adults from the Nonantola group, Switzerland objected, as two thirds of them were not Yugoslav, until eventually the Zionist legation at the League of Nations vouched for non-Yugoslav children. In order to avoid German controls (on the Italian side of the border), they had to cross the green border again to reach safety in Switzerland. They managed, but the DELASEM official from Genoa, Gioffredo Pacifici, who, together with his brother, assisted the transfer, was arrested near the Swiss border. Both were deported, and murdered in Auschwitz.254 One Sarajevo boy, Salomon Papo, was left behind because of tuberculosis. He was later taken from the sanatorium and deported to Auschwitz. A very high proportion of deportees, over 1400, came from Veneto, Trieste, and the Adriatic coast, where regional Fascism was stronger than elsewhere in Italy, feeding on border mentality and entrenched anti-Slavism. Furthermore, one of Italy’s largest Jewish centres in Trieste, and Jewish communities in Rijeka/Fiume and elsewhere on the eastern Adriatic, were too remote to attempt escape to the south or the north. At least one hundred Jews were deported from Fiume, and at least seventy-one other Fiuman Jews were deported from elsewhere in Northern Italy or the Republic of Salò.255 Among those deported was also Fiume’s police, Giovanni Palatucci, who died from typhus in Dachau. While designated as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vachem, Palatucci’s entire role has subsequently been questioned, and it remains a matter of debate.256 Jewish property was looted, and Jewish community buildings and synagogues in Fiume were vandalized, but, with one exception, the locals did not partake in looting or denunciations.257 The new Voigt, The Children of Villa Emma at Nonantola, pp. 193–94. Of those Fiumans in Italy, many were arrested as they tried to cross into Switzerland. One survivor’s story is Hanna Kugler Weiss, Racconta! Fiume – Birkenau – Israele (Florence: La Giuntina, 2006). Marco Coslovich, Giovanni Palatucci: Una giusta memoria (Salerno: Mephite, 2008) is a recent critical biography. Lajos or Ludwig Plach, a carpenter from Fiume, denounced Jews and served as an interpreter for German troops. For a detailed report on the wartime circumstances, and especially the deportations of the Jews by the President of the Jewish Community in Fiume, Arminio Klein, on 6 December 1945, see HR-DARI-106 Box 3.

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Nazi authorities also sequestrated the goods of refugee Jews still stationed in its port, which we saw served as transit for more than one hundred and twenty thousand of them during the 1930s. Over three hundred wagons of furniture, housewares, art, and other valuable objects were plundered on the spot, or transported to Carinthia, and further to Berlin and other places in Germany.258 With a few notable exceptions, with grave consequences for those affected, and notwithstanding repressive Italian occupation policies towards local Slavic, Greek, and Albanian populations, this chapter has demonstrated the positive attitude towards Jewish plight on all levels, in all the complexity of war situations, and in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe. Over one hundred testimonies have been used in this chapter as records of the humane attitude of Italian civilian and military authorities in occupied or annexed territories, prompting many survivors to choose Italy as their new home after the war.259 Providing new details, and incorporating the voices of the survivors, this and the next two chapters thus reiterate the conclusions of Carpi and Shelah many decades ago. Whereas earlier historiography described the anti-Jewish laws in Italy as lax, and implemented only sporadically and partially, because anti-Semitism was not deeply rooted in the culture and mass psychology of the Italians, this chapter has pointed to the similar behaviour of most Italian troops and civilians in occupied or annexed areas of Yugoslavia.260 While anti-Jewish laws led to discrimination and marginalization, there was active obstruction to deportation or elimination of Jews from the highest military echelons, and even from some in the Italian Fascist leadership. In addition to political and military considerations, this chapter has demonstrated that the Italian attitude was based on direct and personal knowledge of the annihilation of Jews in Croatia and Bosnia, evidence gathered on a number of visits and meetings with local and refugee Jewish representatives, detailed and verified reports that were distributed, and a myriad of personal encounters and experiences. Despite its shortcomings, the protection given to Jewish refugees in Italian-occupied/annexed territories of Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, and in Southern France, as well as in Italy proper, was second to none, especially in the context of the often inimical or slow changing attitude of other countries, Wedekind, Nationalsozialistische Besatzungs, pp. 368–69. Paul Schreiner described the Italians as the noblest of the nations in his Spašeni iz Zagreba, p. 97; Olga Njemirovski stressed that ‘we, Yugoslav Jews must be very thankful to the Italian nation who even under a Fascist Government gave us refuge – if we had not come to the Italian-occupied territory, we would have been the victims of the unspeakably cruel and sadistic Ustashe’, Njemirovski, The Holocaust, p. 35. Wedekind, Nationalsozialistische Besatzungs, p.  351; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 2 702–24.

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including Britain and the United States.261 It left a life-long impression on survivors, as summed up by Drago Baum, first interned in Piedmont and later in Ferramonti camp: ‘I left Italy with an appreciation for the humane attitude and behaviour of the Italian people, with the exception of the Fascists’.262 Manés Sperber, one of the first anti-fascist voices in Europe, and a key figure in resistance networks of Jews in Yugoslavia, was also thankful that his own family was saved in Dalmatia and then Italy, concluding: ‘despite the aggressive, chauvinistic pretentiousness and the extortions of the vainglorious Fascists the Italian people had essentially remained true to its gentillezza and humaneness’.263

This needs to be reiterated, as many of those who survived in Dalmatia, and then fled to Allied-controlled Southern Italy, eventually made it among the 982 refugees who were transported to the United States on the executive order of President Roosevelt, despite the opposition of the US Congress. From August  1944 until February  1946, they were housed in Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter, formerly a decommissioned Army training base in Oswego, New York, and locked behind a chain-link fence with barbed wire, while US government agencies argued about whether they should be allowed to stay or, at some point, be deported back to Europe. It was not until January 1946 that the decision was made to allow them to apply for American residency. This was the only attempt by the United States to shelter Jewish refugees during the war. Safe Haven Holocaust Refugee Shelter Museum is now dedicated to keeping alive their stories. See [accessed 29 May 2022]; Ruth Gruber, Haven: The Unknown Story of 1,000 World War II refugees (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983); and special oral history collections held at Oswego University. Baum, ‘My Italian Holiday’. Sperber, Until My Eyes are Closed with Shards, p. 198. His ex-wife, Mirjam, and son, Vladim, were taken to a village near Udine in the North Italian region of Friuli after spending time on the Adriatic coast where they escaped from Zagreb.

Chapter 6

Exile on Korčula On the most glorious island of the Adriatic, the Hebrews now nest – Korčula has become their nature reserve.1

No other place provides a better microcosm of the Jewish war exile in Italian-ruled Dalmatia than the island of Korčula in the southern Adriatic Sea, opposite the mighty Pelješac peninsula. The Greeks called it Korkyra melaine or ‘black Korkyra’ to distinguish it from Corfu, a couple of hundred kilometres to the south. Attacked and settled by Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Magyars, Franks, and Normans, it was held for centuries by Venetians, when it became known under its Italian name, Curzola. According to a local legend, Marco Polo, the world’s most famous traveller, was born on the island. From Napoleon’s conquests until the end of the First World War, it was ruled by Austria, as was the rest of Dalmatia, and with its collapse, after a brief occupation by Italy, it became part of the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, or Yugoslavia. Devoid of foreign rule, the island nevertheless suffered from overpopulation and extreme poverty, pushing thousands of Korčulans to emigrate for good in the 1920s, mostly to South America, which still took in immigrants. Besides being a popular tourist resort over the last few decades, the town of Korčula was also known for its Summer School, organized by the publishers of the Yugoslav Marxist critical journal Praxis from 1964 to 1974. In the warm and modest environment of the island, the school organizers, Rudi Supek and Milan Kangrga of Zagreb, provided a platform for philosophers and social critics from the entire world.2 Prominent attendees included Ernst Bloch, Eugen Fink, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Henri Lefebvre, Richard  J.  Bernstein, and Shlomo Avineri.3 Yet in the writings and ‘Auf dem herrlichsten Eiland der Adria nisten nun die Hebräer – Korcula ist ihr Naturschutzpark geworden’ Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 174. Originally this was the wording of the German radio broadcaster and newspaper on the Balkans moaning about the Italian treatment of Jewish refugees. German media often published pictures of Korčula, claiming that Jews were there on holiday. Milan Kangrga, ‘Korčulanska ljetna škola’, in his Izvan povijesnog događanja: Dokumenti jednog vremena (Split: Feral Tribune biblioteka, 1997), pp. 278–94. Nenad Stefanov, ‘Message in a Bottle: Yugoslav Praxis Philosophy, Critical Theory of Society and the Transfer of Ideas between East and West’, in Entangled Protest: Transnational Approaches to the History of Dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. by Robert Brier (Münster: fibre, 2013), pp. 109–28.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_007

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reminiscences of both the organizers and their guests, there is no sign that they were aware that this southern Dalmatian island had become a magnet for German and Austrian artists and intellectuals many decades earlier, although for different reasons. From 1933 onwards, Korčula turned into an emigration destination, and then, during the war years, it became an island for the internment of Jews and others, and a remarkable oasis of safety in Europe.4 Among the first exiles from Germany to land on Korčula was the painter Richard Ziegler (1891–1992), close to the so-called November Group in Berlin, who moved in with his Jewish wife from Cologne, Edith Lendt (1905–2004) in 1933. His diary, detailing their reasons for migration and describing their time in exile, is preserved thanks to another German painter and friend, Walter Höfner, who followed Ziegler to Korčula, bought a house, and even married a local girl, Fani Kondenar.5 Ziegler, whose first wife was also Jewish, was staunchly antifascist, as could be deduced from his diary entry for 29 February 1933, while he was still in Germany: Official and planned contagion. The plague of nationalism. Restriction of every free thought in the name of God. German people were and remain the people of barbarians and servants […] They will bring upon us new wars and the country will be destroyed.6

Soon after these prophetic words were written, the Zieglers arrived in Korčula and bought a villa from the local noble family Smrkinić, built in 1881, with a beautiful garden, wine colonnades, and a stone pergola. Edith also painted. A short account of Jewish internment on the island is provided by Jens Hoppe, ‘Kurzola Island’, in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume III: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany, ed. by Geoffrey  P.  Megargee and Joseph  R.  White (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), pp. 546–48. The story about Vela Luka is told in Zvonko Maričić, Luka Spasa. Zvonko Maričić, a native of Vela Luka and witness to the Jewish exodus on the island, used archival evidence of the Jewish Community of Split, under whose watchful eye the refugees remained until the capitulation of Italy, and its correspondence with other communities in Italy and what was Yugoslavia, as well as correspondence with refugees themselves. Finally, Maričić also assembled memories of locals and Jewish refugees, some of which were published in Israel. The section on Ziegler is compiled based on information provided by the Richard Ziegler foundation in Germany: [accessed 25 October 2021]. Walter Höfner (1903, Hamburg–1976) remained on Korčula until 1943, when he joined other evacuees to Bari, only returning to Germany in 1949. His seaside landscapes and abstract paintings are still sought after. Cited in Vladimir Depolo, ‘Richard Ziegler: Život i rad na Korčuli od 1933. do 1937’, Godišnjak grada Korčule, 11 (2006), 189–93. Ziegler’s diary and around thirty of his works are still preserved in Korčula.

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Besides Korčula landscapes, the pair drew plants found on the island.7 Life in Korčula was cheap, but the paints the artist needed were not. Besides family support from back home in Calw, the Zieglers enjoyed having as patron the famous Zagreb architect Hugo Ehrlich, who also introduced them to the art world of Zagreb. Ziegler and Lendt’s house in Korčula became a magnet for German friends and artists, who brought or sent them newspapers which Richard used for drawing caricatures of German leaders. Their best-known guest, Manès Sperber (1905–1984) described his stay with the Zieglers in the summer 1934, and then again in 1937–38, as a separation from the world, on an extraterritorial island of biblical landscapes.8 The idyll was only broken when boats from Dubrovnik and Split brought newspapers, which catapulted them back into time. They optimistically hoped for a sudden awakening of the German working classes or intervention by the victor nations, but over time they could only witness with disbelief how the once powerful German Communist party, with millions of voters, could not do a thing to help the thousands imprisoned in concentration camps or to prevent Hitler from seeking further expansion of his powers. Sperber eventually moved to Paris, where he worked for the Communist Internationale.9 When Ziegler once interrupted his almost idyllic time in Korčula, best illustrated by his canvas Isle of Love, with a short trip to Germany to visit his parents in 1934, his diary impressions turned less optimistic: ‘common people happy, simple, not claustrophobic anymore, blindly devoted. Those rich: self-secure, even aggressively secure, secure in victory, well-dressed. Women: proud to serve the man. Young: joyous and victorious, as if on the playfield.’10 In 1938, Richard and Edith moved to England, where her sister already lived. After a short internment, Richard worked for the UK (war) Ministry of Information and the American War Office of Information, and finally published what became a famous book of

The collection is now kept at the Linnean Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly Square, London. Sperber, Until My Eyes are Closed with Shards, p. 24. In 1938, Sperber left the party because of the Stalinist purges, and a year later he volunteered for the French army. After their defeat, Sperber took refuge in Cagnes, in the so-called free zone of France, and finally fled with his family to Switzerland in 1942. After the war, Sperber worked as a writer and a senior editor at the Calmann-Lévy publishing house. The quotation is from a diary entry for 28 January 1934. For more on Ziegler, see Cornelia Ziegler, ‘Korčula Re-discovered’; Želimir Laszlo, ‘Edith i Richard Ziegler’; and Georg Bodamer, ‘Isle of Love – Edith i Richard Ziegler na Korčuli 1933–1937’, Godišnjak grada Korčule, 13, (2010), 167–200.

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caricatures ridiculing Nazi leaders and Germany, drawn in Korčula, entitled We Make History.11 In the meantime, however, the artistic colony on the island was enlarged by writers such as Antonio Eger and Leo Glauss, and painters Eduard Arnthal (also spelled Ehrenthal, of whom more later), and Maria Strauss. From the same leftist circle of Manès Sperber and the so-called Berlin Wilmersdorf Artist Colony also came Dinah Nelken (1900–1989).12 In Berlin, Nelken ran the cabaret Die Unmöglichen (The Impossible), and authored poems, film scripts, short plays, and two novels in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1933, her husband, the Communist activist and bookseller Heinrich Ohlenmacher was taken to the concentration camp Esterwegen. Once he was released, they moved to Vienna together with Dinah’s brother, Rolf Gero Schneider, and continued their artistic collaboration.13 After the Anschluss, the three fled to Korčula, where they spent the next five years, before escaping to Italy in 1943. Nelken described her exile experience and wartime involvement with Yugoslav Partisans in her novels Geständnis einer Leidenschaft (1954) and Addio amore (1957), while she confronted her experience of fascism in her novel Spring über deinen Schatten, spring! (1955)14 Yet, Korčula was not a sanctuary only for Jews and anti-fascists fleeing the rise of Nazism.15 Its beautiful medieval capital, frequently compared to the His three series of anti-fascist drawings, Blut und Boden, Deutschland ist erwacht, and Bilderbogen zum dritten Reich are kept in his archive at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste and are accessible online at [accessed 25  October  2021]. Other works by Ziegler, including Isle of Love, are in the galleryfoundation bearing his name in Calw, Germany. Bubikopf: Aufbruch in den Zwanzigern. Texte von Frauen, ed. by Anna Rheinsberg (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988); Marianne Kröger, ‘Nelken, Dinah’ auf: Neue Deutsche Biographie,  [accessed 25 October 2021]. Her first Jewish husband, Fritz, perished in Auschwitz. Their son, Peter, previously in the care of Annemarie Wolff-Richter, spent the wartime hiding or in prison. Later, he became a leading GDR Communist official. Interestingly, Nelken’s short novel, Ich and dich, written in Vienna and illustrated by her brother, was published in Nazi Germany in 1938 and became a bestseller, with 220 thousand sold before 1945. A film entitled Eine Frau wie du was made based on the novel in 1939. After a long journey through Italy, Nelken came to Rome, where she worked for the Mondadori publishing house before she returned to Berlin. Her books would be published first in East Germany, and only from 1981 in the West. Dinah Nelken would spend the rest of her life active in the movement Künstler für den Frieden. See Christiana Puschak, ‘Fluchtpunkt Korčula: Dinah Nelken 1900–1989’, in Zwischenwelt: Literatur, Widerstand, Exil (Vienna: Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft. 26. Jg. Heft 3/4, Dez. 2009), pp. 39–40. For the following information, I thank Neven Fazinić, photographer and historian of Korčula.

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walled town of Dubrovnik, and its mild Mediterranean climate and beautiful scenery, had recently been discovered. The one to publicize them the most was one of the rare American Nazi sympathizers, Douglas Chandler, a contributor to the National Geographic Magazine, who in 1933 bought one of the largest and most beautiful houses in the old town. Chandler spent seven years on Korčula with his wife and daughters, enjoying a life of luxury, until he transferred to Berlin in 1940 to become one of the main broadcasters of Nazi propaganda for the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (German State Radio), under the pseudonym Paul Revere, but better known as ‘America’s Lord Haw-Haw’.16 Before becoming a Nazi propagandist, Chandler wrote articles on Yugoslavia in the National Geographic, praising its natural beauties and warm-hearted people. Chandler was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947, but he was released in 1963, and, unrepentant, he moved back to Germany.17 A few wealthy Jewish families also bought villas on the island and moved there or spent time there in the 1930s. Ernest and Stefania Grünwald (who later moved to Brazil) and Giza and Emil Schwarz/Sever (who later fled to Switzerland) owned luxury villas in the Borak (Borgo) area near the port, designed by Zagreb’s most prestigious architect, Baranyi.18 During the war, villa Sever was attached to the hotel Bon Repos, owned by Leo Andreis, which housed Jewish refugees. Other houses in and around Korčula town were bought by Dr Robert Robić (who moved to the US in 1940), Dr Paulina Mahler (US), Dr Richard Strauss (Canada), Dr Schlatzer from Vienna (US) and Croatian painter Maksimilijan Max Vanka with his Jewish wife Margareta Stetten Vanka (left for US in 1935).19 The island was also familiar territory for Yugoslav Jews, who came as visitors or through business (mostly wine).

Nina Strochlitz, ‘The Nazi Who Infiltrated National Geographic’, National Geographic, 27 April 2021. There is more on Chandler and other Americans who worked as Nazi propagandists in ‘Seltsamer Haufe’, Spiegel, 26  February  1949 [accessed 25 October 2021]. Andreja Der Hazarijan Vukić, ‘Arhitektura Aladara Baranyia u Zagrebu’, Život umjetnosti, 56/57 (1995), 28–43. HR-DADU-SCKL-579 Narodni odbor Korčula, Predmet Jevrejska imovina podaci (noncatalogued). Most of the properties were devastated and looted by the Germans, and after the war, the Yugoslav authorities moved in people in need. According to the policy of allowing emigration of Yugoslav Jews to Israel after 1949, all their non-movable property was nationalized, whereas the property of foreign Jews was nationalized by law in 1948. Dr Djuro Arnerić, the local solicitor and politician, also managed the properties of Waldemar Uhrlich, the Neuman family, and Friedrich Glasner, but no details of what happened to them during the war could be traced.

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At odds with the wealthy and/or artistic exiles and visitors in the island’s capital, the port town on the other side of the island, known as Vela Luka (Vallegrande in Italian), was mostly home to poor fishermen and workers in the canned sardine factory, but nevertheless it too saw newcomers motivated by the rise of Nazism. A Hachshara school, preparing the Jewish youth to become fishermen in Palestine, was set up in late 1937 by the Zionist Techelet-Lavan (Blue-White) movement, but it was taken over by the Hashomer Hatzair (the Young Guard) youth, mostly from Sarajevo and Belgrade, who were very close to the Yugoslav Communists.20 Between thirty and forty young men, and a few women, trained there until 1941, learning how to fish, but also many other crafts, such as boat-, barrel-, and rope-making, fish conserving, and so on. Besides Hachshara activists in Vela Luka, a couple of Yugoslav Jews hid on the island as Communists before the war. When the war started, more Jews began to arrive into Vela Luka, especially the relatives or friends of Hachshara fishermen, as the island was easily accessible from the nearby Pelješac peninsula.21 Enrico Josif (1924–2003), a future famous Serbian composer, fled with his family from Belgrade to Dubrovnik and then Split, where already in early summer he got in trouble for his anti-fascist activities with local Jewish youths and had to flee. He escaped to Korčula to hide with his teenage friend Zvonko Letica, son of the island’s dentist and hotelier. Letica would later be essential in connecting the local and Jewish refugee anti-fascist youth.22 Oskar Davičo (1909–1989), a Communist activist and one of the leading writers of Serbian surrealism, fled to Dalmatia immediately upon the Nazi attack and first found himself in Dubrovnik, then Mljet, and eventually ended up in Split, where he was arrested and transferred to Vela Luka on Korčula.23

For more on the fishing school, see Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp.  14–34; the diary of David Maestro, one of the later lodgers on Hachshara premises, O boravku židovskih izbjeglica u Veloj Luki, was translated from Hebrew to Croatian and incorporated into Maričić’s book. See also, Aleksandar Mošić, ‘Jews on Korčula’, in We Survived I, p. 213. Interview with Boris Nemirovski. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1996. Josif’s mother and brother would join him in September in a group sent by the Italian government to island confinement. Interview with Enriko Josif. Oskar Davičo studied in Paris, where he first encountered French Communists, before joining the Yugoslav Communist party upon his return. In Yugoslavia, he was a French high-school teacher, but he was incarcerated for his political activity. After his short stay in Vela Luka, Davičo managed to transfer to Lombardy in Italy, from where he escaped in 1943, and returned to Dalmatia, where he joined the 1st Proletarian Brigade of the Yugoslav Partisans. After the war, Davičo became one of Yugoslavia’s foremost reporters (reporting from the Nuremberg Trials, the Trieste crisis, and the Civil War in Greece) and writers. See Branko Šašić, Znameniti Šapčani i Podrinci (Šabac: Dragan Srnić, 1988).

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Two more foreign writers arrived in the early days, during the turmoil following the Nazi invasion. Fleeing Belgrade after the bombing, in a tumultuous journey which he described as his Anabasis, Franz Theodor Csokor (1885– 1969) arrived after two weeks at the house-atelier of the most famous Yugoslav/ Croatian sculptor, Ivan Meštrović, in the vicinity of Split. The sculptor provided him with contacts on the island, and promised that this was the place to disappear into.24 This was almost not necessary as, once he arrived, Beppo (the carrier from Korčula port) immediately introduced him to the German colony of painters, and soon to some from the circle of mostly Austrian anti-fascist artists that he had previously encountered in Belgrade. The most prominent of them, and with Csokor the most prolific chronicler of the Korčula exile, was Alexander von Sacher-Masoch. Together with his partner Milica, he fled from Belgrade, via Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, an escape abounding in adventure that included travelling dressed as a Muslim and on fake papers.25 During two and a half years on the island, Sacher-Masoch wrote three books about his experiences, which were published after the war – Beppe und Pule: Roman einer Insel, Die Ölgärten brennen, and Plaotina: Geschichten vor einer Dalmatinischen Insel.26 From Vienna and Belgrade exile, Csokor and Sacher-Masoch were met by colleague and fellow anti-fascist Piero Rismondo. Later on, they were joined by the Zagreb intellectuals and leftists the Ehrlich sisters (Vera Stein and Ina Juhn), who were already known on the island as part of Manés Sperber’s circle, described earlier.27 After the war, their camaraderie was described in Viennese leftist magazine Österreichisches Tagebuch, edited by Sacher-Masoch. The writings of Csokor and Sacher-Masoch provide the backbone for this story, in addition to later historical research, interviews, and the memoirs of Meštrović would later be arrested by the Croatian Fascist Ustaša, and only managed to escape to Switzerland with the help of the Vatican. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 118. Cyprian, ‘Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs 1935–1938’, p. 110. Alexander Sacher-Masoch, Beppe und Pule: Roman einer Insel (Vienna: W. Verkauf, 1948). The subtitle says that these stories were written on Korčula between 1941 and 1943. Other parts of his Yugoslavia’s wartime triology are Die Ölgärten brennen (Hamburg/Vienna: Zsolnay, 1956), and Plaotina: Geschichten vor einer Dalmatinischen Insel (Basel: Gute Schriften, 1963). The quotations here are from Alexander Sacher-Masoch, Die Ölgärten brennen, 2nd edn (Mannheim: Persona Verlag, 1994), and the translations Maslinici u plamenu (Split: Književni krug, 2004) and Bepo i Pule (Split: Književni krug, 2009). Vlado Obad, ‘Verbindende Kunst: Erste literarische Kontakte zwischen Kroatien und Österreich nach 1945’, in Germanistik im Kontakt: Tagung österreichischer und kroatischer Germanist/inn/en, ed. by Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, Doris Moser, and Slađan Turković (Zagreb: FF press, 2006), pp. 221–32.

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other survivors. For them, the island’s beautiful Mediterranean landscape offered a canvas for literary, utopian, exotic, or purely aesthetic reverberations. Dinah Nelken described how the exile worked on artists: ‘Then, all of us wrote, the expelled poets and thinkers, deprived of their former reality and in the search of that un-reality, where the hope replaced the present with future.’28 In their novels, the exile obtained an additional, higher literary value, transcending its individual paradigmatic experience, as they used literature or art to come to terms with what was happening to them and to the world as they knew it. The self-understanding of the biographical in their fictional texts represents a typical topos of exile literature as they internalized their individual experiences in an aesthetic form. A mixture of autobiographical, biographical, and merely fictional (the use of alter ego), these works were written during the exile, and published immediately or soon after the war, whereas the historical works or memoirs were written, and interviews conducted, half a century later, adding another layer of questions about the hierarchy and validity of sources. This chapter will use them interchangeably in order to draw as detailed a picture as possible. Often dismissed, these fictional texts offer unique insights that other historical sources and testimonies do not provide. One example is how Sacher-Masoch witnessed the occupation by the Italian Army, and described it as a rather comical affair compared to the German Army’s murderous bombing of Belgrade, which he had experienced. The Italians arrived with three tanks that looked like toys or cans, and attempted a mini-parade in the main square, watched by most of the inhabitants and the few exiles already on the island. But one of their Lilliputian tanks broke, making the sound of an alarm clock breaking down. The driver got out, yelled ‘Madonna mia’, and began to punch it. Then he just spat at his tank, abandoned it, and joined the other soldiers who went for wine in the local tavern called the Pigeon.29 While a few Jews and anti-fascists came to Korčula to hide (or because of some earlier connections), the bulk of Jewish refugees ended up in Split, which was the biggest city in the part of Dalmatia annexed by Italy by the agreement signed by Mussolini and the Ustaša leader Pavelić on 21  May  1941. Among the thousands of newcomers, most were from the Yugoslav cities of Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo, but there were also many from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, who had been on the run for several years now. By the late summer, hundreds of refugees were sleeping on the floor of the Jewish cultural centre, ‘Yarden’, where they were also subject to an attack by the Italian Fascist ‘Blackshirts’. Supplies and order were difficult to maintain, Puschak, ‘Fluchtpunkt Korčula: Dinah Nelken 1900–1989’, p. 39. Sacher-Masoch, Maslinici u plamenu, pp. 28–29.

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and the Italian Questura (police) became concerned about the large number of Jewish (and other) refugees in the politically volatile city of Split. Eventually, the Italian authorities, like the Yugoslav ones before them, decided to dispatch them from the city. From September to December 1941, hundreds of refugees who had no means or connections to stay in Split, or to go to Italy, were sent to remote islands or Italian-occupied Albania. Of all islands, most were sent to Korčula, which was a fully annexed Italian territory, with four hundred being sent to Korčula town, and around three hundred to Vela Luka, greatly increasing the number of Jews who had already found shelter there.30 Others found their way independently. In Zagreb, Dalmatians selling papers on the black market, known as macher(s), could secure access to Korčula island, as word soon spread that it was a safe haven for Jews.31 Csokor wrote in autumn 1941 that there were eight hundred refugees on the island, almost all Jews, save for ten Catholics, usually spouses.32 According to Aleksandar Mošić, a young Jew who left a detailed reconstruction of his escape from Belgrade, via Sarajevo to Split, the idea of island confinement came from Korčula Bon Repos hotel proprietor, Leo Andreis, who obtained the approval of the Italian municipal administration and insured that residence tax was paid, as was customary in tourist destinations.33 Arriving in Korčula from September 1941, the Jews sent from Split initially did not know whether the island would be their Elba or their Saint Helena, as Csokor wondered. For many, the remoteness of the island was a punishment, and the Italian authorities certainly used it in this way to remove the poor and the Communists from Split and Dubrovnik. The particularities of selection of destitute young single men sent to the poor port of Vela Luka, in addition to previous settlement of young Hachshara activists and Communists, would later account for the fact that many of them joined the Partisans. The Jewish refugees sent to Korčula, like elsewhere in territories annexed or occupied by Italy, obtained the status of ‘confined’, which permitted free movement only in the place of residence. At the same time, it provided basic food provision, with monthly coupons distributed by the Italian authorities. Some refugees were housed in former hotels, while others stayed with friends or rented from locals with extra living space. The Italian Jewish Aid Agency DELASEM from Genoa Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 36–41. The Schlesingers bought theirs in December 1941 from a blond Dalmatian macher, and travelled to Rijeka and then onwards to Korčula by boat, as told by Suvin, ‘Slatki dani, strašni dani Iz Memoara jednog skojevca, dio 1’, Gordogan, p. 53. Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 302. According to Hoppe in the Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia, there were 740 interned. Mošić, ‘Jews on Korčula’, pp. 208–22.

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also sent money for the refugees on behalf of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy via the Jewish Community of Split. It funded accommodation for the poorest, and a tax was introduced for the richer, so that all refugees could survive and thrive. This solidarity was enforced and extended to Gentiles too, such as the prominent anti-fascist refugees mentioned. Furthermore, a sort of cooperative was established by two Yugoslav Jews who managed the hotel Bon Repos, where more than a hundred wealthy refugees initially stayed, while around twenty youngsters with no money were allowed to live there in return for work in the hotel kitchen or cutting wood, washing up, carrying water, and so on. When, by the end of 1941, around one hundred mostly wealthy refugees from both towns were transferred to Modena, Italy, the situation worsened for the remaining five hundred, most of whom were poor.34 These numbers exclude those who were on the island before the Italian annexation, but who were equally if not more vulnerable. In Vela Luka, the wealthier among the refugees stayed in the two small hotels, Istra (Ashkenazi) and Šantić (Sephardi), while others stayed in the Hachshara fishing school or mostly with locals, paying a small rent or helping with household chores, fishing, and grape and olive harvesting. The Hachshara house, with a canteen and a fishing boat, became a valuable asset for the refugees, as the Hachshara activities had to cease with the influx of so many refugees. The young people organized the first canteen on its premises, which was not supervised by the Italians as was the one in Korčula town. The hall was also used for public celebrations and events. Tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters found work easily; teachers and bookkeepers instructed privately or held courses. There were also classes in Italian and English organized among the refugees themselves. The celebrated writers lived in the same conditions as others, and they gave classes in art and history to refugee children, and lent their books to other refugees. Young Eva Fischer (1920–2015), who escaped from Belgrade after her father Rabbi Leopold was deported, drew portraits for people. She would later become a famous Italian artist.35 Marcel and Tilda Kalef ran a shop.36 Sacher-Masoch worked in the local shipyard from autumn 1942, and had to give up writing completely.37 Some joined locals in cutting wood and fishing. One of the destitute refugees, Moric Danon, in his recollections published in 1975, wrote how he accepted any job as porter, carrier, waiter, Majer Altarac and Eli Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci u Korčuli i njihovo učešće u NOP’, in Sjećanja jedne generacije: grad Korčula, 1900–1946 ed. by Zvonko Letica (Korčula: Gradski odbor udruženja boraca narodnooslobodilačkog rata Korčula, 1990), 776–82, (p. 777). Interview with Eva Fischer. I campi fascisti Dalle guerre in Africa alla Repubblica di Salò. Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 45–47. Cyprian, ‘Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs’, p. 111.

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wall painter, beach guard, and servant to wealthy refugee families, refusing any financial help from the Refugee Committee.38 Like Moric, after a year in hotels or private accommodation, many were left without funds, but they continued to stay free of charge or for a little help with whatever works were required. Nevertheless, there was a clear social division between those able to maintain themselves and those forced to work and survive by the aid and meals in the canteens. The main reason people quarrelled was food, or rather the lack of it. Digestive systems, weakened by years of eating very little, could not take it, and many recount suffering from upset stomachs and the like. As there was nothing to do, people showed exaggerated interest in food.39 Naturally, differences arose as to who could afford to buy extra food and who were able to bring and use some of their wealth. Olga Njemirovski wrote about Czechoslovak Jewish refugees who carried with them valuable collections of stamps, which, as she explained, weighed very little and took up little space, but which helped them to live during those trying times, just as we saw they helped Pollatschek in his pre-war internment in Derventa.40 Others turned to smuggling olive oil from the island to Split, each time they obtained a permission to travel.41 The Sarajevo Jew Heinrich Levi, who spoke Italian, was appointed as the representative of the refugee community in Korčula town.42 In Vela Luka, Josef Maestro, another refugee from Sarajevo, was chosen to represent its initially three hundred strong refugee community, which organized itself in the socalled Comitato per l’assistenza agli emigranti ebrei di Vallegrande, and which maintained links with the Jewish Community of Split and DELASEM. Avram Papo oversaw the community kitchen at the Hachshara premises in Vela Luka. In both towns, the Jewish children were schooled by their own teachers according to the old Yugoslav syllabus, and were prepared for taking examinations in Split, which was also financed and praised by DELASEM.43 These visits to Split were rare escapes from the monotony of the island for schoolchildren and for their parents, who were allowed to escort them. Some Korčula refugee students did rather well, such as Darko Suvin (Šlesinger), who later became a Moric Danon, Mali čovjek u velikom ratu (Zagreb: Grafički srednjoškolski centar, 1975). After fleeing to Italy, Moric joined the Partisans and returned to fight in Yugoslavia. After the war, Moric studied, and eventually joined the Croatian national theatre in Zagreb as dramatist and director. Njemirovski, The Holocaust and the Jews of Yugoslavia, p. 33. Ibid., p. 25. Interview with Boris Nemirovski. Mošić, ‘Jews on Korčula’, p. 214. Levi replaced Angelo Farhi who, among others, was moved to internment in Italy. Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 44–45.

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prolific author, critic, and professor at McGill University. Others complained about the cultural life, which was not as developed as in Kraljevica camp, and about the fact that the refugees only managed to run elementary and lower high school.44 But, schooling was an additional burden on the community, and on the aid money they were receiving. As the war progressed and the number of refugees grew, DELASEM found it increasingly difficult to provide adequate funding. Its president, Lelio Vittorio Valobra, repeatedly wrote to Split Jewish Community president Viktor Morpurgo asking them to rely on local means or to ask the wealthier refugees to share what they had.45 An additional deficiency for refugees settled in Vela Luka was that they were getting less food provision from the Italian government, as Vela Luka was considered a rural area, where a different regime of coupons applied. Initially, the Italian authorities were friendly and helpful, and they even made sure to remove any anti-Semitic signs that fascist sympathizers had previously placed in island tavernas.46 Later on, when the Italians banned all fishing boats to prevent the Partisans making connections, the Vela Luka Hachshara’s boat was exempted. Thus, the Hachshara youngsters could ferry people from one side of the bay to the other, and earn money to keep up the canteen. The Germans could only observe and photograph the island and its dwellers, including the refugees, from aboard their passing ships. In the records of some of the refugees, exile on the island under the Italian administration until its capitulation offered paradise-like conditions compared to that on the continent.47 ‘We were very fortunate to be there’, stressed Joy Levi Alkalay.48 Sacher-Masoch also wrote to his parents that it was so peaceful on the island that one slowly became human again.49 The first two years, the favourite pastime was swimming in the sea and enjoying the beaches until late October, as Csokor described. Central European Jews invented the Adriatic Sea as a tourist resort, and were the first to actually advocate and enjoy the benefits of sea water and swimming.50 They watched the locals in the traditional Moreška Propusnica za koncentracijski logor Kraljevica, pp. 201–09. Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 51–53. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 125. Alexader Fredi Mošić, ‘Erinnerungen – verfasst im Mai 2007 in Belgrad’, Zwischenwelt, Vol. 27/4 (2011), 44–49. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, pp. 104–12 (p. 108). Cyprian, ‘Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs’, p. 110. While there were visitors before, hardly anyone swam in the sea before the 1930s. The biggest advocate was a Hungarian Jewish doctor, Balázs Győző from Pecs, who campaigned on behalf of Hungarian Jews to continue coming to Yugoslavia after the Anschluss of Austria and the visa restrictions introduced in 1938. Győző wrote over two hundred articles and gave over fifty lectures in the 1930s advocating the benefits of sea bathing and

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sword dance and Lent processions, and they took part in grape and olive harvesting and wine pressing. Besides social divisions, the most pronounced difference between the refugees was their backgrounds. Those from Yugoslavia differed from German, Austrian, or Czech refugees in how they dressed, in their moral codes and customs, and especially in their political persuasions, ranging from pious to very liberal, from Communists to Zionists, to proud members of their purported nations. Both Sacher-Masoch and Csokor were especially delighted with what they described as Spaniards, or Sephardic Jews from Serbia and Bosnia, big families such as Altarac, Almuli, Alkalaj, Demajo, Montiljo, Poljukan, and others.51 Interestingly, their songs from Granada, rituals, and colourful dresses, and especially their ‘royal’ attitude, as Csokor admits, impressed much less their central European Ashkenazi co-religionists.52 Music was, however, very important to all, as described by Csokor: We have been quarrelling about everything and found peace only in songs, in the songs of all the countries from which we have gathered here; Sephardic among them, old Castilian from the Spanish fatherland, which the Spanish-speaking ancestors of some of us left half a millennium ago.53

Among the musicians in exile and performing in Korčula was Bruno Bjelinski, born in 1909 as Bruno Weiss into a Jewish family in Trieste. After obtaining a doctorate in law at the University of Zagreb, Bjelinski studied music and started composing in the 1930s. Evacuated in 1943, he later returned to join the Partisans, and became the foremost composer of Partisan songs.54 Others were the accordionist Samuel Čačkez from Mostar (later a schlager and operetta artist in Israel and New York), the bass baritone Makso Savin (Max Schön, later a soloist in Belgrade and at the Sarajevo Opera), and the tenor Zvonko Glück from Croatia.55 From Zagreb also came the jazz musician Miroslav (Fred) Schiller.56 tourism. His friendship with the Yugoslav prime minister, Dragiša Cvetković, to whom he wrote directly, enabled Hungarian Jews to visit the Adriatic coast until the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. AJ, MUP 14, 922–925. Among them was the most prominent Sephardi author and translator from Sarajevo, Haim (Jaime) Alkalaj (1912–1969). See Haim Alkalaj, Izabrana djela, ed. by Vojislav Maksimović (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1984). Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 126. Ibid., p. 215. Zdenka Weber, ‘Bruno Bjelinski, hrvatski skladatelj europskih obzora’, Kolo, 3–4 (2009). Mošić, ‘Jews on Korčula’, p. 217. For Schiller, see [accessed 25 October 2021].

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Among those who performed in Korčula first was the young Flory Jagoda, who later became a legendary Ladino singer. She was born Flora Kabiljo to a musical Bosnian Jewish family in 1923. Flory grew up in her birthplace of Sarajevo and the town of Vlasenica, where her family originated. After the Nazi invasion and the incorporation of Bosnia into the Croatian Ustaša state, most of the Kabiljo family was rounded up and murdered, except for seventeen-year-old Flory and her parents, who escaped from Bosnia to Dalmatia separately, but who were reunited on the island of Korčula.57 Initially, with all radios confiscated, the refugees spent time in blissful ignorance of what was happening on the continent, and especially what their children, parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins who had stayed behind were facing. When the postal service was established, and letters from neutral Switzerland or the US began to arrive via Split, these daily boats became the biggest event, and crowds gathered for pieces of news that arrived on their isolated Adriatic shelter after undergoing censorship by a number of authorities. As is evident from novels, letters, memoirs, and interviews, the news about the extermination of Jews, or the lack of news from loved ones, caused much more pain than any form of destitution. Among those interned were Maximilian (Max) Kandt, previously a prominent Yugoslav/Austrian journalist, with his son Rudolf. However, Maximilian’s wife, Regina, and Rudolf’s wife, Eva, and son, Alexander, remained in Belgrade. Regina’s last letter to her husband and son before the three of them were incarcerated and executed in a gas van alongside Belgrade Jewish women, children, and elderly people, reached them only after the war ended. Although written in November 1941, before the Final Solution was thought to be agreed, Regina was very much aware of what was awaiting them.58 In 1942, the news about deportations in Croatia and Bosnia spread

After the evacuation to Italy, Flory met and married American GI Harry Jagoda, and moved with him to northern Virginia in 1946. Eventually, Flora Jagoda dedicated her life to preserving her family’s cultural legacy through their Sephardic music in Ladino, the language of Jews from Spain and Portugal. A film about her life, The Key from Spain: The Songs and Stories of Flora Jagoda, appeared in 2000. For more on Flora Jagoda, see Harriet Freidenreich, ‘Yugoslavia’, in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, ed. by Paula Hyman and Dalia Ofer. For the testimony of Flory Jagoda, see [accessed 25 October 2021]. The letter is now displayed in Yad Vashem, in the collection of last letters from the Holocaust. https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/last-letters/1941/kandt.asp [accessed 25 October 2021]. Max and Regina’s middle son, Fredi, immigrated to Palestine in 1935, while their youngest son, Reuven Dafni, immigrated in 1936, and was later one of the parachutists serving in the British Army who were dropped into Yugoslavia in spring 1944 in order to rescue Jews, about which more in the last chapter.

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quickly and reached the island.59 Postcards arrived saying ‘They are coming for us and this the last time I can write to you.’60 Then, a card or two would arrive from a camp, after which there was silence. The elderly brooded over the silence, and easily fell into depression. A survivor from Jasenovac, released upon the intervention of Zagreb Mayor Werner, and who eventually landed on the nearby island of Hvar, brought the news of the horror of the deportations of Zagreb male Jews to Jasenovac, and women and children to Đakovo in January 1942, as recorded by Csokor. He learnt how his two Viennese friends, Ilse and Grete, hanged themselves on a window latch in the pension where they were staying before they were to be deported. They wore long dresses, and those who saw them thought that they were only standing together by the window.61 Among those deported were three Bulgarian merchants who were stuck in Zagreb when the war started, and a seventy-eight-year-old textile merchant from Graz, Simon Rendi, who went mad on encountering the horrors of the camp, and was thus shot immediately upon his arrival. Soon after, all other elderly Zagreb Jews were murdered, usually by being hit by a mallet.62 Even more terrifying was the tragic fate of children and women in Đakovo camp, many of whom were from Bosnia. DELASEM transferred letters from worried relatives from faraway places to Korčula and throughout Dalmatia. Among the news that reached the island was also that about Marko Leitner, the renowned Osijek lawyer, and Sacher-Masoch’s father-in-law, who had been decorated with the Theresia’s Cross for bravery during the First World War. Leitner (Dr Markus Feldmann in Sacher-Masoch’s novel) had stayed behind, and ran the Jewish Community of Osijek. Thanks to his connections, he saved many fellow Jews, but he was deported himself to Auschwitz and murdered in 1943. Sacher-Masoch’s fictional account of Leitner’s fate in Ustaša-governed Osijek, based on hearsay and fragmentary news reaching the island, remains the only, albeit a literary, monument to this brave lawyer and his actions during the war.63 As the news from the continent could only offer a tragic and fragmentary picture, the exiles spent endless hours debating the war, its outcome, and their fate, usually alongside their favourite pastime of playing cards. In the winter Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 42, 60–62. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, pp. 104–12, (p. 108). Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 301. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, pp. 30–135. Simon (Rosenbaum) Rendi (1864–c.1942), the founder of B’nai B’rith in Graz, once the president of Graz Jewish community, the owner of one of the biggest department stores before aryanisation, his arrest, and eventual escape to Zagreb. The story appears in the second half of his novel, Die Ölgärten brennen.

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months, people in Korčula town would usually gather at Sacher-Masoch and Milica Leitner’s old house in the centre to listen to Csokor’s lectures on art history held in German, but they would switch to discussing the war, where to go, and what to do to stop the Nazis if they could, long after the lecture was over.64 The German-speaking refugees were caught in the paradox of being the victims, while speaking the same language as their hunters and murderers. Sacher-Masoch describes having to give German lessons to a young Italian man who was impressed by Nazi power and racial theories.65 Yet, those most struck by the paradox were the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Jewish war veterans. Chased by their much-idealized Heimat, and sometimes by their own erstwhile comrades, they found themselves at the mercy of their former Great War enemies – the Italians. As in the rest of Italian-held Dalmatia throughout 1942 and 1943, most refugees wanted to move to Italy proper, which offered far better living conditions and opportunities to travel further. The Hirschler, Neumann, Salom, Fischer, and Heršković families succeeded, after protracted appeals and negotiations. Many others failed, while some managed only to get transferred from Vela Luka to Korčula town or to Split, both of which boasted better connections and opportunities. Archival evidence abounds in letters and disputes about DELASEM support, over who is entitled to how much, or to sponsorship to go to Italy. Dealing with it might produce irrelevant results, as the fact remains that almost all refugees on Korčula survived thanks to Italian authorities, DELASEM support, and the warm welcome from the Korčulaites. There were only three deaths from natural causes and three births; there were also three weddings, performed by a rabbi from Split.66 All the locals would come to watch the marriage in the Jewish rite, with bride and groom under a chuppah. Archives also contain a number of conversion requests, but it remains unclear whether they ever took place, and it certainly made no difference to the destinies of the refugees in the Italian zone. Yet despite the apparent idyllic exile, troubles were also brewing on the island. Soon after arrival, the European and Yugoslav Jews were caught up in Korčula’s political tensions. In the interwar period, many islanders, like most of Southern Dalmatia, initially espoused the centralized and unitary Yugoslav

Cyprian, ‘Die Exilzeit Alexander Sacher-Masochs’, p. 110. Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 302. Sacher-Masoch, Die Ölgärten brennen, p. 79. In Vela Luka, Boris Nemirovski married Melita Gross, and Oscar Rössler married Anita Bischitz, Maričić, Luka Spasa, p.  77; Joy Levi (1920–2014), refugee from Vienna, met and married Yugoslav refugee Joe Alkala(y)j, and the couple eventually fled via Italy to Portland, Oregon, where they later became well-known benefactors of the Jewish community; (Testimony of) ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’ in Voices from the Holocaust, pp. 104–12 (p. 108).

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monarchy.67 Later on, the opposition Croatian Peasant party also took hold. Once the Italian army occupied and annexed the island, there were some attempts at resistance under the umbrella of the Yugoslav government in exile. Yet this soon ended in disappointment when mostly Serbian Četniks, who from December 1941 were recognized as the official Yugoslav monarchist forces, began collaborating with the Italians elsewhere in Dalmatia. Namely, the Serbian Četniks in Dalmatia gathered mostly in response to Ustaša massacres, and soon after engaged in acts of revenge against Croat and Muslim villagers, while collaborating with the Italians, who used them to fence off the Ustaša.68 In January 1942, a British submarine with two agents of the Yugoslav government on board attempted an action to supply weapons to Korčula, which failed, as the former mayor and leader of the Yugoslav monarchists on the island, Dr Juraj (Đura) Arneri(ć), deemed armed uprising too risky, and Četnik collaboration with the Italians too compromising.69 As the monarchists and Četniks ceased to be an option for the Croatian inhabitants of the island, the local elites vacillated between the Italian annexation authorities and the emerging Communist-led Partisans, who took the lead against what was legitimately perceived as foreign occupation and Italian assimilationism. With their vision of a new socialist Yugoslavia, where all ethnic groups would be equal, and all foreign influence and interference removed, the Partisans were gradually gaining support, but also enemies, throughout the country. The conflict between the various movements in Korčula was not as severe as elsewhere. Nevertheless, Csokor saw early on the dangers of this conflict and impending civil war in Yugoslavia. In a letter to a Polish friend, he deemed the reconciliation between monarchists and Partisans to be impossible, and compared it to an impossible alliance between the Polish Underground and Soviet Red Armies.70 Compared to the rest of occupied and dismembered Yugoslavia, the island was unusually quiet until relatively late, with ‘laugher and singing’, as Csokor described it before the war began to tighten its belt around those stranded there. But in early 1942, the Partisans gave up any cooperation with the Tonko Barčot, ‘Jugonacionalisti na otoku Korčuli’, Radovi Zavoda povijesnih znanosti HAZU u Zadru, 49/2007, pp. 691–720. For more on the Četniks, see Jozo Tomashevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941– 1945: The Chetniks. Zvonko Letica, Misija ‘Henna’, Godišnjak grada Korčule 7 (2002), 341–94. Arneri and his daughter Marinka were remembered as assisting refugee Jews to reach Italy. Bonka Davičo, ‘Bili smo brži od smrti’, Mi smo preživeli  …: Jevreji o Holokaustu, 2 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2003), pp. 351–55. Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 305.

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Yugoslav nationalists and began armed attacks against the Italians. Similarly, if not more, cruel, was the way the Partisans treated their potential competitors, killing several of them in a scenario played out elsewhere in the country, thereby creating conditions for an anti-fascist uprising, but also for civil war against non-Communists. In late 1942 and the first six months of 1943, the situation in Korčula confirmed the fears of the Jewish refugees in Split for whom the internment there was not only a banishment to isolation and destitution, but was also fraught with dangers because of Partisan activities – the reason that they tried everything they could to remain in Split or go to Italy.71 Former Hachshara members, and other mostly Sephardi youths from Sarajevo in Vela Luka, had already established links with local Partisans during 1942.72 Mirko Rosenberg, a student originally from Osijek and interned in Vela Luka, was the first to join the Partisans in June 1942, and he later became a fighter in the celebrated First Proletarian Brigade.73 Đuro Engl Pavlović, another pre-war Communist in Vela Luka, also joined the Partisans that summer, and later became the commander of the Biokovo Partisan platoon and one of the Commanders of the XXVI Dalmatian Brigade.74 Alarmed by these defections, and the continuous disputes between poor and rich refugees, in September 1942, a delegation of DELASEM, made up of its president, lawyer Lelio Vittorio Valobra, and E. Luzzatto, came to Split to inspect aid distribution and the conditions in which refugees lived, especially since Split was still home to a hundred and thirty, whom they fully maintained. They also visited Vela Luka and Korčula town, as DELASEM at that time directly maintained around a hundred and seventy refugees with no means in Vela Luka, and around seventy in Korčula. In their meetings at the highest levels with the governor of Dalmatia and the Split police prefect, Valobra and Luzzatto intervened for smoother administrative processing of requests for transfers to Italy, and measures that would ease and lessen the costs of aid delivery.75 By that time, not only was food scarce, but the wear and tear and constant washing of few items of clothing meant that many were desperate for clothes and shoes. In January  1943, thirty-five young men living in Vela Luka’s former Hachshara wrote to DELASEM in Genoa detailing their total destitution. The number dependent on DELASEM aid was constantly on the rise. By February 1943, DELASEM reported fully supporting two hundred refugees As testified by Sara Raisky in her memoir, La matassa, p. 138. Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci’, p. 778. Ivan Barčot, Od Korčule do Sutjeske (Split: Izdavački centar, 1980), p. 145. After the war, Rosenberg emigrated to Israel. Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci’, p. 779. Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 85–87.

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in Split, three hundred in Vela Luka, two hundred in Korčula, two hundred on the island of Hvar, and one hundred on Brač.76 Because of malnutrition, new diseases began to appear. Further appeals were made to all nineteen Jewish Communities in Italy, and Jews in Split made additional collections of money, clothing, and other items. Donations were sought directly from wealthy Jews, and many donations came from Florence, Milan, Verona, Genoa, Parma, and Livorno, but also from the many refugees from Yugoslavia who had settled in Italy. The biggest donors remained the Stock and Morpurgo families from Trieste, both related to the Morpurgos in Split. A full record of all donations and how they were spent (mostly for canteens, monthly support to the destitute, and medication) is preserved to the last Italian lira. HeChalutz, a Jewish youth movement that prepared volunteers to Aliyah to Palestine, and which was already maintaining sixty mostly German refugee teenagers rescued from Zagreb to Nonantola, near Modena in Italy, also sent money in 1943, but the Vela Luka Hachshara was by then empty, and most of its members and other Jewish youths joined the Partisan resistance instead.77 Out of thirty-five Jewish refugees who resided in the former fishing Hachshara in Vela Luka, four of whom were there already before the war, and who signed a letter to DELASEM, fourteen young men and one woman joined the Partisan resistance in February 1943. While they were all sympathizers with the Communist party or members of the leftist Jewish Hashomer Hazair, their total destitution also played a role in their decision, as recorded by David Maestro, and Majer and Eli Altarac.78 On the other hand, the sympathy of Sarajevo Jews with the Communist Party was almost universal, so that even youths from the most affluent and respectable families considered Sephardi aristocracy, such as Danon and Salom, joined Partisan ranks.79 Twelve out of the fifteen would die fighting as Partisans in Yugoslavia in the next two years. Immediately the Italians arrested the remaining young men in Vela Luka and transported them to prison in Korčula town, severely beating them along the way. Eventually, they were released and placed in Bon Repos, where the canteen was under strict surveillance.80 As the news spread, the commander The official Italian count of the interned was 534, which by the capitulation of Italy had fallen to 506. Hoppe, ‘Kurzola Island’, p. 546. For the Jewish exile experience on the island of Hvar see Mara Kraus, Der talentierte Herr Ginić: eine Familie überlebt den Holocaust (Weitra: Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, 2017). The full correspondence is in Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 97–111. Maestro in Maričić, Luka Spasa; Majer Altarac and Eli Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci’. Samokovlija, Dolar dnevno, pp. 28–30. Following the capitulation of Italy and evacuation of refugees to Italy, most of these young men decided to return and join the Partisan forces. Many of them would die in

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of the Italian 6th Army Corps, Paride Negri, alarmed the higher command, writing to the Governor of Dalmatia in Zadar about the turmoil in Korčula, claiming that Communist propaganda was supported by around four hundred Jews who were freely interned on the island, and thus moving around. For reasons of security, and undermining Communist activity, the Commander demanded that all Jews be interned in a concentration camp, and suggested the hotel Savoia and other isolated buildings for that purpose. Nevertheless, Negri requested that humanitarian conditions were met, enabling Jews to live together in proper sanitary conditions, and with food and water supply. At the same time, the Commander was well aware that the island of Korčula could not provide a storage facility for a concentration camp in terms of food and sanitary provisions, so he asked for the Jews to be transported elsewhere.81 At that time, there were already more than three thousand refugee Jews interned from Kraljevica to Dubrovnik, and eventually on the island of Rab. Eventually, those in Korčula were spared, as the island was considered to be a safe Italian territory. Apart from young Hachshara activists, most of the other refugees remained silent witnesses of the dramatic events around them, which soon engulfed them, even if not as the key protagonists. According to Suvin, the refugees knew little about the Partisans, except for the fact that one of their leaders was a fellow Jew, Moše Pijade. Their source of information was Radio London, which until 1943 reported little on Yugoslav resistance.82 Yet, as the Partisan actions intensified, the Italian forces turned to hostage taking and executions. At the end of March 1943, after an act of sabotage by the Partisans, Italians took six hostages in the village of Lumbarda, including the sculptor Ivo Lozica, a disciple of Ivo Meštrović and creator of voluminous sculptures of peasants and fishermen. Then, on 26 March, a woman informer was shot, and her daughter severely hurt. In the evening, the Partisans set fires throughout the island to commemorate the momentous demonstration of Belgrade and Yugoslavia rejecting the pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy two years before. The Italian lieutenant decided to kill the hostages to prevent further incidents.

the last couple of years of the war, as recalled by one of the survivors, Moric Danon from Zenica, who dedicated a short play and an anthology of poems published after the war to the bravery and anti-fascism of his friends. See Moric Danon, Otok na pučini (Zagreb: Novo pokoljenje, 1951) and Stihovi s velikog puta (Zagreb: the author, 1952). The original letter in Italian published in NOB u Dalmaciji 1941–1945: Zbornik dokumenata knjiga 5 (February–March 1943) (Split: Institut za historiju Radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1983), p. 477. Suvin, ‘Slatki dani, strašni dani: Iz Memoara jednog skojevca, dio 3’, Gordogan, pp. 129–30.

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In Lumbarda, as Csokor reported, a village priest, Pavo, and an island doctor, Pansini, begged the Italian commanders to no avail, and four out of the six were executed in front of all the villagers on the same spot as a woman the day before. We are left with Csokor’s poignant and terrifying description of Lozica ‘throwing last look on his hands which burned from unfinished works’.83 Gunfire was replaced by the unbearable cries of the pregnant wife of one of the executed innocents, who was silenced only hours later by tumultuous rain that lasted for the next two days. It was the beginning of a deadly spiral of attacks and counterattacks, executions and retaliations that would frighten all on the island for the next four months. In early June, Viktor Morpurgo and two other officials from Split visited the refugees in Vela Luka again, amid heightened tensions and in a desperate attempt to confirm the authority of the Refugee Committee and its representation with the Italian authorities. Morpurgo also met with tenente (lieutenant) Giuseppe Gaetano of the carabinieri, reassuring him of the loyalty of the refugees. Sacher-Masoch left a rather warm portrait of tenente Gaetano, who had promised to protect the refugees as long as they stayed loyal.84 Yet, only days later, a tragedy happened in June when Partisans attacked an Italian truck on the road to Vela Luka and killed seven carabinieri, who, according to Csokor, only the night before had sung Bandiera Rossa, and not some fascist song. Italian troops retaliated, and arrested and shot ten locals and three youngsters from the Vela Luka Hachshara group (Isak Kabiljo, Leon Romano, and Abram Romano, all three from Sarajevo) between 22 and 25 June 1943.85 The retaliation was conducted by Gaetano, and the only guilt of those executed lay in being family relations to those who had joined the Partisans. Both Gaetano and the captain of the carabinieri, Alfredo Roncoroni, were after the war accused by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but they remained in the best memory of Jewish refugee survivors.86 Further unrest was prevented by the fall of Mussolini at the end of July 1943. Like the rest of the island, the exiled artist Csokor celebrated with Rolf, his sister Dinah Nelken, her partner Heinrich, Sacher-Masoch and his wife (and his three black cats and a dog), a blond lawyer from Berlin and another man from Vienna.87 Dinah Nelken, her brother and her partner Heinrich Ohlenmacher

Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, pp. 221–30 (p. 227). Sacher-Masoch, Maslinici u plamenu, p. 41. Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 117–19. Interview with Paul Arnstein, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1997. The accused were never extradited, and no trial ever took place. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 170.

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managed to move to Italy soon after, invited by the publisher Mondadori.88 For others, celebrations were replaced by worries, as Morpurgo and other Jewish officials from both Split and Trieste, DELASEM leaders from Genoa, and the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Dante Almansi, pressed to resolve the situation of the other Korčula Jews, either by evacuating them to the mainland or by improving their legal status and aid provisions. Korčula internee Haim Alkalaj was to travel to Rome to directly deliver the demands of his fellow refugees. Despite the hard work of the Italian Jewish representatives, nothing could be done before Italy capitulated on 8 September 1943. After some skirmishes with the Partisans, Italian soldiers were allowed to evacuate the island under the condition of leaving all their weaponry, munitions, and provisions. The Jewish refugees, like the rest of the island’s population, wholeheartedly supported the Partisan takeover, but they came to the pier eager to get away with the Italians. This turned out to be impossible, except for a very few.89 Instead, most refugees remained and helped with the locals to organize the newly emerging Partisan regime. Sacher-Masoch was in charge of wall newspapers. Even some Italian soldiers decided to stay and join the Partisans. There was a demonstration at which the widows of two executed Jews also spoke. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that the Germans were advancing to recapture the islands, and the Jewish refugees presented the Partisans with a plea for evacuation to the island of Vis, which housed Partisan headquarters, and further to Southern Italy, which would eventually spare them from the subsequent German occupation and terrible bloodshed on the island.90 After some deliberation, they were allowed to leave, with the sick and old going first. Sacher-Masoch described what happened when the boat was supposed to take the sick, old, and wounded to Vis and further to Bari: […] besides those who in the Commander’s opinion were supposed to sail to safety there were many who were neither sick nor old but just faster and cleverer than the others. There was a lot of injustice. Families set apart who had suffered for so many years together and were now separated without knowing whether they would ever see each other again.91

Heuss, Mit dem Kinderheim auf der Flucht, p. 228. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, pp. 104–12 (p. 109). Maričić, Luka Spasa, pp. 127–37. Sacher-Masoch, Die Ölgärten brennen, p. 112.

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Only one suitcase was allowed per person, and intense trade-offs took place between the haves and have nots. Finally, a ship for evacuation was found. Sacher-Masoch described the departure of the first: The ship called Swallow was made to fit a hundred passengers. On that night there were two hundred and eighty on board. Lying, standing, crouching and kneeling next to and over each other; in the hold, on the deck, in the only rescue boat; holding onto the masts; stepping, kicking and cursing each other and much worse as there was no space whatsoever between their squeezed bodies.92

These scenes, all too familiar from the 2015 Mediterranean refugee boat disasters, also exposed the ugly dimension of flight. As the refugees were embarking on the small boat taking them away from Korčula, their possessions were meagre. The rich were those who, after all the travels and accidents during years of flight, possessed more than the one set of clothes that they were wearing. Sometimes, these last items of clothing were tuxedo trousers and, as recalled by Sacher-Masoch, they provoked envy as they always had done. One passenger, a certain Montillo, had his trousers torn on a spike of the type that the boats were full of, causing a yet more tragicomic situation because this ‘accident’ happened during a life-saving journey, and besides, no one had ever been seen to travel on these decrepit boats in fancy outfits. What happened next was an ugly conflict over borrowed trousers, bringing the worst out of people in the worst of situations.93 One group arrived in a part of Italy still under German occupation, and they had to rely on another fishing boat offering to take them to Bari if they could pay with gold, as recalled by Joy Levi: ‘We didn’t have any money at all so we watched the people get on the boat; even some who we thought were our friends just dropped us when we needed their help.’94 Back on the island, the Partisans and the locals were ritually destroying the Venetian stone lions on churches and public buildings.95 No arguments of art historians were listened to. Despite their clear sympathies for the Partisan anti-fascist resistance, Csokor and Sacher-Masoch disapproved of, and opposed, these actions. Csokor tried to enlist help from the popular friar Vid from nearby Badija island, who discarded his religious habit and instead participated in Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 125. ‘Joy Levi Alkalay’, in Voices from the Holocaust, pp. 104–12 (p. 110). Numerous lion statues were vandalized and sometimes destroyed, having been previously instrumentalized by Italian fascists, who exploited the traditional Italian sentiments of ‘superiority’ and antagonism towards Slavs. See Vicko Marelić, ‘The Lion, the Music and the Island Bridge- Winged Venetian Monuments in Korčula Town’, Časopis za povijest Zapadne Hrvatske, 14/1 (2021), pp. 69–107.

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Partisan-led anti-fascist resistance.96 Yet, this was the least violent revanchism compared to the executions that followed. The Partisans arrested an innocent young Italian shipyard manager, who returned to the island now under Partisan control to bring his employees their pay. Sacher-Masoch, who knew well his boss from the shipyard, pleaded with the Partisan commander, but to no avail. Painter Eduard Arnthal, or more probably only his wife – who from before the war had lived in one of the most luxurious villas on the island, in the area called Dominče, close to the sea where now the shipyard stands – also fell victim to Partisan rage.97 While Arnthal was Jewish, he and his wife Hedwiga did not socialize with other refugees or register with their committees, claiming that they were German. Once the Partisans took over, somebody accused them of being spies with absolutely no evidence. Csokor wrote that the couple remained quiet during the Italian occupation due to their son serving in the Wehrmacht.98 Sacher-Masoch recorded that Hedwiga looked at their executioners and did not shed a tear. Leo Andreis, the Bon Repos hotel owner, escaped to Hvar with the refugees, but he was halted there and executed by the local Partisans, most probably for reasons of collaboration with the Italians, even though his son had died fighting with the Partisans. The socalled People’s Liberation Committees established their hold on power with these executions, and rejected any arguments or legal reasoning. ‘We have no time’, explained one Partisan, as the only argument against court proceedings or establishing someone’s guilt or innocence. This short digression to describe Partisan brutality, lawlessness, and senselessness is even more striking, given that Sacher-Masoch owed them his survival and that he supported them. Yet he was, and remained, an outsider who eventually left the Yugoslav lands.99 Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, pp. 179–97. Father Vid (1896–1992) was born as Andrija Andro Mihičić. With a broad liberal arts education gained through the study of theology, philosophy, art history, aesthetics, and psychology, he became a Franciscan monk in 1911, while after the war he worked as a university professor and well-known art critic, essayist, poet, and public intellectual. Some publications indicate that Eduard Arnthal was executed on Korčula in 1944; for example, in a book dedication by Jürgen Trimborn, Arno Breker: Der Künstler und die Macht. Die Biographie (Berlin: Aufbau, 2011). Others claim that he was back in Berlin in 1950, as in Maike Bruhns, Art in the Crisis: Artist Lexicon, Vol. 2 (Munich/Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz, 2001), p. 41 and other sources. According to the documents in Korčula Archive, Fond Općinski sud u Korčuli (HR-DADU-SCKL-160), serija Konfiskacije, nr. 13 and 32/1945, Hedwiga was also accused of appropriating items from Hotel Bon Repos along with other refugees, named as Piliš Edo, Dr Revan Stanislav, Has Oskar, Altarac Bianka, Lowy Aleksandar, Rendeli Jelka, Borešić Ivo, Dr Sacher-Masoch, Kamhi Emica, Altarac Mošo, Salom Jakov, and Kraus Adolf. Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, pp. 190–97. Sacher-Masoch, Die Ölgärten brennen, p. 106–11.

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On the other hand, it was not all senseless. The refugees Milan Valder and Olga Njemirovski were also initially arrested for collaboration with the Italians, but they were released, as their collaboration was deemed to have been necessary due to their vulnerable status.100 In November  1943, as the Germans amassed troops on the Pelješac peninsula opposite Korčula, the Partisans decided to evacuate the second group of refugees and almost three thousand locals, who were transferred via the islands of Hvar, Vis, and Lastovo to Allied-controlled Southern Italy. Many eventually ended up on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, where the British set up refugee camps.101 In December, only eighty-four non-combatant Yugoslav and four Austrian Jews remained on Korčula, including Sacher-Masoch and Milica Leitner. As the Germans occupied the town of Korčula on 23 December 1943, they fled to Vela Luka and managed to evacuate at the last moment to Vis, and eventually to Bari in Italy, where, according to Sacher-Masoch, the era of justice would end and the bond of Equality and Brotherhood would break, they would split into rich and poor again, the wheat would separate from the chaff, and everything would be as it was before.102 In Bari, both Csokor and Sacher-Masoch joined the Allies’ Radio Bari German broadcasting services, contributing to Allied propaganda and the war effort until its very end.103 Whereas refugees and locals were evacuated, the war began on the island in earnest, as the Germans proceeded to take over all former Italian-controlled areas. In order to support the Yugoslav Partisans, on 20 October 1943, the First Partisan Oltremare (overseas) Brigade was hastily formed among the Yugoslav refugees and the Italian anti-fascists in Bari. Twenty-two of the evacuated Korčula refugee Jews joined in a special platoon of a Monenegrin battalion, along other Dalmatian, Slovenian, and Montenegrin battalions. Two Pisan Jews, Claudio Paggi and Franco Luzzatto, joined too.104 Already in November, their transfer to the islands of Vis and Korčula was initiated.105 Together with Maričić, Luka Spasa, p. 132. Marinko Gjivoje, Otok Korčula (Zagreb: the author, 1968), pp. 67–81. Sacher-Masoch, Die Ölgärten brennen, p. 126. After ending up in Italy in 1944, Csokor lived in Rome and worked for the BBC, before returning to Vienna in 1946 in British uniform. In 1947, Csokor became president of the Austrian PEN Club, with which he remained actively associated until well into his old age. In 1968, he also became vice-president of the International PEN. Upon his return to Vienna, Sacher-Masoch was the first editor of the Austrian Communist magazine Wiener Tagebuch and the General Secretary of the Austrian PEN, which he helped found with Csokor. Aleksandar Demajo, ‘Always One Step Ahead of Death’, We Survived … 2, pp. 34–48 (p. 47). Vera Paggi, Claudio … una storia ritrovata: La vicenda di Claudio Paggi, ebreo italiano sfuggito alle persecuzioni razziali, morto partigiano in Jugoslavia, 1st edn online, March 2003.

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the other poorly trained and unprepared Partisans, they had their baptism of fire on 21 December, when the German 118th Division launched operation Herbstgewitter (Autumn Thunder) to occupy the Adriatic islands. Over five hundred islanders and six hundred other Partisans died in poorly organized and futile resistance, including at least two hundred and twenty who were executed as prisoners in an act of revenge.106 Among those defending the island were also eight hundred Italians from the Oltremare Brigade, three hundred of whom would die alongside the Yugoslav Partisans. Having suffered heavy losses, the surviving Partisans and Italian volunteers were eventually evacuated, and later transferred to the Dalmatian coast to join the bulk of the Partisan forces. Many, including Claudio Paggi, died from typhus soon after. Luzzatto survived to the end of the war in German captivity, hiding his Jewishness. Among the twenty-two Jewish former internees who joined the Partisan forces in Bari and later returned to Korčula to fight the Germans, fifteen died.107 The initial attack was followed by severe reprisals and the execution of many who failed to evacuate the island. The Partisan disaster at Korčula changed their decision to defend the Dalmatian islands, and they were all abandoned except for Vis, which was much more distant from the mainland and closer to Allied bases in Italy. Instead, a mass exodus from southern Dalmatia and islands to Vis, and further to Italy, began. Among twenty-eight thousand exiled Dalmatians, there were around five thousand inhabitants of Korčula, who, like the Jewish refugees, were taken to Southern Italy and then transferred to a British military base in El Shatt near Suez on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. They stayed in Egypt until March 1946, when the majority returned to the island, now under Communist rule, whereas several hundred refused and joined the Yugoslav monarchist exile in overseas countries. Several hundred Jews evacuated from Split or Korčula, or, arriving from Rab, were also transported together with Dalmatians to El Shat and other British military bases in Egypt, where control and local administration were handed over to the Partisans. According to British reports, the Jewish refugees in the group were better off and were all seeking to relocate to Palestine. The British commander, Major P. B. Webb, stressed that this was not because the Partisans were anti-Semitic, but because it was the most opportune move at the time, given its vicinity.108 Many Jews

The brief account of the operation is available [accessed 25 October 2021]. Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci’, p. 780. Dušan Plenča, ‘Jugoslavenski zbjeg u Italiji i Egiptu’, Istorija radničkog pokreta. Zbornik radova 4 (1967), 335–477; Mateo Bratanić, ‘Hrvatski zbjegovi u Italiji od 1943. do 1945. Godine’, Časopis za Suvremenu Povijest, 1 (2016), 161–96.

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interned on Korčula eventually ended up in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina, although a large group returned to Yugoslavia or remained in Italy. When the Germans finally abandoned Korčula in summer 1944, the Partisans returned. There were no more Jews on the island until the new authorities decided to set up a hospital on the island of the Badija, just off Korčula, which housed a large Franciscan convent and excellent accommodation facilities, to take in hundreds of heavily wounded Partisans, mostly from Montenegro. The hospital was run by a group of seven Swiss doctors, a few of whom were Jewish. Deeply disturbed by Swiss complacence and collaboration with the Nazis, these doctors sought a way to actively participate in anti-fascist resistance. Joining Yugoslav partisans was their chance, and they were able to activate the funds of Centrale Sanitaire Suisse (CSS), which was formed to assist the International Brigades, and to bring some medical equipment with them.109 The whole endeavour was enabled by the former mayor, Dr Arneri(ć), who managed to escape both Italian and Partisan prisons. The socialist idyll of the early revolutionary period in Yugoslavia, as described by Dr Paul Parin, was only dampened by debilitating hunger on the island in 1944–45, which prevented wounds from healing and patients from recovering. The locals brought oranges to the Swiss doctors to have their teeth pulled out, and the Montenegrins sent some sheep across the sea for their wounded brethren. They were placed on a barren islet nearby, and one by one they were slaughtered. According to Parin, mutton helped to heal the wounds, and so saved many previously desperate patients. Younger friars were very helpful, but the Abbot was decisively opposed. One of the Swiss doctors, Guido Piderman, married Chela, one of the Dalmatian nurses, and the Partisan commander urged the Abbot to hold the ceremony. Tea and oranges were prepared for the feast, all patients and soldiers filled the church, and the organist played. The Abbot, however, delivered a sermon against the Partisans, accusing them of sodomy, genocide, and treason, and only the presence of the Swiss doctors and the inviolability of the wedding ceremony in the church saved his life at that moment.110 With so many people returning slowly from exile, Korčula took years to recover. Eventually, it became the prosperous and peaceful place that it is now, a pearl in the Adriatic, pride of its inhabitants, and a joy to all visitors.

Paul Parin, Es ist Krieg und wir gehen hin: Bei den jugoslawischen Partisanen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991). Parin’s book is a mixture of memoir of his war experience with the Partisans, criticism of them from the leftist perspective, and plaidoyer against another war in Yugoslavia. Ibid., 153–63.

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Altogether, 987 men and women from Korčula died in the war, either as Partisans or as civilian victims shot by the Italian and German occupiers.111 The victimhood of the island inhabitants and the subsequent exile in Egypt would become the cornerstone of the Communist-led Yugoslav narrative on Korčula, and in Dalmatia in general. After the Croatian declaration of independence in 1991, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, it has been marginalized, if not entirely erased. New narratives have been created with less space for Jewish suffering or the international nature of anti-fascist resistance. Instead the focus turned to each nation’s exclusive victimhood and righteousness.112 Unlike in many other places in Croatia, the monuments to Partisans remain on Korčula, and they include the names of the fallen Jews. The experience of Jewish refugees or the mission of Swiss doctors on Badija is remembered by local anti-fascists, whose work is very visible, active, and vocal. Certainly, there is much to remember and cherish. The inhabitants of Korčula treated the Jewish refugees very humanely, despite their own misery. There were close contacts, common gatherings, and anti-fascist sentiments, and some of the Yugoslav Jewish refugees intermarried with locals.113 Alkalaj Sadit married a local girl, Vinka Marinović, and both fled to Italy with their baby daughter. Some refugees later returned to the island that Sacher-Masoch called ‘good mother’, and their descendants still live there. Refugees from different parts of Europe also intermarried on the island. Altogether, thirty-nine of the Yugoslav and foreign Jews interned in Korčula joined the Partisan forces, and twentyseven of them lost their lives. Those that survived later took up high positions in the Yugoslav army, and in social and political life. Yugoslav Jews kept close contact with their hosts and friends on the islands, but many who emigrated to Israel or overseas wrote letters or returned to visit the place of their exile. Most importantly, seven hundred refugees survived the war, spending a shorter or longer time on this island. This chapter is another effort to keep the memory of this extraordinary experience in war-torn Europe alive.

Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, p. 399. For more on the memory of the Second World War in Croatia see Framing the Nation and Collective Identities: Political Rituals and Cultural Memory of the Twentieth-Century Traumas in Croatia, ed. by Vjeran Pavlaković and Davor Pauković (London: Routledge, 2019). Altarac, ‘Jevrejski konfinirci’, pp. 776–79.

Chapter 7

Rescue in Albania It took fifty years for the first publications on the rescue of European Jews in Albania to appear. Isolated after the war by its totalitarian socialist regime, Albania remained beyond the radar of Holocaust researchers, despite its record of sheltering many more Jews within its borders at the end of the Second World War than at its beginning. Furthermore, Albania’s post-war isolation most likely contributed to the fact that only seventy-five of its citizens were recognized as the Righteous Among the Nations, and this happened at a relatively late date.1 After the country opened to the world in the 1990s, the story of the Albanian rescue of the Jews emerged, and it is by now well-explored and more widely known.2 The surge of publications and media attention focused on the fact that many of the Albanian rescuers were Muslims, which served well to counter the increasing animosity between Muslims and Israel, but also to counter prevalent images of Albanians as pauper immigrants and petty criminals in many European countries. Many of these instant and attention-grabbing publications suffered from romanticizing and stereotyping Europe’s least known and developed country. In addition, as Daniel Perez argued, the extraordinary survival of Jews in wartime Albania became a subject of campaign among Albanians to rewrite their history, whereby the humanity of those who saved Jews was used to stress Albanian victimhood at the hands of the Communist regime, and especially under Yugoslav and Serbian rule in Kosovo.3 Yael Nidam-Orvieto and Irena Steinfeldt, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Albania Through the Perspective of the Yad Vashem Files of the Righteous Among the Nations’. The most recent study is Shaban Sinani, Albanians and Jews: The Protection and Salvation (Tirana: Naimi, 2014). Other notable Albanian researchers of the topic are Artan Puto and Apostol Kotani. Among previous publications, see Berndt Fischer, Albania at War, 1939–1944 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999); Michael Schmidt-Neke, ‘Albanien – ein sicherer Zufluchtsort?’, in Solidarität und Hilfe für Juden während der NS-Zeit (Regionalstudien 3), ed. by Wolfgang Benz-Juliane Wetzel (Berlin: Metropol, 1999), pp. 247– 70; Gli ebrei in Albania sotto il fascismo: una storia da ricostruire, ed. by Laura Brazzo and Michele Sarfatti (Florence: Giuntina, 2010), especially the chapter by Sarfatti, ‘La Condizione degli ebrei in Albania fra il 1938 e il 1943: Il Quadro Generale’, pp.  125–51. In addition, a Guidebook: A Reference to Records About Jews in Albania Before, During, and After the Second World War was produced by the General Directorate of Archives of the Republic of Albania, compiled by Nevila Nika and Liliana Vorpsi; translated into English by Sokol B. Bega (Tirana: State Central Archives, c.2006). Daniel Perez, ‘“Our Conscience is Clean”: Albanian Elites and the Memory of the Holocaust in Postsocialist Albania’, in Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_008

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This astonishing story had its prelude. In the interwar period, Albania was considered by prominent Jewish activists as a possible emigration destination, but its remoteness and other priorities precluded the materialization of these plans. Eventually, Albania featured as an option for very few Jews fleeing Germany. Notably though, after other countries closed their doors, the influx of Jewish refugees in Albania continued for some time, as the country kept its borders open, or did not police them strictly. From April 1939, Albania was occupied by Fascist Italy, which forced it to enter a monarchical union. Preserving its government and most competencies, Albania functioned as Italy’s protectorate, and saw territorial gains that almost doubled its size, until Italy’s demise in September 1943. Despite some attempts, neither the Italian anti-Semitic regulations nor any other anti-Semitic laws were ever introduced in Albania. Instead, the country became a refuge for many more Jews from the neighbouring Balkan countries. Following the Nazi invasion in 1941, and the early implementation of the Final Solution in the Balkans, hundreds of Yugoslav and Greek Jews found shelter in the country, either as a short-term station on their way to Italy, or remaining until the end of the war. After Italy’s capitulation in September  1943, Albania endured a year-long Nazi German occupation, which was a time of trial. Amidst the raging civil war and massive evacuation of troops from Greece and Africa, the plans to arrest and deport the Albanian and refugee Jews never materialized. It was during that perilous year that hundreds of Jews, along with many more Italian soldiers, were hidden and aided by Albanians of all faiths, including local authorities, who provided documents to protect them. Jews hailing from Yugoslavia were the most numerous survivors, although again, exact numbers are impossible to establish. The war circumstances in Albanian-held Kosovo, formerly part of Yugoslavia, where in two instances deportations took place, are differently remembered among the survivors, and will be examined separately. In line with the rest of the book, this chapter will concentrate on recovering the lived experience of Jews who took refuge in Albania. Illuminating their experience will contribute more detail to the existing historiography, and address the few still open questions regarding the Axis policies toward Jews in Albania and Kosovo, local collaboration, and some wider issues of culture and civilization in rescue and survival of Jews. Some survivors, and many recent accounts and films about the Albanians’ refusal to comply with the Nazi genocidal policies, attributed it to the traditional notion of Besa, which literally

Postcommunist Europe, ed. by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2013), pp. 25–58.

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means ‘to keep the promise’.4 According to this interpretation, guided by the Besa, the Albanians protected their guests, that is, Jews, even risking their own lives, because their family honour rested on respect for this custom. Besa has been part of an ancient code of law (and honour), the so-called Kanun, which remained a practised customary law among some Albanians in northern regions well into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Albanian scholar Sinani has successfully dismissed this Orientalizing and romanticizing interpretation, whereby the Kanun regulated all aspects of life, family, property, and, importantly, hospitality by pointing to the attitude of the Albanian collaborationist authorities, which were definitely not guided by Besa.5 Still, Sinani argued that certain ‘ethno-national’ features made Albanians more tolerant and less anti-Semitic than other peoples. The sheer diversity of experiences recorded by survivors, while often praising the role of Albanians, does not support such assumptions. Instead, as this chapter will demonstrate, the rescue of Jews rested on Albania’s remoteness, and a society still widely unaffected by anti-Semitism, and the trappings of an intrusive, modern state with its inflexible laws and regulations. These were, after all, the reasons that allowed for cases of Jewish survival throughout the Balkans.

Arrivals Before the War Prior to the Italian occupation in April  1939, there were only around two hundred Jews in Albania, mostly concentrated in the coastal town of Vlora/ Valona, including immigrants from neighbouring Greece and a few Polish and other foreign citizens, who arrived to work for foreign companies exploring Albanian natural resources in the 1920s and 1930s.6 The miniscule Jewish The first notable film was a German–Albanian production by Gjergj Xhuvani in 2003 entitled Mein Freund der Feind. In 2012, it was followed by Besa: The Promise produced by JWM Productions and directed by Rachel Goslins, which trails Norman H. Gershman, an American photographer interviewing and photographing families who rescued Jews. The film is based on Gershman’s photographic series and book, Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in WWII (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008). There is a recent elaboration of this interpretation in Esilda Luku, ‘Why Did Albanians and their Collaborationist Governments Rescue Jews during the Holocaust?’, Hiperboreea, 6 (2) (2019), 33–49. For Besa, see Margaret Hasluck, The Unwritten Law in Albania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, first published in 1954). The Kanun was published in English translation by Leondar Fox as The Code of Lekē Dukagjinit (compiled by Shtjefen Gjecovi) (New York: Gjonlekaj Publishing Company, 1989). Sinani, Albanians and Jews, pp. 140–45 and p. 174. The number oscillated between 150 and 204 in the 1930s. While it is likely that there were others who were not registered, their numbers were small. Sarfatti, ‘La Condizione degli ebrei in Albania’, pp. 126–29.

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community was not officially recognized until 1937.7 Albania was only emerging as a state in the interwar period, with most perks of modernity still missing. Yet, there were advantages to this. Anti-Semitism was almost unheard of, although there were other national archenemies. Despite its remoteness, and the absence of Jewish family or business connections to rely upon, Albania nevertheless turned into a possible exile destination for some German, and, after 1938, Austrian Jews. Estimates range from one hundred to four hundred refugees, arriving on what was interpreted as the direct invitation of Albanian King Zog.8 The King indeed extended his invitation to Jewish settlers in 1935, through his Consul General in Salonika, promising concessions, rich resources, and possibilities for exports.9 Allegedly, King Zog became interested after he learned about the Jewish plight from the former American minister, Herman Bernstein, although the move was more likely part of the King’s modernization agenda, and attempts to emancipate from the ever-growing dependency and control of the country by Fascist Italy. Besides individual German Jews’ enquiries about settlement and visa applications in the interwar period, according to Albanian researchers, there are records of official suggestions and demands to settle Jews in Albania, such as that of James McDonald, the High Commissar for Refugees in the League of Nations, as well as that of Albania’s Representative in the League of Nations.10 This was followed by initiatives by Professor Finer, Sir Philip Magnus, John Walter, the son of the owner of The Times, and, separately, by the Central Committee of German Jews for Help and Reconstruction, with the same intent in 1935. Nothing ever came of these plans, and eventually, as seen from the numbers above, relatively few Jewish individuals and families from Germany came to Albania in the late 1930s. In addition, an unknown number of refugees fleeing through Yugoslavia crossed into Albania or Greece, where they could board illegal transport boats to Palestine.11

Giovanni Villari, ‘La presenza ebraica in Albania’, Italia contemporanea, 239/240 (2005), 333–42 (p. 337). Guideboook, pp.  4–21; Gli ebrei in Albania, pp.  39–42; Apostol Kotani, Shqiptarët dhe Hebrenjtë në shekuj (Tirana: Shoqata e Miqësisë Shqipëri-Izrael, 2007), pp. 44–49. In 1938, there were only thirty-one, Sarfatti, ‘La Condizione degli ebrei in Albania’, p. 130. ‘Albania’s King Zog Extends Invitation to Jewish Settlers’, The American Jewish World, 7 June 1935, p. 3. Guideboook, p.  8. Other examples are in Shaban Sinani, ‘The Italian Policy Regarding the Admission of Jews into Albania’, in The ‘Jewish Question’ in the Territories Occupied by Italians: 1939–1943, ed. by Giovanni Orsina and Andrea Ungari (Rome: Viella, 2019), pp. 285–98. Interview with Paul Kurschner. USHMM Collection, Gift of the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive.

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After the Anschluss, and in a development very similar to Yugoslavia, in September  1938, the Albanian Ministry of Interior Affairs ceased granting work visas to anyone of Jewish background. Nevertheless, tourist visas were still issued, an opportunity used by some Austrian Jews, especially those whose residence in Yugoslavia was expiring. Like Yugoslavia, and exceptionally for Europe, Albania never ceased granting citizenship to Jewish applicants after five years of residence or three years of state service.12 The pogroms in Germany in November of the same year prompted those desperate and without anywhere else to go to contemplate Albania, as the Meyer and Gerechter families from Hamburg did, travelling to Berlin, where they easily obtained a three-month visa from the Albanian Embassy. By that time, according to archival sources, Albania had introduced strict limitations to tourist visas, allowing only one month’s stay and requiring financial guarantees, which was clearly not respected in practice, as testified by the survivors. Instead, the Gerechters just had to overcome the idea of Albania as a ‘primitive’ place, as recorded by their nine-year-old daughter, Johanna.13 According to some testimonies, Albania’s King Zog also personally intervened, arranging for people to come. Among them, thirteen-year-old Fritzi Weitzmann and her family of eleven, from Vienna. King Zog helped the Weitzmanns to re-establish the family’s photography business in Durrës/Durrazzo, as he previously used to sit for portraits by Fritzi’s father, Oscar. Failing to obtain visas for any other country, or to place their children on youth Aliyah programmes, the Weitzmanns decided to move to Albania in September 1938, and through bribes even managed to bring all their belongings with them via Venice and Trieste. Most importantly, they had the family jewels sewn into their winter clothing. The Weitzmanns found Durrës ‘primitive’, and soon transferred to Tirana, where Oscar was entrusted with well-paid and prestigious photographic work for the Royals, such as producing the King’s portrait to be placed in all the schools.14 Other Austrian Jews, who were already in Albania, such as Richard Atlas and Karl Cohen, also petitioned the King to be allowed to remain, while others, such as Friedrich Lorvus and Emil Borgus, were recorded as converted to Orthodox Christianity in Shkodër.15

Sarfatti, ‘La Condizione degli ebrei in Albania’, p. 131. Johanna Gerechter, ‘Auch in Albania gibt es keine Ruhe’, in Fremd in der eigenen Stadt: Erinnerungen jüdischer Emigranten aus Hamburg, ed. by Charlotte Ueckert (Hamburg: Junius, 1989), pp. 188–197 (p. 192). Interview with Fritzi Owens. ‘Segment  86–99’. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1996. Guideboook, pp. 17–19.

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Most of the early refugees arrived via Yugoslavia, usually after their residence permits expired. Among them was a prolific composer, Abel Ehrlich. Born in East Prussia in 1915, Ehrlich fled Königsberg in 1934, and came to Yugoslavia, pursuing his musical studies in Zagreb. Yet, by the end of 1938, his residence permit based on his student status had expired, and Ehrlich moved to Albania, one of the last countries to accept Jews. In January 1939, he could proceed to Palestine, thanks to a certificate issued by the British Mandate, on the ground of being a gifted musician.16 Trude Grünwald, born in Vienna in 1922, left Austria with her parents Siegfried and Rosa in July 1938, travelling to the spa resort Rogaška Slatina, and eventually to Zagreb. While it was easy for them to get into Yugoslavia, thanks to connections in its Embassy in Vienna, the Grünwalds soon found themselves in Zagreb with their three-month visas expiring, without any job prospects, and unable to pay bribes to extend their stay. Then, they learned about Albanian King Zog’s open invitation to visitors, including those with the infamous J on their passports, on the occasion of his jubilee. They decided to take up the offer, and set out on a journey along the Adriatic Coast, all the way down to Durazzo/Durrës. Trude’s exile diary is simply a continuation of a travel diary that she had been keeping for a couple of years already, and aptly named Auf weiter Fahrt (On the Go).17 Impressed by Maribor and Rogaška Slatina spa, sixteen-year-old Trude felt she was living in a dream. Like an experienced traveller, she kept tickets and souvenirs along the way (As seen on the book cover). They went sightseeing in Split and attended a football match in Dubrovnik. In her later recollections, Trude singles out a marriage offer on the train by a young man trying to help her stay in Yugoslavia.18 In Durazzo, as Trude referred to the town by its Italian name, she was shocked by dirt and poverty, although again, this just established her flight story as a typical travelogue. There were Gypsies (Zigeuner) everywhere, and they were, according to Trude, ‘a doomed proletariat’. Durazzo’s only hotel, the Metropole, is described as worse than the worst house in Vienna. Eventually, the Grünwalds settled, along with fifty-five other Jews from Germany and Austria, in a single refugee compound by the sea, a sort of commune, financed by the Joint, albeit very modestly. The food was meagre, and quarrels were frequent, usually between the assimilated and the Orthodox Jews.19

For more on Ehrlich, see Yuval Shaked, Abel Ehrlich and the Question of Building and Preserving an Israeli Musical Heritage. ‘Trude Grünwald: Diary of Emigration’, Wiener Library, 1832. Epstein, Swimming Upstream, p. 40. Ibid., pp. 41–43.

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Poor and dilapidated shanty towns, an overpowering smell of damp, dreadful – these were Grünwald’s impressions of Albania. Women were not allowed to walk freely or show their faces, except for a few prostitutes. No wonder that, very soon, this tomboy girl from Vienna was denounced as a prostitute. Having to explain herself to Durazzo’s police prefect, she pointed out cultural differences, and employed all her fast-learned skills of adaptation, which she had had to practise ever since the German troops had marched into her native Vienna. Trude’s quick adaptation was forced not by her Jewish distinctiveness from the European mainstream, but from her experience of discrimination by, and literally terror of, that European mainstream. Like many others, Trude soon modified her Orientalism or Balkanism. After the first impressions sketched above, Trude’s diary only has warm words for the kindness of her Yugoslav and Albanian acquaintances and environment. She does not necessarily contemplate it, but simply and quickly rationalizes it. After visiting the only restaurant in Durazzo, she writes in her diary: ‘Whilst the food was edible, (its) standard of cleanliness was well below what we would normally expect, but I was beginning to become immune to the filth.’20 The arrival of Jewish refugees could have not passed unnoticed by the German Minister in Albania, who expressed his concern about a considerable increase in the colony of his country’s passport holders. While many were able to leave, thanks to obtaining Palestine certificates or visas for the UK or US, around a hundred mostly poor Austrian Jews were reported as stranded in Albania at the end of 1938.21 A modest, but continuous, flow of new arrivals from Austria raised the eyebrows of the Italian Legation in Tirana too, which regularly reported on the situation, and especially on the assistance to the refugees by various groups such as the Hebrew Committee in New York, the Rothschild family, American Senator Robert Reynolds, and especially a certain Samuel Uriewiecz (Horwitz?), a Russian Jew who seemed to be coordinating all these efforts. Sinani demonstrated that the Italian reports were driven by concerns about Anglo-American capital and connections in Albania, rather than by anti-Semitism.22 Some refugees were granted permission to proceed to Italy, like the families above, but the Italian Foreign Ministry officially frowned upon the (re)settlement of Jews in Albania. Accordingly, the Albanian Ministry of the Interior introduced further obstacles to obtaining tourist visas, which from March 1939 were to be granted only for a month, upon proof of the possession

Ibid., p. 46. FO Annual Report 1938, Albania, BL IOR/L/PS/12/155, p. 10. Sinani, ‘The Italian Policy’, p. 293.

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of five hundred golden francs, although it is unlikely that any of these were applied in practice, as the flow of refugees continued.23 Unlike their parents, young refugees were hanging out with the locals and enjoying their time. Trude also tried to earn some money teaching German, French, and mathematics, while waiting for her visa. Italian Ambassador, Francesco Jacomoni di San Savino (officially Minister Plenipotentiary), also became her student, and eventually her saviour. After the Italian Army invaded Albania in April 1939, Jacomoni became the Regent or Lieutenant of Albania, and helped Trude’s family emigrate to England via Italy in July that year. Trude Epstein’s real-life experience is contradicted by recent Italian historiography, which singles out Jacomoni as the author of various reports to Rome concerning the establishment of a Jewish refugee colony in Albania.24 The Italian legation also forwarded requests by the Chamber of Commerce in Tirana to promote measures to prevent Jews from coming, due to potential competition.25 Italian historian Tommaso Dell’Era concluded that these reports were evidence of Italian pressure to stop the migration of Jews to Albania, but Epstein’s and other testimonies pointed out exactly the opposite. Could it be that the reports were simply part of their job, and in no way prevented or affected the arrival or further emigration of Jews via Italy? From the reports of Jacomoni’s deputy, Babuscio Rizzo, we learn that out of three hundred and fifty refugees, most settled in Tirana and Durazzo (about two hundred), while smaller groups were to be found in Valona (Vlorë), Argirocastro (Gjirokastër), and Scutari (Shkodër). Apart from the above-mentioned request by the Chamber of Commerce, Rizzo could not find any anti-Semitism in the country. Officially, Albania entered a monarchical union with Italy, with Jacomoni operating as the King’s Lieutenant, but for most purposes it functioned as a protectorate in relation to its patron state.26 While Italy controlled the key sectors of defence, security, and public administration, it often clashed with the Albanian government and local authorities ascertaining their power. Personally, Jacomoni advocated a more flexible attitude, allowing for Guideboook, pp. 26–27. After the war, Francesco Jacomoni di San Savino was sentenced by the High Court to five years in prison, only to be released in 1948 and his guilt dismissed, as he was never a member of the Fascist party. His own account of his time as Minister and Regent in Albania is La politica dell’Italia in Albania (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1965). Rodogno dismissed Jacomoni’s memoir as a self-defence by a prominent fascist diplomat. Tommaso Dell’Era, ‘The Italian Occupation of Albania: Fascist Albania and the Persecution of Jews (1939–1943)’, in The “Jewish Question” in the Territories Occupied by Italians, ed. by Giovanni Orsina and Andrea Ungari, pp. 309–32. Silvia Trani, ‘L’unione tra l’Italia e l’Albania (1939–1943)’, Clio, 30/1 (1994), 139–68.

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Albanians to take charge of their country, against a more imperialist approach by Italy’s Foreign Minister, Count Ciano. The Office for Albanian Affairs within the Italian government in Rome planned to pass anti-Semitic laws, similar to the ones introduced in Italy, and envisaged the expulsion of foreign Jews, but nothing came of this, except for correspondence kept in archives, because of the resistance of local and Italian authorities in Albania itself, who pointed out the impracticality of their implementation.27 In his memoir, Jacomoni used the fact that the racial laws were not extended to Albania as an argument in favour of its sovereignty.28 Indeed, the changes at the helm had little or no effect on refugees such as the Weitzmanns, who continued, albeit at a slower pace, to depart on Italian boats to Bari, and then proceeded by train to Naples, from where they sailed to the US. Their travel costs were born by the Joint. Johanna Gerechter lists among those still in Albania: the Krauss family (Katerina, Gertrude, Friederike, and Fritz); Heinrich Stern with his wife; the Weinsteins; Mr Galitzky; Fritz Altman; Hans and Anni Krall, and her sister, Olga Stutecka; Josef Gertler; Walter and Finny Mandel, and her mother Mrs Thatcher; Menashe, Resel, and Julius Wolf; Mr Horn; Mr and Mrs Tau; Dr Leo; Edith, Hannelore, Eva, and Alexander Meyer; Emil and Stella Borger from Yugoslavia; and Mr Jacobson from East Prussia, among others.29 The Italian Consul turned Regent, Jacomoni, assured them that no harm would come to any of them.30 For the next two years, there were no changes, and, despite their alliance with Hitler, the Italian occupiers did not bother Jews at all. Johanna insisted: ‘The Italians were very gracious. They knew we were Jews. We had friends among the soldiers.’31 During that period, the Rabbi Josif Levi and his rather poor community in Pristina, in Yugoslavia’s southern region of Kosovo, welcomed a number of Austrian and German refugees, who were escorted over the border and eventually immigrated illegally to Palestine, via Albania, a precedent for a subsequent, much more intense, wave of Yugoslav Jewish refugees.32 All of this would change with the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Following the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and Greece in April  1941, the Italian protectorate of Albania doubled its territory. It was awarded Yugoslav territories Dell’Era, ‘The Italian Occupation of Albania’, pp. 320–21. Jacomoni, La politica dell’Italia in Albania, p. 70. Johanna Jutta Neumann, Escape to Albania: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl from Hamburg (London: Centre for Albanian Studies, 2015), p. 133. Epstein, Swimming Upstream, p. 53. Interview with Johanna Neumann. Milovan Pisarri, ‘La Shoa in Serbia e Macedonia (1941–1943)’, in Gli ebrei in Albania, pp. 169–98 (p. 195).

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with majority Albanian populations, including Western Macedonia, parts of Montenegro, and the whole of Kosovo, except for the mineral-rich area of Kosovska Mitrovica, which was taken by Germany.

Yugoslav Jews Flee to Italian-Held Albania The first large group of Yugoslav Jews to arrive in Albania consisted of those who had fled from Belgrade and Sarajevo to Montenegro during the April invasion. Most of them were transferred by the Italian occupiers to the internment camp in the central Albanian town of Kavajë in July 1941, as already reported in Chapter 5.33 They had limited contact with Albania and Albanians, before they were transferred, a few months later, to the Ferramonti internment camp in Italy.34 Similarly, a number of refugees coming to Albania from Belgrade managed to be promptly transferred to Italian-held Dalmatia or Italy proper. This was the case of the later great Italian painter Eva Fischer and her family, who escaped from Belgrade via Albania to Korčula, Split, and finally Bologna, where they survived the war under false names.35 In Kavajë, and in all the other camps later established by the Italian Army for the internment of Jews, there was no maltreatment or any evidence of anti-Semitism. Refugees were fed, and benefited from a modest daily allowance, the same as everybody else. Those who had some special skills were hired to work by the Italian Army.36 While refugees were reaching Albania from all directions, the most complex and dangerous situation of all was in Kosovo, which, in autumn 1941, turned into the last escape resort for over five hundred Serbian Jews, once all other borders or travel possibilities had been shut down. While formally attached to Albania, Kosovo was much more volatile. Nazi Germany occupied it for almost two months, before handing it to the Italians and local Albanian collaborators. In this short period, the Gestapo ordered Jews into forced labour, many houses and businesses were ransacked and robbed, and there were a few executions.37 After June 1941, the German army still held a narrow strip Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, ‘I profughi ebrei rastrellati in Monenegro nel luglio 1941 e il loro internamento in Albania e in Italia’, in Gli Ebrei in Albania, pp. 153–67. Interview with Alegra Koen, 20 September 2011, USHMM Collection, Gift of Fundación Memoria Viva; interview with Boza Rafajlovic, USHMM Collection, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation. Interview with Eva Fischer. Sinani, ‘The Italian Policy’, pp. 297–98. Rukula Bencion, ‘I Watched Them Kill My Loved Ones’, We Survived …3, pp. 437–40; Nisim Navonović, ‘From Captivity to Captivity’, We Survived … , pp. 296–300.

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in the north of Kosovo. In addition, its troops and the Gestapo made frequent incursions into the southern parts of Kosovo, where the Albanian nationalists held power under Italian tutelage. By 1942, Albania had officially annexed most of Kosovo and western Macedonia, with expansionism and Albanization of the new territories an essential part of Fascist Italy’s imperial plans. During the interwar period, Kosovo’s majority Albanian population was discriminated against in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, whereas the Serbs wielded power and influence, while the small Jewish community allied closely with the Serbs. Unsurprisingly, Serbian Jews fleeing to Kosovo reported hostility from the new local authorities and majority population.38 Most refugees found safety only by lodging with local Jews or Serbs. The language barrier must have played a major role, but the testimonies of Jewish survivors also indicate that they considered Kosovo Albanians hostile, due to the long-standing Albanian/Serbian conflict over the territory.39 The negative feelings must have been mutual. This could explain why only a trickle of Serbia’s Jewish population, destined for extinction, attempted to flee to Kosovo, and further to Albania. In addition, many were unwilling to leave their loved ones who had already been arrested, or feared to flee, as frequent controls made travelling to Kosovo dangerous. Mira Karaoglanović, née Koen, only fled Belgrade after learning that her father had been executed. Escaping with her aunt, their travelling ordeal lasted for a year before they reached Kosovo, and eventually safety in Albania. First, they had to procure fake documents. Then, the dangers connected with border crossing made them stop and hide for months at a time in Leskovac, and then Niš. In April the following year, they secured guides, who took them to Skopje in Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia on an oxcart loaded with wood. Dressed as village women, they passed the Bulgarian police control. At the end, they were stuck in Skopje for several months before they could continue their journey to Albania via Kosovo.40 Formally, Jews were not allowed to enter Kosovo, and Italian soldiers at the border were ordered to send back those seeking refuge. Those who travelled by train were sent back from Pristina, only to be met at the Lipljan station, just before the border, by local Jews, who helped them to get out and remain Similarly, the Jews were singled out as objective allies to the Serbs in areas occupied by Bulgaria which eased the enactment of anti-Jewish policies by the Bulgarian bureaucracy. See Nadège Ragaru, ‘The Madding Clocks of Local Persecution: Anti-Jewish policies in Bitola under Bulgarian Occupation (1941–1943)’, in Local Dimensions of the Second World War in Southeastern Europe, edited by Xavier Bougarel, Hannes Grandits, and Marija Vulesica (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 161–95. Interview with Marko Menachem; Navonović, ‘From Captivity to Captivity’. Mira Karaoglanović, ‘Saved by the Hand of God’, We Survived … 3., pp. 441–47.

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in Kosovo. The locals shouted in Ladino, and those on the train understood and descended.41 Those who travelled on the road attempted to cross the border away from official crossings, or under the cover of night. Marijana Munk, née De Majo, in 1918 in Vienna, her sister-in-law, and their four children did not flee Belgrade to Pristina until December 1941, after all other family members had been arrested, and soon executed. Prevented from entering by the Italian soldiers at the border, they spent the night nearby, and eventually managed to enter with the help of locals. In Pristina, they stayed illegally, before being able to procure documents with local names. They paid to be driven to Durrës in June  1942, escorted by an Italian soldier for safety.42 Importantly, most of the Serbian Jews who dared to flee to Kosovo had connections along the way, and enough money and/or valuables for all costs and bribes needed. Exceptions were the young, desperate, and adventurous, such as Pavle Ciner and Ivan Singer, who travelled from Belgrade and crossed the border on foot. They encountered a group of Italian soldiers, who took them from Pristina to Shkodër in North Albania on top of a tarpaulin for the modest sum of thirty lire. It was cold and uncomfortable, but they felt wonderful to be travelling to safety.43 Another option was to travel via smaller places in Kosovo, rather than Pristina. Albert Nahmias and Moisi Kamhi paid smugglers to take them from Skopje to Uroševac/Ferizaj in Kosovo. There, they procured identity documents with Albanian names. All that was needed were two testimonies that they were away from town, and thus not registered as citizens. Nahmias became Namiazi (Albanian sounding), and Kamhi became Kamzi. From there, they paid to be transported by car to Tirana.44 They had only words of praise for the Italian authorities and soldiers they encountered along the way. Towards the end of 1941, and in January  1942, Germany intensified pressure on Albania to stop allowing Jews to enter, and to deport those already there. The German Consul General in Tirana requested from the Head of the Albanian Government, Mustafa Kruja, the immediate repatriation of at least three hundred Jews, who were identified by the German Military Command in Belgrade as escaping from Serbia to Kosovo. The list with full names and precise origins was submitted. According to Jacomoni, Kruja asked for Italian permission to transfer them to Albania, where they were subsequently provided with false documents and material assistance. With Jacomoni’s approval, Kruja reported back to the German Consul that those on the list could not be located. Pisarri, ‘La Shoa in Serbia e Macedonia (1941–1943)’, p. 195. Interview with Marijana Munk, USHMM Collection. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 140. Interview with Albert Nahmias. USHMM Collection.

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Rome was not officially informed about this move, but Jacomoni wrote privately to the Director General of the Foreign Ministry, Conte Luigi Vidau, who had already helped to provide documents for a number of Jewish refugees from Germany, Poland, and other countries.45 Yet, under the increased pressure from their German allies over the number of Jews, from December 1941, the Italian authorities in Pristina began to detain the clandestine refugees among them, first placing them in an abandoned school, and then in the main prison. Arrests and imprisonment followed throughout Kosovo, although the refugees were not treated as other prisoners. Families were able to stay together, the children could play, and representatives could fetch food from outside. Italian guards were remembered as friendly. Imprisonment was explained by the lack of any other facilities for their internment. Nevertheless, in what has already been described in Chapter 5, based on the research of Sarfatti, as the biggest stain on the Italian treatment of Jews, on 17 March 1942, the Major of Carabinieri in Pristina, Giorgio Silvestro, upon the order of Colonel De Leo, succumbed to German pressure and handed over a group of fifty-one Serbian Jews, who were later deported to their deaths.46 Registering and cooperating with the authorities was once again proven to be deadly. Vida Mevorah and her daughters, Ester and Luci, avoided deportation thanks to their Sephardi connections. They fled from Pristina to Prizren, where they survived until September 1942, between arrests and hiding with the locals.47 In Prizren, five or six Jewish families who had been hiding in the area were also brought to the local prison in March 1942. Women were separated from men. The terrible conditions were only circumvented by the promise of the Italian commanders that they would not be deported back to Serbia. Another couple of hundred Jewish refugees remained in Pristina prison, and so did hundreds of other Jews, scattered in private accommodation or prisons throughout Kosovo. Their ordeals lasted at least until June 1942 in Pristina, and even longer in Prizren, before they were taken by the Italian military convoys to Kavajë and Berat in Albania, where they were placed in free confinement.48 The largest group from Pristina prison was transferred to Kavajë on 8 July 1942.49 While deportations were not repeated, the situation in Kosovo remained fraught with dangers because of the German security presence and the vicinity of German Jacomoni, La politica dell’Italia in Albania, pp. 288–89. Michele Sarfatti, ‘Tra uccisione e protezione. I rifugiati ebrei in Kosovo nel marzo 1942 e le autorita tedesche, italiane e albanesi’, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 76/3 (2010), 223–42; also his short piece, ‘I volenterosi alleati di Hitler’, Corriera della Sera, 16 April 2010, p. 55. Luci Petrović, ‘Refugees’, in We Survived … , pp. 282–95. Ibid., p. 289. Jas̆a Altarac papers, 2002.438.1, USHMM Archives.

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occupation areas. This is why, along with the refugees, Kosovo’s native male Jews were also interned in the Albanian towns of Vlorë/Valona and Berat, and almost all other Jews fled or were taken away from Kosovo to Albania.50 From 1942 onwards, Kosovo saw few new arrivals. There were also a few Jews who fled Skopje, under Bulgarian rule. This was the case of Mira Koen who, with a group of eight other Jews, was taken by Albanian smugglers over the mountains from Skopje to Uroševac in November 1942. The Italian Quaestor in Uroševac was very friendly, helping them to get to Pristina. As soon as there were about fifty Jews in Pristina, a bus was organized to take them to Kavajë.51 As the news about the extermination of Jews spread, the Italian Army and Police became much more expedient in transferring the Jews from Kosovo to the safety of Albania. Nevertheless, very few Jews went from Skopje to Albania, such as the brothers Konforti, who already had commercial connections, and who relocated to Tirana immediately following the Bulgarian occupation.52 Rašela Vajnštajn (Weinstein) with her daughters also fled from Skopje to the Albanian coast, after being warned by family and friends in Serbia about massacres of Jews there.53 The relatively few escapes could be explained by the absence of an immediate threat, even though the situation for Jews in the Bulgarian-occupied areas deteriorated day by day. Contrary to the troubles experienced in Kosovo, and the threats in the Bulgarian-held areas, the Jews who reached Albania had only praise for their experience. Upon arrival, Singer and Ciner were arrested for having arrived illegally, but they were treated in the utmost humane way by a ‘pleasant and sympathetic’ quaestor in Shkodër, who helped them to legalize, despite carrying forged documents.54 Moving to Durrës, the two young Jewish refugees from Belgrade made friends with Italian soldiers, sharing stories, addresses, and photographs. The Italian soldiers they befriended prepared them an orange salad with peeled oranges cut into slices, seasoned with pepper and salt, and drenched in olive oil, offered with bread and wine – a feast for starving refugees after weeks on the road. They even took them to a brothel, as per Singer’s heartfelt account, describing his first-time clumsiness.55 Singer also reported on the (false) rumour circulating among the refugees that the Mayor of Tirana was a Serb, eager to help his fellow Serbs. Some Belgrade Jews went and begged Jozef Baruhović, ‘Under the Same Roof as the Germans’, pp.  425–36; Navonović, ‘From Captivity to Captivity’; Bencion, ‘I Watched Them Kill My Loved Ones’. Mira Karaoglanović, ‘Saved by the Hand of God’, p. 445. Interview with Marko Menachem. Tamara Aloni, ‘Over the Mountains into Albania’, We Survived …3, pp. 448–51. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 141–42. Ibid., pp. 143–47.

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him for help, and indeed, all were given fifty lire.56 In other testimonies, the survivors described their lives in Albania until September 1943 as being relatively safe and tranquil, with no reports of anti-Semitism. The largest group was in Kavajë, with more than a hundred Jews from Belgrade alone. Only the heads of families had to report to the Quaestura (police), but otherwise there were no restrictions. They could work, if they had the right connections, and children went to school.57 Some were even able to operate small businesses, although, not surprisingly, in most cases refugees lived in very modest economic conditions.58 In many cases, it was that work or business that enabled them to get to know the people who would eventually become their rescuers in 1943. The large colony in Kavajë was self-organized. They compiled a register with their names, writing a letter to the Pope in Rome, among others, asking for help. The isolation forced them into closer ties, so that several single men and women, or those who had landed in Albania without their partners, got together for protection, but also love. On the other hand, the appearance and behaviour of Jewish unveiled women, but also of Jewish men seen doing household chores, raised the eyebrows of their Albanian neighbours, to which they had to react, in one of many episodes of culture clashes, as described by Grünbaum.59 The presence of the Italian army and civil service in Albania offered most relief, as testified by all survivors. An example of the lack of any discrimination or anti-Semitism is that of Polish-born Jewish geologist, Professor Stanislav Zuber (1883–1947), who was hired in 1927 as the chief geologist for Azienda Italiana Petroli d’Albania (AIPA), after it obtained a concession from King Zog to exploit Albanian oil fields.60 Zuber was married to an Italian, and he continued his work during the war without any hindrance. Despite his prominence, nothing happened to him throughout the German occupation of Albania either. Paradoxically, Zuber died in prison, in the hands of the post-war Communist-led regime of Enver Hoxha, who aimed to take over the Italian concessions.61 Ibid., p. 146. Jas̆a Altarac papers, 2002.438.1, USHMM Archives. [accessed 25 June 2022]. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, pp. 54–56. Highly appreciated by his Italian and Albanian colleagues, Zuber is remembered for doing the first geological research and mapping of Albania. Among his works published during the war are Appunti sulla tettonica e sull’evoluzione geologica dei giacimenti metalliferi albanesi (Rome: Italgraf, 1940) and Organizzazione e condotta delle spedizioni geologiche in Albania: Esperienze delle campagne di ricerca dell’A IPA 1926–1941 (Rome: Italgraf, 1942). Officially, Zuber was accused of collaboration, espionage, and sabotage. Recently, Zuber was rehabilitated, and his bust was unveiled in Kuçova. For more, see Ajet

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The March  1943 deportations from Bulgarian-held areas, as well as from Thessaloniki and the rest of Northern Greece, brought another wave of refugees to Albania. Their escapes were more dramatic, as the deportations were accompanied by total blockades of those places by the German and Bulgarian police. Sara Alkalaj, born in 1921, fled to Pirot with her mother, following arrests and executions of Jews in Belgrade. They were safe until 13 March 1943, when both were arrested and then deported, along with another 178 Jews found in Pirot. After three days of a horrendous journey in crammed freight wagons, Sara Alkalaj managed to escape when the train stopped in the town of Lom, on the Bulgarian border. Another youngster from Belgrade, Rafael Rudi Abravanel, who Sara knew from Belgrade’s Hashomer Hatzair, also escaped. Sara and Rudi managed to get to Sofia independently. With the help of Bulgarian Jewish family and friends, they procured fake documents bearing Bulgarian names. Then, they travelled to Skopje, only to find its Jews had already been deported. From Skopje, they paid Albanian smugglers to take them to Kosovo, along the well-chartered escape route passing by the village of Begunce (literally meaning ‘refugee’ in Serbian) to Uroševac/Ferizaj, where they were arrested and held along with around a hundred other Jews, who managed to escape deportation from Skopje. After a month, the Italian Army transported them to Albania, as it had done with earlier waves of refugees, and placed them in free confinement.62 Rudi went to Shkodër, and he and his new fiancée, Bojana Konfino, changed their names to Rushdie and Kadrie Hoxha. Sara found her only remaining brother, who had escaped earlier, in Kavajë. Skopje-born Marko (Mordechai) Menachem, who was a student in Belgrade during the German attack, and who managed to procure documents to continue his studies in Sofia, also returned to his hometown in March 1943, worried about his father and sister, as the rumours about the deportations spread. Despite his knowledge of impending danger, Menachem was rounded-up with his family and thousands of other Skopje Jews in Monopol tobacco warehouse just outside the town. Menachem was one of the two people known to have escaped. With the help of contrabandists, as he called them, he left Skopje and, via Tetovo, reached Albania after a perilous journey across the mountains, Mezini, ‘Stanislav Zuber dhe gjenocidi komunist’, Gazeta Shqiptare, 14 September 2008; Arqile Teta, Profesor Stanisllav Zuber: jeta dhe vepra (Tirana: Shtypshkronja Ilar, 2010); ‘Profesor Stanisław Zuber wybitna postać geologii: Vivat Akademia’, Periodyk Akademii Górniczo-Hutniczej dla Absolwentów AGH, 1 (2008), 23–25. Their entire families were gassed, or killed by other means. Interview with Sara Alkalaj, USHMM Collection, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation; Jasna Ćirić, ‘Rafael Rudi Abravanel iz Pirota’ [accessed 25 June 2022].

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which lasted several days. His family perished with the rest of the Macedonian Jews.63 The case of Irene Grünbaum, who escaped Skopje with the help of Muslim friends, is particularly revealing. She fled the city covered by a feredža (a three-piece garment that veils the body, the head, and the face), carrying all her possessions wrapped in a handkerchief – a piece of bread, a piece of cheese, her comb, and her glasses. She was led over the mountains for ten gold coins by a coarsely speaking Albanian kachak (Albanian, kaçak – smuggler), Nafi. Downtrodden, limping, groaning, and bleeding, Grünbaum dragged herself behind her guide between villages, where he had contacts who fed them, and helped heal her feet.64 Along the way, she was horrified to find out how he had shot his wife in the leg for disobedience. Her only hope was the Besa, or the promise her guide gave, to take her to the safety of Tetovo, in the Albanian-controlled part of Macedonia. Grünbaum refused to be caught up in the blockade of Skopje, just as she had refused the round-up of Jews in Belgrade, a couple of years earlier. As a foreigner, she had less attachment to these places, and less to lose. Yet, without local connections, and not speaking local languages, deciding to escape into the unknown demanded audacity and nerve. In her memoir, Irene Grünbaum is startled by other Jews’ lack of resistance and widespread submission to their fate. She was also a single woman on the move, which made her particularly vulnerable. Despite the degrading circumstances, in which she found herself so often, Grünbaum retained her strength and dignity. Remaining in Tetovo was not an option for her. Denunciations could easily happen, not because of anti-Semitism, but because of family feuds, or conflicts between kachaks themselves. Only Tirana, Kavajë, and towns in Albania proper, were considered safe from arrests and deportation back to where one came from. Having obtained fake documents in Tetovo, just as others did elsewhere in the Italian protectorate of Albania, Grünbaum continued her journey and struggle to survive. Besides Skopje Jews, 3276 Monastir/Bitola Jews were deported from Monopol to Treblinka, in the joint action by the German and Bulgarian forces. The Monastir community was the most traditional in the whole of the Balkans, exclusively speaking its archaic form of Judeo-Spanish. After the March 1943 deportation, all Jewish property was auctioned, and synagogues and community centres were ransacked and destroyed. Very few Jews avoided deportation, and none returned. Some fifty youngsters, formerly members of Hashomer Hatzair and Techelet Lavan, joined the Yugoslav Partisans before this, and a Interview with Marko Menachem. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, pp. 27–40.

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few of them saw the end of the war, along with a few others, who survived as prisoners of war, foreign citizens, or doctors.65 Shockingly, only fifty-seven Monastir Jews fled to nearby Albania, where all survived.66 One of them, Alegra Koen, recalled that a Christian friend of her brother warned them to flee. Her parents remained behind, but Alegra and her brothers paid smugglers to take them by truck all the way to Tirana67 Then, there was the Avramović family from Belgrade, who first fled to Skopje, and narrowly escaped the deportation of Serbian Jews by the Bulgarian police on 20 November 1941 by fleeing to Monastir, which seemed safer as it was more remote. When they arrived, Monastir’s Sephardi community was already ghettoized in the former Jewish neighbourhood by the Dragor River. In March  1943, when they heard about the deportations, the Avramovićs fled the ghetto and hid in the house of a Macedonian Christian named Mitar, who they thanked as their greatest life benefactor. In order not to endanger Mitar’s family, the Avramovićs sought help from French nuns in the convent of St Joseph, who had previously allowed their daughter to attend their school without charge. The Mother Superior could not help, but she directed them to the Italian Consulate. The Italian Consulate’s Secretary could not help officially, but through a servant he connected the Avramovićs with a guide, who took them for a fee to Albania. They had to walk over snow-covered mountains, but the actual border crossing was not difficult.68 Once in Albania, the Italian carabinieri arrested them, and kept them for forty-eight hours before handing them to the Albanian police in Kočani. After being kept in prison for another five days, the Avramovićs were taken to the internment camp in Porto Romano near Durrës, and, finally, after three months, the Kavajë camp, where for the first time they obtained some aid provided by the Albanian government. The family of (Solomon) Moni Kario also escaped Monastir on 17 March 1943, guided by an Albanian Muslim, Rexhep, and a Christian, Nikola, who saved their lives, as they testified later.69 Leon, Esperanza, and their six-year old daughter, Tina Pardo, fled with the help of the Partisans, who took them over to Albania, where they procured documents One of them was Shlomo ben Mordechai Hacohen (Salomone Koen), son of a rabbi and member of Hashomer Hatzair, who escaped to the Partisans in the mountains, while his father was deported. Interview with Salomone Koen, 23  November  2009. USHMM Museum Collection, Gift of Fundación Memoria Viva. Cohen, Last Century, p. 184. Interview with Alegra Koen. ‘Memoirs of Avram Avramovic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1895, regarding his experiences in Belgrade, Skoplje, Bitolj and Albania’, Deposited as manuscript to Yad Vashem in 1955. Record Group: O.39 – Collection of Memoirs Written for the Yad Vashem Competition, File Number: 42. Yad Vashem O.75 – Letters and Postcards Collection, File Number 2646, Item ID 10725537.

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that allowed them to stay in Albania until the end of the war.70 The rest of their extended family was deported, along with all the Monastir Jewish inhabitants who obeyed deportation orders. While safe in Albania, the latest wave of refugees arrived without any possessions. After years on the run, those that came before them were also on the edge. Still more Jews kept arriving from Greece, escaping deportations there. Finding any work became impossible. Police reported a surge in clandestine immigration and trade in documents, for which the Italians accused the local Albanian authorities. The Albanian Ministry of the Interior intervened, rejected all accusations, released all those detained who were investigated for possessing or trading in documents, and allowed all Jews the right to asylum.71 In the meantime, the political situation deteriorated. Communist-led resistance against the Italian occupiers flared. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini was removed from power. While Italians rejoiced at what they believed to be the end of war, for the Jews under Italian protection in Albania and elsewhere, the real drama was only beginning.

Escaping and Hiding in Albania After the Italian Surrender Following the Italian armistice with the Allies, announced on 8 September 1943, Albania was occupied by Nazi Germany, along with other Italian-controlled areas in the Balkans. In took the Wehrmacht only a couple of months to complete the takeover, including taking many Italian soldiers as prisoners of war. Others hid with the Albanian villagers to avoid arrest, or tried to escape across the Adriatic to the Allied-controlled south of Italy, just like the other group of people that had good reason to fear the advancing Germans. In Kavajë, the Italian military commander assembled the heads of the Jewish families, announcing their withdrawal, and promising that they had destroyed all the records. The Albanian mayor then provided documents identifying them as citizens and Muslims.72 Some were sent away with the help of Albanian officials, like doctor Moše Đerasi, who was sent to Preza village by the Health Ministry.73 Being widely known in the small town of Kavajë, most Jewish refugees chose to leave and hide in remote villages, where the poorest of Albanians shared Interview with Tina Pardo, 18  October  2011. USHMM Museum Collection, Gift of Fundación Memoria Viva. Dell’Era, ‘The Italian Occupation of Albania’, p. 326. Jas̆a Altarac papers, 2002.438.1, USHMM Archives. Petrović, ‘Refugees’, p. 292.

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the little they had with the Jews they were hiding, or to move somewhere else, where nobody knew them.74 The same scenario repeated elsewhere, with the Albanian authorities issuing Jewish refugees with documents with false names to help them disguise themselves.75 Those who stayed in Albania with fake papers from Kosovo were also reassured.76 The Italian withdrawal also prompted the arrival of a few remaining refugees from Kosovo. This was the case of several members of the Skopje Konforti, Natan, and Cohen families, who for years sheltered in the house of Arslan Rezniqi in Dečani/Deçan, for which he was awarded the title of the Righteous.77 In their escape to Albania, the members of three large families were assisted by Pashuk Biba, whose brother Kol(y)a was an official in the Albanian government. In early December  1943, as Germans were still finalizing their takeover, a large group consisting of forty-two refugee Greek and Yugoslav Jews, led by a merchant from Zagreb, Erwin Fischer, sailed on a make-shift boat from Himarë, in the south of Albania. They paid a local man to fix an old boat and transport them across the so-called Otranto Strait to Italy. The refugees spent twenty days in a nearby village, waiting for the boat to be fixed. What followed, according to one of the passengers, Albert Nahmias, is distressingly similar to the fate of ‘the boat people’ in our times. First, as they were about to board, they encountered more than a hundred Italian soldiers, who were also hiding nearby in expectation of an escape across the sea. The group of Jewish refugees had no alternative but to accept them, even if it meant the boat was overloaded. Then, it took the smuggler twelve hours to start the boat’s diesel engine, before he disappeared, leaving the Jews and Italian ex-soldiers on their own. After eight hours of travel, the engine broke down, with the stranded passengers having no idea where they were or what to do. Left in the middle of the winter seas, they floated for the whole day, before salvation came in the shape of an aeroplane flying over, although they could not know whether it was a German or an Allied one. Desperate, they did everything to draw its attention. Fortunately, it was an Allied plane, which alerted staff on the ground, who Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, pp. 58–59; Petrović, ‘Refugees’, p. 291. ‘Memoirs of Avram Avramovic’. Interview with Marijana Munk. Several other Muslim families, such as the Ruli, Spahiu, and Rema families, and the Serbian Orthodox monks in the nearby monastery, also helped. ‘The Important Thing is that they Arrived Safely’, in Milan Fogel, Milan Ristović, and Milan Koljanin, Righteous Among the Nations: Serbia (Belgrade: Jewish Community Zemun, 2010), pp. 204–06. For a detailed account, see Dinah Spitalnik Konforti, Escape de los Balcanes: La Valiente Saga de los Konforti durante el Holocausto (n.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017).

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sent rescue. Exhausted but alive, the refugees were brought to Otranto, leaving all their possessions in the sinking boat.78 Similarly, in Shkodër, in the north, Rudi Abravanel and Bojana Konfino found a fisherman willing to take them to the shores of Puglia in the Allied-controlled part of Italy for a fee.79 The brothers Konforti from Skopje, who ran a business in Tirana, bought a boat themselves, and organized escape to Italy for those who could afford twenty golden Napoleons.80 Another boat left Shkodër, organized by a wealthy refugee called Melanow, and carrying a lot of refugees, but the news reached Irene Grünbaum and other potential travellers in Tirana too late for them to join.81 As most refugees had no money or valuables after years on the run, the vast majority remained in Albania. Initially, Nazi Germany did not proceed to implement the Final Solution in Albania, and declared that any moves to do so would be made only with the consent of the Albanian collaborationist government.82 More importantly, compared to other countries, the Nazis had the upper hand in Albania for less than a year. True, in Hungary that was more than enough to organize and implement the biggest deportation of all. Yet, as Perez has recently argued, when the Germans entered Albania, the imperative was to neutralize communist and other nationalist Albanian resistance forces, and thus secure strategically important territory for the German military retreat from Greece and Africa. The support of local elites in this effort took precedence over any plans to round up and exterminate the Jews.83 Thus, the Albanians were given full autonomy in interior affairs, and no pressure was exerted to deport the Jews, as was the case in other countries. The presence of Nazi German forces nevertheless meant that the Jews in Albania faced an existential threat. If discovered, the Jews could have been arrested and possibly deported. From early spring 1944, the Gestapo in Tirana embarked on an attempt to register the foreigners/Jews. Marijana Munk, who moved with her family from Durëss to Tirana, described their anguish about that order. But the local authorities registered them, accepting fake documents that they had brought from Kosovo, even Interview with Albert Nahmias. USHMM Collection, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. Tamara Aloni, ‘Over the Mountains into Albania’, We Survived  …3, p.  450; Jasna Ćirić, ‘Rafael Rudi Abravanel iz Pirota’ [accessed 25 June 2022]. Interview with Marko Menachem. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, pp. 88–93. Michele Sarfatti, La Shoah in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), p. 151; Bernd Jurgen Fischer, L’Anschluss italiano: la Guerra in Albania (1939–1945) (Nardo: Besa, 2004), p. 236; Sinani, Albanians and Jews, pp. 148–52 with relevant documents. Perez, ‘Our Conscience is Clean’, p. 28.

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though they knew they were fake. A much bigger concern for the police was the Partisans, and any links that the refugees might have with them, rather than their Jewish background.84 Collaborationist forces struggled against the Partisan resistance, who by that time controlled most of the south of Albania, and by summer the clashes spread throughout the country. Nazi German ability to implement any policy was further diminished by the mass arrival of Wehrmacht troops withdrawing from Africa, and by November  1944, all German troops had retreated from Albania. Survivors describe 1944 as the longest year in their lives, spent in constant fear, and search for safety or hideout. As a single woman in a very patriarchal environment, Grünbaum had to overcome much more than dearth and hunger. Throughout her ordeal, Grünbaum refused the role of a victim, and avoided countless men who tried to take advantage of her as a refugee. When, immediately after the war, she decided to record her autobiography, Irene Grünbaum continued her endeavour, as Morris rightly pointed out in her analysis of this remarkable source.85 Just as she asserted herself as a Jewish woman during the war, despite the marginalization or extermination that society had in store for her, so she chose not to remain invisible to herself and the world after her ordeal was finished. Grünbaum too had to flee the safety of Kavajë once the Germans arrived. On her way to the mountains, she was arrested by the Communist Partisans as a suspicious foreigner. The connections she had made in Kavajë, and the survival skills acquired during years on the run, helped her once again.86 Most refugee families turned to the few contacts with local Albanians that they had established during the Italian rule. The family of Serbian Jewish photographer Moshe Mandil was interned for a short time in Kavajë, before being released to free confinement. Mandil could practise his profession, and even hired a sixteen-year-old Albanian boy, Refik Veseli, as an assistant. With the Germans advancing, Refik Veseli became the Mandils’ saviour, as he took and hid them in his hometown of Kruja. Soon, they were joined by another family, the Ben-Yosefs. When the Germans came searching for the Jews, none of the villagers gave up the Jewish families, although they all knew that the Veselis were hiding them. Both families survived the war, thanks to the courage and generosity of the Veselis and their neighbours.87 The Mevorah family fled Interview with Marijana Munk. Katherine Morris, ‘Balkan Exile: The Autobiography of Irene Gruenbaum’, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 39/1 (1994), 239–53. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, pp. 62–77. Gavra Mandil, Život u crno-belim slikama (Nova Pazova: Bonart, 2003). Refik and his parents were included among ‘The Righteous Among the Nations’ in 1987.

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Kavajë to the isolated village of Preza, sent by the owner of the house in which they had stayed. Often, the conditions in the villages were unbearable, without fuel for heating and food, so come spring 1944, the Mevorahs and many others decided to descend back to Tirana and other cities, hoping that their anonymity would protect them. By that time, the civil war was raging, and nowhere was secure. Yet both Partisan (Communist) forces and nationalist militias made efforts to protect Jews. Often, they were housed with the families of commanders, who could be trusted. Vida Mevorah and her two daughters fled Tirana again, but this time they were protected by the nationalist officer Nu Pali and his family in the village of Miloti.88 Jewish families interned in Vlorë/Valona flew to Mount Dajti, and several of them stayed in the village of Shen Gjergj (St George), where villagers helped them hide and survive.89 Nina and David Kohen, two of the very few to survive from the large Jewish community in Ioannina, Greece, fled to Vlorë (Valona), when the Nazis took over, and then hid in a small Muslim village in the Albanian mountains, called Trevlazer. They took Muslim names, so David became Daut, Nina became Bule, and their son Elio became Ali. Everyone in the village knew they were Jews, but not one person betrayed them, as their daughter Anna frequently stated in her efforts to raise awareness about the rescue of Jews in Albania.90 The Baruhovićs in Shkodër moved from a nice central apartment to a run-down Muslim area, and changed their names to Muslim ones to disguise themselves. It all went well, until the Wehrmacht withdrawal from Greece brought so many German soldiers to Shkodër, and four of them moved in with Sida (Simha) Baruhović and her two children. After initial tensions, she realized that the soldiers were against Hitler, so she spoke up in German, and immediately they came to terms with each other. Sida, who was a wife of a royal officer in Zagreb with a maid and a batman before the war, was now washing the linen of German soldiers in Albania in return for food. Even after the German command realized that her husband and the whole family might be Jewish, they left them in peace, as military evacuation took priority.91 Nearby, Marilena Langu Dojaka was born in 1942, after her mother Hermina Stein fled there from Czechoslovakia, where the rest of family later perished in camps. In 1944, Hermina and baby Marilena found refuge with an Albanian family in the northern town of Mat, who hid them in the mountains or in a Petrović, ‘Refugees’, p. 293. Navonović, ‘From Captivity to Captivity’, p. 300. See Anna Kohen at [accessed 25 June 2022]. Baruhović, ‘Under the Same Roof as the Germans’, pp. 432–36.

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cellar each time the Nazis were passing by. Hermina and Marilena kept close ties with the Albanian family who protected them, and, like Marko Menachem, eventually remained to live in the country after the war.92 Others sought safety in Tirana, which offered some level of anonymity. They were selling the last of their jewellery and possessions to survive. Again, the best chronicler is Irene Grünbaum, who returned from the mountains, along with many others looking for jobs, food, or any miserable opportunity that Tirana under German occupation could offer, in comparison to the countryside ravaged by civil war. She describes encountering many old acquaintances from Belgrade, Skopje, Kavajë, and other stations of her extreme travelogue. She accepted any job she was offered. What hurt her more than physical labour or sleeping among rats was the arrogance or avoidance she experienced from refugee men, who gathered in Café Berlin in central Tirana discussing their situation, but leaving her, as a woman, out of their plans.93 Her fortunes changed when she found work as a German teacher, and encountered some prominent people close to the ruling circles, which brought improvements, but also dangers. Partisans would come into Tirana and execute collaborators, while Germans, who she met regularly, could discover her Jewishness.94 Avram Avramović and his wife and daughter were also hiding in Tirana with the help of the Christian Orthodox (arch)bishop of Tirana, Kristofor Kissi (born in 1881, and died by poisoning in 1948). The bishop could not take them, as his residence was already full, but he sent them to somewhere they could stay. Conditions were miserable, but the Avramović family survived the German occupation in Tirana, and they boarded the first military convoys with supplies back to Yugoslavia in February 1945.95 The Pardos from Monastir were initially renting a home from the Stermasi family in Tirana, who knew that they were Jews. According to Tina Pardo, life in Tirana was bearable, and some Jewish children like her attended school, until summer 1944, when bombing and turmoil ended any sense of normalcy. The city was bombed by both the British and the Germans, so the Pardos decided to leave once again, going to the mountains in Brar, where they survived with the help of Albanian Partisans.96 Others remained in the suburbs, observing columns of Germans withdrawing.

Sally Mairs and Briseida Mema, ‘In Albania, a Unique Jewish History Museum on the Brink’, The Times of Israel, 4 March 2019. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, p. 91. Ibid., pp. 102–11. ‘Memoirs of Avram Avramovic’. After spending four years in Italy, the Pardo family emigrated to Chile, joining other Bitola Jews, who had moved there in the interwar period. Interview with Tina Pardo.

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There were many deserters, and, by that stage, the German troops were in such disorder that one could bribe them for anything, according to one survivor.97 Through another refugee, Schwarz, who married an Albanian, Marko Menachem made contact with engineer Selim Zuma.98 Through Zuma, Menachem got a fake ID and a job in Cërrik with Ibrahim Biçaku, Bey of Elbasan, one of the greatest landowners, and last Prime Minister during the German occupation. From there, he ended in an alcohol factory owned by another Elbasan aristocrat, and one of the most powerful men in the country, Vasil Nosi. That proved lifesaving for Menachem, when he got into trouble for murdering a German SS officer. Vasil hid Menachem with the help of his brother Nos and sister Adelina, enjoying the protection of their powerful uncle Lef, one of the three regents during the German occupation. After the war, Lef Nosi was executed, and Vasil Nosi died in prison, but after almost half a century, his brother Nos, sister Adelina or their descendants received The Righteous among the Nations for saving Marko Menachem. Paradoxically, after the war and Communist takeover, Menachem was also arrested and sentenced to four years in prison for connection to his employer’s uncle, Lef Nosi, even though Menachem shared Communist views.99 Whether nationalist collaborationist or anti-fascist Partisan – and many others, mostly apolitical – the stories about Albanian rescuers mentioned above may be best summed up by Grünbaum, as she wrote immediately after the war: The populace of Albania, regardless of social status or political persuasion, helped almost without exception. Their sense of justice wouldn’t allow them to refuse the right of asylum to innocent men, women, and children.100

How many Jews survived in Albania after the German withdrawal could not be exactly ascertained, due to records which were purposefully doctored, or neglected altogether. Sinani, in his highly polemical book, Albanians and Jews, claims that 2265 (or around three thousand) Jews were protected in Albania during the German occupation, although he does not provide evidence, and

Interview with Marijana Munk. Schwarz, who was Austrian, married an Albanian woman from Elbasan in Sarajevo, where their son Robert was born, and fled to Albania when the war started. They would remain there after the war, and Robert Shvarc (Albanianized spelling) became a writer and an outstanding translator from German. Interview with Marko Menachem. Because of his knowledge of languages and technical skills, Menachem was released after a year and tasked with technical translations. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, p. 83.

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this contradicts all other authors who have written on the issue.101 True, there were some, such as Irene Grünbaum, who were not registered, and thus are not recorded in the statistics, but they were exceptional. Italian documents regularly report small numbers, reaching the highest of four hundred in April 1943, after the deportations from Macedonia.102 As the bulk of refugees came from Yugoslavia, the evidence and testimonies collected by their Jewish organizations may be the most relevant in estimating the numbers to be in hundreds rather than thousands.

Kosovo Deportation In 1944, the situation in Kosovo, where the Germans similarly took over from the Italians, differed dramatically from that in Albania. A local Albanian (the 21st Waffen) SS division Skanderbeg, commanded by SS Brigadier August Schmidhuber, was formed to fight the Yugoslav Partisans, and to keep the region under German control.103 Among many atrocities committed, mostly against the local Serb population, the SS division Skanderbeg also contributed to the Holocaust. Between 28 May and 5 July 1944, Skanderbeg SS volunteers apprehended hundreds of Jews, Serbs, Albanians, and others – communists, anti-fascists, or simply people in the wrong place at the wrong time – and turned them over to the Germans. They were placed in a special holding camp in Pristina, before at least three hundred were deported to Bergen-Belsen in one of the last transports to death camps from the Balkans.104 There are still disputes about how many of the victims were Jewish, with Sinani and Barjaktari claiming that only forty-three native Kosovo Jews perished,105 Sinani, Albanians and Jews, pp. 159, 169. The article above from The Times of Israel also mentions over two thousand Jews rescued, an exaggeration probably coming from the same source. Dell’Era, ‘The Italian Occupation of Albania’, pp. 326–27, also mentions a report stating that there were one thousand Jews in Albania by summer 1943, but this is based on an irrelevant, anti-Semitic article in a local newspaper. After six months in existence, and following mass desertions within its ranks, poor combat record, and history of atrocities, the division was disbanded on 1  November  1944. Schmidthuber was captured by the Red Army, after the SS Division Prinz Eugen that he subsequently commanded surrendered in May 1945. He was turned over to the Yugoslav authorities and executed as a war criminal in 1947. Franziska A. Zaugg, Albanische Muslime in der Waffen-SS: Von “Großalbanien” zur Division “Skanderbeg” (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016), pp. 254–58. This is backed up by the German list, published by Robert Elsie, of 789 people detained in August in the Pristina holding camp, where only 43 could be positively identified as

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whereas testimonies of survivors from Bergen-Belsen, such as Rebeka Hara, insisted on three hundred Jews being deported by Albanians in SS uniforms, who had previously robbed them of all their possessions.106 Due to the scarcity of sources, previous studies have had difficulty in establishing a full account of these deportations, and the exact responsibility of German and Albanian actors, but most authors have recorded between two hundred and two hundred and eighty Jewish victims.107 Criminal acts, arrests, deportations, and murders, committed by the Albanian SS Skanderbeg division in Kosovo, are not disputed however. On the other hand, the data reveal only a single Jewish family deported from Albania in 1944.108

Humanity and Modernity As in other areas under Italian occupation, described in the previous two chapters, testimonies from Albania insist on the lack of official anti-Semitism. Moreover, the Italian military, and civil and local Albanian officials, never complied with any bans that were issued, which explains the arrival and survival of several hundred (or possibly a thousand) Jews until September 1943. This changed only in 1944, when Albania fell under German occupation. The preliminary exploration of the specificity of the Albanian rescue that took place in that year by Yad Vashem revealed that almost all cases it studied were refugees, rather than the Albanian Jews, because the latter did not consider going into hiding, and simply trusted that their neighbours would protect them. The crucial question for the investigation by the Department of the Righteous was the extent of danger to the rescuers from the German occupiers and local Jewish:  [accessed 25 June 2022]. Rebeka Hara, ‘From Pristina to Bergen-Belsen’, We Survived …, pp. 275–81. Hara lost her mother in the camp. Remarkably, two Muslim women married to Jews, Emine Hilmi and Farie Hilmi, were also among those who were deported and perished. Perez, ‘Our Conscience is Clean’, p. 29. Noel Malcolm in Kosovo: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 310, and Bernd Fischer in Albania at War, p. 187, put the figure above two hundred. The only Albanian Jewish family who were deported and perished in the Holocaust were the Arditis from Shkodër: father Yitzhak (born 1880), wife Luna (born 1888), their three sons, Leon (born 1913, a pharmacist), Daris (born 1917, a physician), and Ugo (born 1922, a violinist), and their daughter, Lucia (born 1910). According to some testimonies, the Arditis were caught because of their deep confidence that they were safe, whereas others attributed it to their links with the Partisans. See Nidam-Orvieto and Steinfeldt, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Albania’, p. 6; Villari, ‘La presenza ebraica in Albania’, p. 341.

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collaborators. It concluded that the fear of denunciation in Albania was less of a real threat than in other countries, as evidenced by some survivors, collaborators, or the Albanian nationalist forces, protecting Jews equally, if not more, than the Communist-led Partisans. Furthermore, most of the rescued were families, not individuals, which is also different from other countries. More specifically, in about half of the cases, the rescuers were either well-to-do businessmen or landowners, and about half were Muslims. As we have seen, in most cases, the rescuers previously knew the rescued from working together or renting them property before September 1943. When the danger arose, the Albanians simply invited and hid Jews in their homes, or with their families in the countryside. Housing or hiding Jews was a well-known fact to the extended family of the rescuer, but also often to all villagers, without this ever becoming a libel. The bond created was so deep that after the war several marriages took place between members of the rescuer and rescued families.109 Most remarkably, the cases in the Albanian files in Yad Vashem, and the survivors’ testimonies sketched here, point to rescue primarily as an individual, not an organized, activity. Religious affiliation or political opinions had no influence on the decision to help other fellow humans. Rescue took place among both rural and urban populations, and was provided by the Albanians and ethnic minorities alike, proving that the notion of Besa as an explanation is simplistic. Besides, as pointed out by Sinani, the foremost researcher in Albania, it would not explain the similar approach to rescue beyond Albania.110 Lack of anti-Semitism, as elsewhere in the Balkans, was a contributing factor, but the respect for the guest, and for human life, in Albanian society mattered much more. As aptly put by Gavra Mandil, who initiated the process of including Albanian rescuers in the process of awarding the title of ‘the Righteous among the Nations’: The Albanians are simple people, but very kind-hearted, warm and humane. They may not have been educated on the heritage of Goethe and Schiller, but they attach the greatest importance to human life, in a most natural and unquestioning way. In those dark days, when Jewish life in Europe did not count for much, Albanians protected the Jews with love, dedication, and sacrifice.111

In a similar vein, Marko Menachem recalled the biggest lesson of his life, which he learnt upon his arrival in Tirana. After finally being able to wash, change his clothes, and put on his new shoes, Menachem slipped on the stairs, stepping Nidam-Orvieto and Steinfeldt, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Albania’, pp. 6–10. Sinani, Albanians and Jews, p. 139. Nidam-Orvieto and Steinfeldt, ‘The Rescue of Jews in Albania’, p. 3.

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on what appeared to be human excrement, and fell. Dirtied and disgusted, he wondered who these ‘primitives’ were, leaving excrement on the street, only to be told by an elderly Belgrade Jew not to complain. ‘These primitives will save your life’, said the experienced refugee, ‘just as they saved countless others, and you should pray that Albanians remain primitive’.112 Vulgar and banal at first sight, Marko Menachem’s story illustrates the experience of many refugees in Albania and throughout the Balkans, which has not been conveyed or confronted in historiography. Time and again, we come across the Jewish survivors’ frequent descriptions of the Balkans as primitive. Nowadays, we assume the negative semantics of the term, but earlier generations commonly used the notion as in the term ‘Primitive art’, denoting art from certain cultures, judged socially or technologically ‘primitive’ by the West, such as native American or sub-Saharan African. By the late twentieth century, the term was considered derogatory, and it fell out of favour. Recently, the grand museum of ‘primitive arts’ in Paris aptly changed the name of its collection to ‘first arts’  (les ‘arts premiers’). Likewise, the rescue and humanity experienced by the Jewish refugees in the Balkans could be similarly reinterpreted, not as ‘primitive’, but as the ‘first’ or original. Coincidentally, the Balkans are the cradle of European civilization, so one can claim that Marko Menachem learned the lesson of that First Europe in Albania, the lesson that the rest of Europe had struggled to understand and appreciate. Marko Menachem understood and embraced the Albanian people and country as his own. Not even the red terror established by Enver Hoxha’s Communists, who imprisoned him for four years, could dissuade him. He remained in Albania, forming a family, and becoming a prominent professor and author of several tens of textbooks in technical subjects. Paradoxically, the only ‘European’ (Austrian) Jew with close knowledge of, and relationship with, Albania prior to the war could not be saved. Norbert Jokl (1877 – probably May 1942), considered to be one of the fathers of Albanology, abandoned his law degree to pursue linguistics, most notably Slavistics and Romance languages, before he taught himself Albanian, an Indo-European language that had been barely studied before. Established as a librarian at Vienna University, Jokl was awarded the title of Professor extraordinarius, and, in 1937, was made a Hofrat (Privy Councillor) for his achievements, only to be discharged the following year, following the Anschluss. Attempts in 1939 and 1940, by some of his students and colleagues, as well as those of the Albanian writer Gjergj Fishta and the Italian Foreign Ministry, to have Jokl move to Albania never materialized. On 4 March 1942, Jokl was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to a pre-deportation camp in Vienna. A couple of months later, Interview with Marko Menachem.

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Jokl was reported on a deportation train to Minsk, where he was murdered. According to other reports, Jokl died from mistreatment in the Vienna camp, or committed suicide on the train. His rich library of over three thousand books was confiscated, and taken to the National Library of Austria, despite his wish to bequeath it to Albania.113

Georg Renatus Solta, ‘Jokl, Norbert’, in Neue Deutsche Biographie, 10 (1974), p.  585; see  [accessed 25 June 2022]; Jacomoni, La politica dell’Italia in Albania, p. 183.

Chapter 8

Resistance of Jewish Refugees in Yugoslavia The last chapter offers a different story – that of resistance and hope regardless of circumstances. The sheer number of examples below, and the multitude of forms of resistance, suggests that their inclusion is not just a positive token, but a crucial part of the story that this book is telling. The historiography of resistance, vast as it may be, has been dominated by studies of the types of resistance that could be easily documented or explained. This necessarily prioritizes armed resistance, or activities that involve groups, networks, logistics, communication, and a certain hierarchy of command. This bias will be reflected in this chapter, providing insight into anti-fascist resistance of the Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia before the war, and then discussing at length their participation as Partisans, while also analysing the nature of that involvement. While the vulnerable position of refugees, often on the move and without any property, prevented them from engaging in many other types of non-violent resistance commonly associated with sabotage at the workplace, undermining authority, listening to foreign (Radio London) broadcasts, and so on, it will provide for some other resistance and survival strategies, unveiling the variety of Jewish subjectivity and agency during the Holocaust. For some Jewish refugees, resistance was not only a political and eventually a military struggle, but also a complex and transformative experience from marginalized expellees into conscious political subjects and actors. Therefore, this chapter will also aim to illustrate how refugee flight, and especially wartime experience, impacted forcefully on their political and cultural identities, and left a lasting legacy on their lives.

Resistance Before the War After years of progressive discrimination, abuse, and dehumanization, which brought many to absolute deprivation and desperation, escaping became the most common response of German Jews. Fleeing and surviving fundamentally undermined the Nazi German goal of extermination of Jews. Assisting others in flight or hiding, not wearing the Yellow Star, spreading information, and organizing life and education in places of hiding or internment/concentration camps became the means of resistance available to refugees. Some Jews who fled to Yugoslavia continued their anti-fascist political activities, or

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engaged in them for the first time, while in exile, long before they were physically threatened. In their new temporary refuge, some maintained links with former political allies, while others created new networks and outlets for resistance. The most researched among the latter were those in connection with the activities of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS-MI6) D Section. From 1938, British Intelligence aimed at drawing Yugoslavia into the respective system of alliances or, when this became impossible, at preventing it from being taken into the opposing camp.1 The head of its operations in Yugoslavia was Julius Hanau, a South African Jew, who fought on the Salonika front in the First World War, and remained in Belgrade after the war. Hanau became a representative of several British companies and gained prominence as one of the founders of Radio Belgrade in 1927, set up as Marconi Wireless Co. Capital, which he was representing.2 Among many languages, Hanau was fluent in Serbian, and he maintained ties with Anglophile members of Belgrade political and military elites, as well as with his SIS associates, mostly British engineers in the Yugoslav mining industry.3 To intensify its operations, now aiming directly against Germany and its interests, Hanau needed more agents, and he sought them among anti-fascist and anti-German forces on a local level, exiles from the Reich being the most obvious choice. The German Security Service was well aware of the British connections among Jewish refugees in Zagreb and elsewhere, as the network of agents emerged in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Maribor on the Reich’s border too. As Pirker points out, their life experiences helped them to operate in different national contexts, to maintain subversive, trans-border connections, and to transfer the knowledge now needed to Peter Pirker from the University of Klagenfurt has researched the resistance activities of some Jewish exiles in Belgrade and beyond in connection with British agencies in Gegen das Dritte Reich: Widerstand und Sabotage in Österreich und Slowenien, 1938–1940 (Klagenfurt: Kitab Verlag, 2010), and ‘Transnational Resistance in the Alps-Adriatic-Area in 1939/40: On Subversive Border-Crossers, Historical Interpretations and National Politics of the Past’, Acta Histriae, 20 (4) (2012), 841–64. Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi. p.  107. In 1940, Hanau was withdrawn from Belgrade to London as the biggest thorn in German eyes, but he returned after the occupation to liaise with Monarchist Četniks. His brilliant career ended abruptly in 1943 in Cairo, when he died of a suspected heart attack. For more information about Hanau’s wartime activities as the key, and actually the first, agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), see John Grehan and Martin Mace, Unearthing Churchill’s Secret Army: The Official List of SOE Casualties and Their Stories (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2012), p. 16, and Nick van der Bijl, Sharing the Secret: The History of the Intelligence Corps, 1940–2010 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013), p. 74. Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi, provides a general framework of British and German influences on Belgrade elites in this period, whereas Jerca Vodušek Starič, ‘The Concurrence of Allied and Yugoslav Intelligence Aims and Activities’, Journal of Intelligence History, 5 (1) (2005), 29–44 looks at the intelligence networks in detail.

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sabotage their former homeland.4 The operations included smuggling pamphlets, vilification of German businesses and business interests, organizing anti-German demonstrations, and, in the case of Slovenia, supplying Slovene anti-German groups (both in Yugoslavia and among Slovene minorities in Italy and Austria) with money, explosives, and weapons in order to attack transportation lines, power plants, and industrial and armament production centres.5 Finally, it included biological warfare, such as the well-documented case of attempting to spread foot-and-mouth disease and potato plague. The British, personified by Lieutenant Colonel Hanau (code name Caesar), could count on support from the Yugoslav state apparatus, especially from the pro-British Yugoslav counter-intelligence and the Ministry of the Interior.6 Communist and Zionist activists from both sides of the political divide already informally allied with the Yugoslav army and officers in their anti-German stance and, just like Britain, hoped that Yugoslavia would be able to divert Germany.7 But, as Pirker has demonstrated, anti-German acts and sabotage were rare and exceptional, and they could only be imagined as instigated and backed by the British Secret Service. The names of two German Jewish refugees, both very prominent in these operations, need to be mentioned. They both came from the ranks of the German Social Democrats (SPD), and they were politically ostracized immediately after Hitler assumed power. The better known of the two is Jakob Altmaier, born in Flörsheim am Main in 1889, in a family of local bakers.8 Altmaier became an SPD activist in 1913 and volunteered in the First World War, barely surviving after being severely wounded. After the war, he participated in the German revolution and became a well-known left-wing journalist in the Weimar Republic. Among other newspapers, he wrote for Kurt Tucholsky’s Weltbühne, and he was a Berlin correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He wrote the longest for the Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst and Vorwärts, for which he reported from his Paris and Belgrade exile, and from the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, Altmaier Pirker, ‘Transnational Resistance in the Alps-Adriatic-Area in 1939/40’, p. 842. An eyewitness account by Josef Trapp, a member of a Communist resistance group in Austria/Yugoslavia, details the networks and sabotage. Wiener Library, 1656/3/7/1056. Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi, pp.  107–08, lists all Hanau’s confidants, including proGerman Prime Minister Stojadinović, the leadership of the Anglophile Agrarian Party, Ministers of the Interior, generals, prominent intellectuals, and journalists. Interview with Francis and Eili Ofner, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Tape 2. There are two biographies of Altmaier: Christoph Moss, Jakob Altmaier: ein jüdischer Sozialdemokrat in Deutschland (1889–1963) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003); and Werner Schiele, An der Front der Freiheit: Jakob Altmaiers Leben für die Demokratie (Flörsheim: Magistrat der Stadt Flörsheim, 1991).

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joined German Freedom Party Radio, based on a British ship in the English Channel and broadcasting to Germany against the Nazi rule. From the Atlantic, Altmaier came to Belgrade, where he had close ties with several British journalists. From then on, he was working for D Section of the British SIS, keeping important links with the leadership of the Anglophile leftist Agrarian Party, with which he also had a shared political agenda. We also read about Altmaier in the recollections of the Schohl family from his hometown of Flörsheim, as he put them in a hotel whose owner he knew in Belgrade, and arranged temporary residences for them through his Yugoslav Police contacts.9 A second German exile in the British secret service was Alfred Becker, son of the rich Prussian landowner and SPD politician Arthur Becker, a rather rare combination and a prominent figure described as ‘Red Jew’ by his conservative enemies.10 Alfred inherited a landed estate near Schwerin and became an expert in agricultural economics, but, like his father, he chose a political career instead, working towards land reform for the SPD and in the League for Human Rights. The latter got him into trouble with the National Socialists, and he fled to the Netherlands and France. However, we find him with his family in Yugoslavia in 1936, where he found employment in the Yugoslav Ministry of Agriculture. According to Pirker, Becker and Altmaier initially produced anti-Nazi pamphlets, fliers, and magazines, mostly directed at the German ethnic minority in Yugoslavia (such as Deutsche Mitteilungen).11 This was then extended to propaganda material in German, which was smuggled into Austria and Germany. Pirker found evidence that Becker was directly involved in acts of sabotage, more specifically infecting cattle bound for Germany with footand-mouth disease. Similar to Altmaier’s links with the opposition and government circles in Belgrade, Becker established links with the anti-fascist and national liberal Slovenian underground, both in Austria and in fascist Italy. As the two-hundred-page secret report ordered by Reinhard Heidrich in 1940 concluded, all attempts to purge the Yugoslav police and security apparatus of anti-German and British influence failed, and Yugoslavs ‘only pretended’ to ally with German interests.12 Altmaier and Becker were among the few German exiles prepared to fight Nazi Germany also using military means immediately after the war started. After the subversion campaign was busted in 1940, Altmaier fled from Belgrade Large, And the World Closed its Doors, p. 194. Wolfgang Wilhelmus, ‘Arthur Becker: Agrarier-Sozialdemokrat-Jude’, in Wegweiser durch das jüdische Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, ed. by Irene Diekmann (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1998), pp. 429–47. Pirker, ‘Transnational Resistance in the Alps-Adriatic-Area in 1939/40’, pp. 849–51. Ibid., p. 849.

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to Athens, where he continued working as a propagandist, and eventually to Cairo, where he spent the war in the British headquarters as a Balkan expert.13 Becker continued in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), founded by Winston Churchill in 1940. He fled from Belgrade to Istanbul, where he recruited a few other Austrians for subversive British warfare, and then proceeded to SOE operations in Palestine and Kenya.14 True, the few British spies and German exiles working for them had to leave the country, but most of them returned as experts a year later, after the German occupation of Yugoslavia, or continued their work from elsewhere. Zagreb and Maribor, and Yugoslavia in general, naturally harboured other anti-fascists from neighbouring Austria – from Catholic conservatives and Monarchists to revolutionary socialists and, the most active ones, the Communists.15 They produced, and smuggled back to Austria, anti-fascist literature, party instructions, and money, forged passports, and documents, and they maintained networks of resisters throughout the continent. While not exactly refugees, these political activists first tried and patented illegal border crossings that were later crossed by Jewish refugees using the same mountain paths, and sometimes the same couriers. Whereas in the 1920s Austrian Jewish Communist activists such as Manès Sperber or Karl Steiner were the key organizers and instructors of their Yugoslav comrades, by the 1930s, leading Austrian Communists had to hide or meet in Yugoslavia.16 In 1939, they made Zagreb their headquarters in exile, headed by a prominent Jewish Communist, Viennese architect Julius ‘Bobby’ Kornweitz.17 In Zagreb, Kornweitz stayed Jakob Altmaier was one of the few Jewish refugees who returned to Germany and became very active in Germany’s second attempt at democracy, even though he lost his siblings and many other members of his family in the Holocaust. He represented SPD again as the only deputy that officially declared his Jewish confession in the first session of the Bundestag. Initially he led secret negotiations with the state of Israel, and he was eventually responsible for the 1952 Luxemburg reparation treaty between West Germany and Israel. His rich and dramatic political career came to an abrupt end in 1963, when he died in his Bundestag office. Jakob Altmaier’s papers are kept in the archives of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Berlin and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Alfred Becker also returned to Germany, and he died in 1967 in West Berlin. Heimo Halbrainer, ‘Maribor und Zagreb als Orte des politischen Exils und Drehscheiben des österreichischen Widerstands’, Zwischenwelt, 27 (1/2) (2010), 44–49. Steiner’s life and work were a major inspiration for Danilo Kiš’s book of stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, published in 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. His own book, Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, published in 1971, about his experiences in the Gulag was a bestseller translated into many languages. For more on Kornweitz’s activities in Yugoslavia, see Hans Schafranek, ‘Julius Kornweitz und Leo Gabler – Auslandsemissäre der KPÖ im Visier der Gestapo’, in Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Wiederstandes, Jahrbuch 2011(Vienna: DöW, 2011), pp. 185–208.

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with a young lawyer, Franz (Franjo) Baum, a native of Yugoslavia who studied and worked in Vienna, where he had befriended Kornweitz. The meetings with other Communists, most importantly with Leo Gabler, who came to Zagreb from Moscow to assist in reviving the party, often took place in Zagreb’s cafés and parks. The safest environment for the meetings was provided by Frank Öhler in his lodgings. Öhler was one of the owners and heirs of Kästner und Öhler, the first and foremost department store chain in Austria, which also had a branch in Zagreb, the famous NAMA, Zagreb’s largest and most luxurious store.18 Öhler had to escape to Yugoslavia after the Anschluss, when his department stores in Austria were Aryanized.19 Not a Communist himself, Öhler was supportive of resistance to the Nazis.20 From later police interrogation of Kornweitz, we learn that Öhler financially supported the Austrian Communists while opposing their views, and especially the Soviet neutral stance after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939.21 In early 1941, after learning about the Gestapo’s discovery and arrest of leading Communists in Austria, Kornweitz returned to Vienna, as instructed from Moscow, to set up new leadership structures, but he was arrested, investigated, and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was killed in 1944.22 Franz (Franjo) Baum was in the first group of Zagreb lawyers arrested by the Ustaša, deported to Gospić camp, and slaughtered by the Ustaša on the island of Pag in summer 1941. His two-years older brother and his father were murdered in the same year. Franz Öhler stayed in Zagreb, planning to emigrate further to Turkey, but he was prevented by the Nazi attack on Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Ustaša state. He was also among the first prominent Jews in Zagreb to be arrested in May 1941, but as a non-Yugoslav he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he remained incarcerated for the duration of war and died one day after the liberation in 1945. His wife Gertrude also perished. Their property was nationalized by the Ustaša, and all their Jewish and Serbian workers were fired. A brief history of the department store is available: ‘Die Geschichte von Kastner und Öhler’ [accessed 14 November 2021]. Recently the story of the Zagreb branch and its employees has been told in Rory Yeomans, ‘Purifying the Shop Floor: Kastner and Oehler Department Store as a Case Study of Aryanisation in Wartime Europe’. Yeomans assumes that the Öhlers were deported and murdered in 1943. Halbrainer, ‘Maribor und Zagreb’, p. 48. Schafranek, ‘Julius Kornweitz und Leo Gabler’, p. 190. His short biography, ‘Julius Kornweitz, espion et resistant’ is available at [accessed 14 November 2021]. His older brother Nathan escaped to Belgium, where he was active in the Communist resistance until he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. He died the following year.

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In the interwar period, the Yugoslav police reported on, arrested, or expelled a number of Jewish Communist and Anarchist activists who came from Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary, yet, besides their files containing names and countries of origin, we know little of their activities and whether any remained.23 Therefore, it is interesting and illustrative to have a closer look at the case study of a network in Sarajevo – made up of Anarchist activist Helmut Klose, his friend/partner Elsa Riewe, writer Hans Hartlieb, painter Willy Hempel, and his wife Marta – produced by Vladan Vukliš, based on a Sarajevo police investigation.24 Helmut Klose was born in Jankemühle (Brandenburg, Germany) on 4  August  1904, the second of six children born to Fernardine Klose and her husband Bernhard, a Jewish miller. Having lost his father in the First World War, Klose was forced to work from a young age, and he only managed to finish his education in the late 1920s, when he was already a prominent anarcho-syndicalist activist and journalist, while taking jobs in mining and road construction. With Gregor Gog (1891–1945), Klose was among the founders of Der Bruderschaft der Vagabunden (The Vagabond Brotherhood), and, in 1929, he helped to organize an International Conference of Vagabonds in Stuttgart. The same year, he acted in the film Vagabund, directed by Fritz Weiss. Politically active in Berlin from the 1930s, Klose was under particular threat from the SA and SS, and he fled Germany for Austria, and then to Yugoslavia, where he obtained a residence permit from the Sarajevo police because of his Jewish faith.25 Klose worked as a German teacher and tour guide for the Putnik travel agency in Sarajevo. Three years later, his friend/partner Elsa Riewe was refused extension of her residence permit by the same police, but that was soon resolved by her marriage to a Yugoslav citizen. In January 1937, the Sarajevo police discovered that Klose was receiving printed material from Barcelona (publications of CNT-FAI and Direkte Aktion), and they decided to withhold his residence permit. Klose was summoned by the police, and from the hearing we learn about his activities – uninterrupted links with German Communists and Anarchists, his role in the distribution of Communist/Anarchist literature among German exiles in Yugoslavia, and so on.26 It was only at this stage that the police inspector realized that Klose had arrived and registered in Yugoslavia AJ, Ministarstvo Unutrašnjih Poslova, Državni Sud za Zaštitu Države, AJ, MUP (DSZD), Fond 135. Vladan Vukliš, ‘Sarajevski dosije Helmuta Klozea: 1933–1937’, Prilozi, 44 (2015), 181–205. Ibid., p. 186. In his application submitted to the Sarajevo police in September 1933, Klose wrote that after spending some time in Apatin (a German minority populated town) and Belgrade, he settled in Sarajevo, where he planned to write for German newspapers. The police issued the permit less than a month later. Ibid., p. 189–95.

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with a forged passport. Expelling Klose without any travel document proved difficult, as the German consul refused to issue him with a Passavant (a temporary document in order to return to Germany). While the Sarajevo police waited for a response from higher authorities about how to deport him, Klose escaped on his own to Austria. There, he was arrested and deported to Italy, but he then managed to reach his destination via Switzerland and France. In Spain, Klose joined anarchist volunteers, and we know of his later whereabouts.27 Back in Sarajevo, having belatedly realized about his political activities, the police intensified their surveillance of Klose’s friends and alleged links with Yugoslav Communists in Split and Sarajevo. From Klose’s letter from Spain, intercepted by the police, we learn that other members of the ‘German’ group also planned volunteering in Spain, and that Klose advised them to reach Switzerland first. As a result of this investigation, the permit of residence issued to Hans Hartlieb (which explicitly stated that he was not a Jew) back in 1933 was revoked, and he was forced to leave the country, whereas Elsa Riewe was saved from expulsion because of her marriage to a Yugoslav.28 Some younger refugees joined local political activists and resisters, most notably the Communists, whose activities had been illegal in Yugoslavia since 1920. Among them, we find three young women. Livia Lili(ka) Boehm (Böhm), who came from Hungary to Novi Sad in the 1920s, worked as a clerk and became a Communist youth and women activist, as well as a member of the local Hashomer Hatzair. After the Hungarian occupation, Lili joined the resistance task force, and she was elected as a member of the regional Communist leadership before she was arrested by the Hungarian police while carrying a gun and hanged publicly in Novi Sad in November 1941. Lili Böhm’s contact in Subotica, Laura Lola Wohl also fled to Yugoslavia from Kalomeja, Poland, and married her cousin Winkler in order to obtain residence. Trade unionist and Communist, she rose to the membership of Regional Party Committee and In Spain, Klose was arrested again, this time by the Stalinists on 2 July 1937 on trumpedup charges. After more than a year, he was released in completely broken health, and he was soon interned in the camp at Gurs in France. It was only in September 1939, through the mediation of a British artist, Hedda Carrington, that he was allowed to settle in Cambridge. After the war, Klose worked in the Lissmann Zoological Institute and had four sons, the first, called Radovan Bob Klose, was one of the founders of Pink Floyd. Helmut Klose died in 1987 at Haslingfield. See Nick Heath, ‘Klose, Helmut’, lib.com.org [accessed 14 November 2021]. After the war, Willy Hempel joined a group of German artists who came together in Munich in July 1949, as the Gruppe der Ungegenständlichen, better known as Zen 49. He died in 1985 as an established painter whose works are still ranked high at auction houses worldwide. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about what later happened to other members of the Sarajevo German émigré network.

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organiser of the anti-fascist resistance in Subotica. Arrested in September 1941, she was hanged along fourteen other Communists in November after prolonged torture.29 Ilsa (Elisabeth) Lev(w)inger from Vienna escaped to Novi Sad in the 1930s, where she became a leader of the Novi Sad youth branch of the Communist Party (SKOJ). This is an extremely rare case of a woman in leadership, and it was explained by Ilsa’s charisma and popularity among the youth. Just before the war, Ilsa became the secretary of the regional party committee in Novi Sad, one of the biggest in the country. She was murdered during the Novi Sad raid in January  1942, when Hungarian troops massacred more than one thousand two hundred Jews and almost three thousand Serbs in an alleged reprisal for resistance activities.30 Eva Froning (born Dzsida in 1917), a Communist and trade union activist from Berlin, fled to Yugoslavia in 1939, and later also joined the Partisans as a courier. After the war, she returned to East Germany, where she was a youth worker.31 All of these cases demonstrate readiness to engage in very risky acts of resistance among political activists of Jewish extraction, which continued unabated during exile. By refusing resignation and passivity, they communicated a strong message to the refugees and local anti-fascists in Yugoslavia. Years of exile and clandestine work in various European countries made the Communists particularly good at adapting to new social contexts. Soon after the Nazi attack on Yugoslavia, many more Jews joined the active resistance led by the Yugoslav Communists. But before we turn to this particular experience, let us illuminate a few rarely recorded cases of resistance in the extreme conditions of internment. The preserved correspondence of the refugees, the recollections of the few survivors, and the Yugoslav archives provide less-known details of the circumstances among the so-called Kladovo transport refugees, when all Austrian, Yugoslav, and international Jewish organizations kept telling them to wait while their situation was being resolved. During the time spent stuck in Kladovo, the number of those aboard the three ships, and later in the camps, rose to almost fifteen hundred. Their situation only slightly improved when the Yugoslav authorities transferred them to Šabac in 1940, where living conditions were much better, and they could interact with the local population and the Margareta Bašaragin, Antifašistkinje Subotice (Novi Sad: Futura, 2021), pp. 53, 120–22. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, p.  332, p.  433. Ilza’s name is on the list of 4628 victims of the massacre compiled by the Holocaust Museum: ‘Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database’  [accessed 14 November 2021]. Data from Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, also known as the cemetery of (German) socialists. [accessed 14 November 2021].

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Jewish community. The key dynamic seemed to be introduced by Polish refugees, who inserted themselves within the core group organized by Viennese HeChalutz, hoping that this would be their easiest way out.32 At least twenty young Polish Jews, closely affiliated with the right-wing Betar Zionists, joined in April 1940. They fled Poland when the war started, and after several months of strenuous hiking over Soviet Ukraine and the Carpathian Mountains, they managed to reach a Yugoslav/Romanian border town on the Danube.33 From the story of Herta Reich, it transpires very clearly that they were quite able to move around and across borders.34 Herta fell in love with one of them, Romek Reich. When the refugees were moved to Šabac, everybody was relieved, as the conditions were much better. Herta even found a job with a Serbian knife/ saw-maker who was married to a Jew. The local Jewish community helped, and there was lively interaction with locals, despite the policy which ordered them to stay in barracks or in the private houses where they were assigned temporary refuge. On 15 March 1941, one of the refugees, Viennese Walter Klein, wrote to his parents in the hope that Yugoslavia, which gave them welcome, and its proud people would be able to defend itself. The refugees did everything to support the Yugoslav effort facing an imminent attack, deciding to stop speaking German. Klein said that they all wanted to join the army, but this was not legally possible, although they were expecting Šime Spitzer, the leader of Yugoslav Jews, to include them in the plans for the ‘Jewish Legion’.35 The young Polish Jews did not want to wait trapped in Šabac. Without permissions from Camp authorities, Romek, Kuba, Hugo, and Stefek travelled to Belgrade, and made contact with Betar and the Polish consulate. A local rabbi married Herta and Romek in the Šabac camp office on 24 March 1941, so that she could apply for Polish documents too. The boys went to Belgrade again, and they were caught up in the whirlwind of protest and bombing there. They took blank passports found in the abandoned Polish consulate, and then decided to flee without any money, food, or anything else. As communications broke down, Herta fled Šabac on foot to locate them. On the way through the Bosnian mountains, Herta was raped. When she could not find Romek and the others in Sarajevo, desperate and humiliated, she decided to return to Heimo Gruber, ‘Gefühl für Gefahr: Herta Reich und der Kladovo-Transport’, Zwischenwelt, 1–2 (2010), 50–53; Najmann, Die Reise nach Palestina, p. 7. Queller, Meine Erlebnisse, p. 64. Herta, born Eisler in Mürzzuschlag in Austria in 1917, was among 822 Austrians who left Vienna on the infamous transport. Herta Reich, Zwei Tage Zeit: Flucht, Vertreibung und die Spuren jüdischen Lebens in Mürzzuschlag, ed. by Heimo Gruber and Heimo Halbrainer (Graz: Clio, 2014), pp. 42–46. Walter Klein’s letter is published as doc. 86 in Die Verfolgung and Ermordung, pp. 334–37.

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Šabac. In a strange coincidence, she saw one of Romek’s Polish friends on the train going in the opposite direction. He told her that Romek was already in Dalmatia, and that he was returning to Šabac to take his sister. Soon, Romek returned for Herta too. In one hour, they were gone from the camp on a long and dangerous journey in a country reeling from bombing, and which was under Nazi occupation. While Polish is a language close to Serbian-Croatian, which was some small help, it is still amazing to read how these young men and women travelled back and forth in a country at war and in disarray, without money or any means. Their bravery, and the madness of youth, eventually saved them. Another young refugee, Frieda Fanny Wiener from Breslau, escaped from Šabac towards the south, and caught malaria and typhus along the way. She managed to reach Bulgaria, where she was cured in Plovdiv, and she survived the war, emigrating to Palestine in 1944.36 A few others, such as Polish-born, Vienna Medical School graduate, Zigmund Lewitus and his wife Dorothea/Deborina, also escaped the camp in Šabac via Dalmatia to Italy, but most Austrian-born refugees did not dare to try the flight in these circumstances.37 Herta and her friends were arrested once again on the border to Italy, but they eventually managed to cross with help of local peasants near Postojna in Slovenia on 3 June 1941. The whole group, made up of Herta, Romek, his brother Stefek, Hugo Schlesinger, Enrico Neufeld, and Joseph Spitzer, were then confined in the picturesque village of Bomba in Abruzzo for more than two years.38 After Italy capitulated, young Polish Jews felt the danger again, and as a group they made yet another adventurous journey through the front lines until they reached Allied-controlled Bari. For Herta, her husband, and friends, it was an amazing survival, despite all the odds and thanks to mutual solidarity. Among the Polish Jews in Šabac, we also find Wolf Kahane, a chemist before the war, who crossed to Yugoslavia illegally and was first interned in Samobor.39 In his letter sent on 2 April 1941 to the head of the local Army district of Šabac, Kahane begged to be admitted to the Yugoslav Army as a volunteer. This was only four days before the Nazi attack, and after a large group of younger Anderl and Manoschek, Gescheiterte Flucht, pp. 199–201. As recorded in the Memorial Book for the Victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938 [accessed 14 November 2021]. The couple were later in confino libero in Enego near Vicenza. Later, Lewitus had a succesful medical career. See ‘Ebrei stranieri internati in Italia durante il periodo bellico’ [accessed 14 November 2021]. AJ MUP 37-114-543 contains several letters that Wolf Kahane sent to the Yugoslav Army to take him as a volunteer, and to try to sell his eye cream and ointment.

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refugees could depart for Palestine. In a letter written and signed in Cyrillic, Kahane explained he was born in 1895 in Grabow(o), presumably in Galicia. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1917, when he was wounded and spent the rest of the war in hospital, and was decorated for courage. Aware that he might be rejected by the Yugoslav Army because of his age, just as he could not obtain a Palestine certificate, he stressed how healthy and ready to fight he was. In addition, Kahane described how before the war in Lodz he represented an English pharmaceutical firm from Rochdale and was part owner of the company Neopharm, which produced an eye cream and skin ointment, which was very successful in the treatment of blisters, especially from acid and sulphur mustard. He attached letters from various doctors in English, German, and French, testifying to the benefits of the product (Granoderm paste), and reassured that, as well as German and Polish, he spoke quite good Serbian. The District Head transferred the plea further, adding that Kahane was one of the Jewish refugees who had already contacted the Ministry of Army and Navy several times while in Kladovo, and had made himself available. The war prevented any response to Kahane’s plea, but it is extremely unlikely that the Army would have considered his request seriously. Both Walter Klein and Wolf Kahane were shot, together with other male refugees from Kladovo transport, in Zasavica, less than six months after their correspondence, which is all they left behind.

War Resistance For many Jewish refugees who remained behind, together with the vast majority of Yugoslav Jews, there was no chance of any organized resistance, or even escape, once the Nazi occupation and local collaborationist regimes were firmly established. Some of the refugees were among the first to be rounded up. There is little documentary evidence about what happened to those imprisoned, except for the reminiscences of a few survivors. They too point out that resistance was attempted and demonstrated, even in the most impossible situations. As already stressed in Chapter 4, the young athletes of Zagreb Makabi sports club, among them some refugees, were the victims of one of the earliest deportations and massacres in Croatia. At the end of May 1941, 165 of them aged between seventeen and twenty-five25 were rounded up in Zagreb and deported to Koprivnica concentration camp.40 A few days later, they were Narcisa Lengel-Krizman and Mihael Sobolevski, ‘Hapšenje 165 jevrejskih omladinaca u Zagrebu u maju 1941. Godine’, Novi Omanut, Zagreb, November–December 1998/5759.

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joined by another nineteen Jewish refugees from Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Romania, whose names are preserved as Max Kutscher, Josef Wimmer, Fritz Weisz, Adalbert Bela Fischer, Max Steinhauer, Hans Markovics, Hedwig Tudiower, Walter and Ladislaus Berenyi (all from Vienna), Erwin Süssmann, Max Cohn, Siegfried Lateiner, Gottlieb Meier (Berlin), Jacob Heim (Leipzig), Otto Fürst (Graz), Andria Szanto (Pecs, Hungary), Lazar Weissberger (Gyor, Hungary), Tibor Ravasz/Reves (registered in Sombor, Yugoslavia), and Eugen Klein (Medias, Romania).41 At the beginning of July, they were transferred to the newly opened Gospić camp, and then divided between Jadovno and the island of Pag, which both became extermination camps, with over ten thousand incarcerated Serbs and Jews tortured and brutally killed in less than two months before the Ustaša surrendered the area to Italian military control.42 Ten youngsters from the initial Zagreb group survived, as they were taken to Gospić for forced labour and then transferred to Jasenovac concentration camp, where only two survived by fleeing two years later. One of them, Zlatko Vajler, Yugoslavia’s interwar table tennis champion and gymnast, and later a Partisan and army colonel, recalled the fate of Pa(u)l Klein and Wilhelm Gerhard Kaiser, two great light athletes. Kaiser fled from Austria in 1938 and soon became Yugoslav champion in the 400 metres.43 In 1941, Kaiser and Klein were among those deported to the Ustaša death camp on the island of Pag.44 Lengel-Krizman and Sobolevski list the original source as HDA, f. NDH, br. 27960. Apart from Tibor Reves, the others could not be verified on the Yad Vashem database or the Jadovno list in Footnote 41 below. The association of relatives of victims runs the site, with 678 Jewish victims among the 10,502 murdered there [accessed 14 November 2021]. Đuro Zatezalo in Jadovno – kompleks ustaških logora 1941. – Zbornik radova (Belgrade: Muzej žrtava genocida, 2007) claims that Jadovno took the lives of 40,123 people – 38,012 Serbs, 1998 Jews, 88 Croats, and 25 others. Yad Vashem lists Paul Klein, born in 1917, as a clerk resident in Osijek and, according to the list of Osijek war victims, he was murdered in Slano, Pag in July 1941. Wilhelm Gerhard (Kaiser) is listed as a medical student born on 16 May 1921 in Vienna to Julius and Julia, born Löbl, a Czechoslovak citizen, and resident in Zagreb prior to the war. His parents were murdered in Jasenovac, as reported by his friend, Professor Emil Freundlich. While almost all inmates from Pag were killed, Zlatko Vajler and Dr Pavle Levković witnessed Kaiser’s Calvary, escaped Jasenovac death camp, and lived to tell the story of Kaiser and Klein. See Zlatko Vajler, ‘Moj boravak u paklu I bekstvo iz njega’, in Sećanja Jevreja na logor Jasenovac, ed. by Dušan Sindik (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1972). Another Croatian survivor, Ante Zemljar, also recalls the events, but names the defiant Austrian refugee as Wyler in his recollections Haron i sudbine (Belgrade: Bigz-Četvrti jul, 1988) and discussion in Novi Omanut, 36/37 (1999). The events are recorded by Ivo Reich, who was in a nearby ‘štenara’ when the execution of Kaiser happened, as told in Schreiner, Spašeni iz Zagreba, p. 124. Kaiser and Klein are not on the lists referenced in Footnotes 33 and 34, which means that the lists are incomplete.

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Klein and Kaiser were the first to attempt escape, and they were caught. Kaiser was brought back to the camp alive, beaten heavily, and tied naked to a pole inside the camp for twenty-four hours. The day after, all inmates were lined up to watch him being executed. Kaiser was ordered to walk for a hundred metres to the wall where the firing squad waited. His walk, or ‘Calvary’, as one of the two survivors described it, filled all other Jewish and Serbian inmates with unspoken pride and determination. Kaiser faced death without fear, and in the hope that it would not be in vain. During the war, a number of refugees in Zagreb went into hiding. Some, such as Tilla Durieux, survived while continuing acts of resistance, mostly by supporting the Communist-led Partisans. After Annemarie Wolff-Richter’s partner and colleague, Erwin Süssmann, was taken to Koprivnica concentration camp, and eventually to Jasenovac, where he disappeared in December 1941, Annemarie remained the only carer for several orphaned children of antifascists and Jews. In February  1944, Ustaša police broke into the apartment where Annemarie was hiding with the children. She was arrested, and accused of being a Jewess with fake papers, while eight children, still in her care, were taken to different orphanages. Annemarie’s Aryan parents, ex-husband, and friends tried to have her released, but even those German and Catholic officials that were willing to help could only confirm that she was Aryan, while admitting her pedagogic activity as Marxist, which was politically damaging. Furthermore, she was caught caring for Jewish children, according to police accusations. After a long period of investigation in Zagreb, Annemarie Wolff (then Husadžić) was deported to the Jasenovac camp, where she died, among the last inmates to be murdered before the liberation in April 1945. Apart from Basil Solomon, other children survived thanks to aid from the Red Cross and the help of Zagreb families such as the Gutmanns and Markovićs.45

Jewish Refugees and the Partisans From summer 1941, the Communist-led Partisans created an outlet of resistance in Yugoslavia, and many Jews eagerly joined, to the extent that the emergence of guerrilla warfare has been attributed in part to its Jewish leaders.46 One of the survivors, the Partisan fighter and later pilot Ivan Singer, explained Heuss, Mit dem Kinderheim auf der Flucht, pp. 216–76. One of the children that survived, Boris Grünwald, later became a top sportsman and sculptor. ‘Unrest Grows in Conquered Lands as Red Army Advances’, The American Jewish World, 16 January 1942, p. 4.

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that their leader, Tito, had cleverly set up a platform broad enough so that anyone could join in the struggle, a wide platform of patriotism, communism, and nationalism, all blended into one, and he too was swept up by it in the cataclysmic times for Yugoslavia, when a hope for a new and better society was desperately needed to dare to challenge the might of Germany, practically with bare hands.47 According to data assembled long ago by Jaša Romano, 4572 Yugoslav Jews joined the Partisans – 2897 serving in combat units, among whom 722 lost their lives, and 1569 as civilians, among whom 596 died.48 At least ten received the highest distinction of National Hero in Socialist Yugoslavia after the war, while many others held high ranks of command. Historiography and memoir literature are full of details about Partisan heroism, often performed by the Yugoslav Jews among them. Many survivors and later authors insisted that most of the resistance, both in Yugoslavia and Greece, came from the enlightened Sephardic Jews, who were deeply entrenched in the Balkans.49 Very little is known about foreign/refugee Jews and their experience, and from the existing data it is very difficult to distinguish foreign from Yugoslav Jews, which this chapter is trying to mend. Among the first to join the Partisans was Fritz Cahn (Fric Kan later in Yugoslavia), born in Munich in 1922, into a large family. Apprenticed to become a locksmith by Adler, a Jewish businessman with a factory specializing in metal processing and drilling machines, Fritz was thrown out of the factory in 1938, when Adler was sent to a concentration camp.50 After his father was imprisoned, Fritz was sent to Italy, but he eventually ended up in Zagreb, where he was interned in a hotel in Samobor in1939. Fritz Cahn spent his time playing accordion, which he had taught himself while still in Munich. Soon after the invasion in 1941, the Ustaša moved the Samobor refugees in cattle wagons to Mostar, Hercegovina, which later saved many, because Hercegovina fell under Italian supervision. The Jews in Mostar were required to wear a yellow armband, but they were saved from deportation or repression by the presence of the Italian troops. In Mostar, Fritz stayed with Pero and Zora Krajner, and he performed at a nightclub with a Yugoslav Jew called Gudman, usually for drunken Italian soldiers. A few months later, as tensions rose and circumstances for Jews became more difficult under Ustaša rule, with the Krajners’ help, Fritz joined Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 287. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, pp. 302–06. Alcalay, The Persistence of Hope, p. 76. Interview with Fritz Cahn on 23 April 1998, conducted in Serbian in Belgrade by Milica Mihajlovic for the USC/Shoah foundation, courtesy of the late Fritz Cahn family.

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first the Mostar Partisan battalion and later the 10th Hercegovina Brigade. Fritz could barely speak Serbo-Croat, but other (Yugoslav) Jews in the Partisans helped him to smooth the initial period. Eventually, he went through all major Partisan military campaigns, and even joined the Communist Party in 1944. His accordion-playing skills saved him from the worst, with the Partisans considering him to be very precious, as he played to lighten their mood wherever they went. ‘I even ate raw horse meat and beech tree leaves and what else …’, he recalled in the interview. Among the first to join the Partisan resistance, Cahn was awarded a special honour, second highest after that of National Hero, as well as additional medals for valour and for ‘Brotherhood and Unity’.51 Later, as Fric Kan, he was among the founders of the Partisan Orchestra, which performed at all major meetings and celebrations, and he remained to live in Socialist Yugoslavia as a Yugoslav Army musician with a rank. His mother, sister, and her child were deported from Munich to Kovno, where they all died, while his father died on the run in Hungary. Whereas Fritz Cahn lived long enough to be interviewed, many others died in battle, and we have only fragmentary evidence about their participation in the Partisan resistance.52 Karlo, a refugee from Austria whose family name could not be identified, was interned in Korčula, where he joined the Partisans and was later transferred to the 5th Montenegrian Proletarian Brigade, dying in the famous Sutjeska battle in 1943, aged thirty-three. Some others are only listed as killed or disappeared in the Partisans, with even less information, such as Leia the Jewish girl, Vera the Jewish Partisan, Mali (the little one), member of the 1st Proletarian Brigade, and so on. We have already encountered the Hochbergers, Ignatz and Maria, from Vienna, whose son Sam was among the first to be murdered, and who were among the first to be deported. Sam’s twin brother, Max, escaped to Dalmatia, and from Rab he joined the Partisans and was heading their radio-technical unit in Glina on Banija mountain. Later, he was transferred to the Partisan base in Bari, Italy, where he died from diabetes.53 The eldest son, Wilhelm, was also captured and murdered in Matthausen in 1945.54 The three brothers Feiner (or Felner) from Munich (sons of Hugo), who were in Brčko in Bosnia prior to the war, all joined the Partisans in October 1941 as Enver Ćemalović, Mostarski Bataljon (Mostar: Skupština opštine Mostar, 1986), p. 346. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, pp. 307–511 provides basic information, which was occasionally cross-referenced. Polić, Imao sam sreće, p. 41. ‘The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names’, Yad Vashem,  [accessed 14 November 2021].

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young Communist activists.55 The youngest, Paul, born in 1924, was killed fighting Germans in the Sutjeska battle in June 1943. Hans, born in 1922, died in the battle for the liberation of Serbia in 1944 near Kopaonik, and Sep, the oldest, born in 1921, died the same year at an unknown location. They all fought in the 6th Proletarian Brigade of Eastern Bosnia. Until the 1990s, there was a street in Brčko bearing their name, but not any longer. Two sons of Alessandro and Anna Oblath from Trieste, who were living in Ljubljana prior to the war, were killed as Partisans in Slovenia. Milan, born in Trieste in 1917, was a political commissar in the Ljubljana Brigade and died near Gorica-Gorizia in 1944, and his brother Dušan, born in Trieste in 1914, died in 1942 in the Tomšič Brigade. Their sister, Dragica, born in 1924, and their father, Alessandro, were deported from Italy to Auschwitz, and their mother, Anna, to Bergen Belsen, and they all perished.56 As the Partisan movement grew, and fights and disease took hold, they were desperate for medical staff. One Partisan report from Split asks about ‘several refugee women (the wife of Prica, and others) who should be trained as nurses and sent to Partisans’.57 Some were experienced and politically committed, such as Paula Neumann, who escaped to Zagreb from Hamburg in 1934, and later joined the Partisans as a nurse, and was remembered as a revolutionary.58 Others simply became involved during the course of the war. Csokor extolled the virtues of women in the Partisans, and how radical this was in a society that treated women as ‘two-legged domestic animals that man keeps for progeny and hard labour’.59 By the end of 1942, out of seventy-three doctors with the Partisans, forty were Jewish.60 To one of them it seemed that the

Ismet Dedeić, ‘Jevreji u Brčkom: Zločin nestanka i grijeh sjećanja’, in Migracije i Brčko (Tuzla: Centar za istraživanje moderne i savremene historije, 2020), pp. 299–323 (p. 309). According to the information provided by the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre in Milan, Italy [accessed 14 November 2021]. Number  24, ‘Izvještaj obavještajca NOP-a iz Splita PK KPH za Dalmaciju o radu i djelovanju u Splitu Rapotec Stanislava, poručnika, koja je Britanska služba za naročite zadatke uputila iz Kaira’, in Narodnooslobidlačka borba u Dalmaciji 1941–1945. Zbornik dokumenata, Knjiga 2 (January–July 1942) (Split: Institut za historiju radničkog pokreta Dalmacije, 1982). ‘Neumann, Paula’, in Židovski leksikon. Csokor, Zeuge einer Zeit, p. 178. Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, p. 446. A remarkably large proportion of Jewish women served in the Partisan medical corps. Early research by Jaša Romano includes 384 nurses, 39 physicians, 19 medics, 18 pharmacists, and about 50 other medical personnel. More than one hundred of these women, including 74 nurses, 13 physicians, and 10 medical students, lost their lives during the war, as listed in his ‘Jevreji zdravstveni radnici Jugoslavije 1941–1945’, Zbornik  2 (Belgrade: Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 1973).

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entire medical corps of the Yugoslav Partisans was made up of Jews.61 Among eighty-three Croatian Jewish doctors sent to Bosnia to deal with endemic syphilis who escaped deportation in this way, there were several Jews from Poland or Hungary, who came to Yugoslavia because of numerus clausus, such as Alfred M. Najfeld (Neufeld) from Rzeszovo, Ignac Tämpel from Pabjanica, Maria (Josef) Schlesinger (Šlezinger) Brandler from Samok, all in Poland; and Irma Sinko Spitzer, Frida Guttmann (1896–1944), and Klara Fürst (1908–1944) from Hungary.62 Eventually, sixty-four joined the Partisans, and seven were killed in the war.63 Legendary Partisan doctor Maria Schlesinger (1895–1943) was dying in the midst of the biggest Nazi offensive. She asked her comrades to bury her at the top of an earth den where the wounded Partisans were hiding. According to the testimonies, the Nazis discovered her grave but did not dig further, establishing one of the famous Partisan stories about how doctor Maria, even in her death, protected her patients. Her doctor husband and their daughter also died during the German offensive against the Partisans.64 Elsewhere, the Partisan hospital in the Šibenik area employed a Jewish surgeon from Vienna and a dermatologist from Dresden, who earned the rank of major by the end of the war.65 A British SOE mission member, New Zealand-born surgeon Lindsay Rogers, left a description of a heroic Lithuanian Jewish doctor in Bosnia. Unfortunately, Rogers does not provide his name, but indicates he had previously been in the administrative side of medicine and had never carried out an operation in his life. Most likely, the doctor is David Frederick, who Romano identifies as a doctor with the 7th Krajina Brigade. In the Bosnian mountains, he had to operate on every wounded comrade who came in, with amazing success. He was using plaster of Paris wherever possible, when he had it, and he followed with almost religious fervour the teachings of the Vienna surgeon Bohler – Bohler’s book was his only personal possession.66 He escaped the execution of Lithuanian Jewish hostages by playing dead, then hid in a forest with the Lithuanian Partisans, and gradually made his way to Goldstein estimated the number of Jewish doctors with Partisans by the end of the war at around two hundred. ‘Eyewitness Testimony 54: The Jewish Doctors of the Yugoslav Partisans’ (A.B. interviewed in Vienna in 1955) in Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecutions (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), p. 301. Harriet Friedereich, ‘Yugoslavia’, The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women [accessed 14 November 2021]. Romano, ‘Jevreji zdravsteni radnici Jugoslavije’. ‘Schlesinger, Maria’, in Židovski leksikon. Gruenfelder, Sustigla ih Šoa, p. 250. Lindsay Rogers, Guerrilla Surgeon: A New Zealand Surgeon’s Wartime Experiences with the Yugoslav Partisans (London: Collins, 1957), p. 88; Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, p. 350.

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Yugoslavia, taking about six months on the journey. Eventually in Bosnia, he delighted Rogers and became: a fighter doctor, working among the drugovi [comrades], always, despite his tragedy, with a smile for them; always sacrificing himself that they could have more, and filled that almost holy fire which drives martyrs to the grave.67

Singer also describes Rogers, who followed suit in applying wound management under harsh conditions, with no bandages, dressings, disinfectants, or medical staff. The plaster would be kept on until the wound healed, even if the wound got infected with maggots, as it would eventually heal completely under the plaster.68 Jews indeed dominated, if not exclusively performed, all medical roles with the Partisans. In Partisan-liberated areas of Croatia (and Bosnia), Jews also played a key role in other aspects of logistics – in organizing cultural life, propaganda, and education-literacy courses, or in administration, as, for example, a refugee from Vienna, Liana Frey.69 The issue of Partisans rescuing or saving Jewish civilians is more complex and controversial than that of Jewish participation. Given the precarious circumstances in which they found themselves in many parts of the country, the Partisans were reluctant to burden their troops with evacuating or caring for elderly or other non-combatant Jewish civilians, or those that could not be used as nurses.70 A recent study by Emil Kerenji pleads for extending the notion of rescue, usually associated with individual acts of Christian or other altruism.71 The agency should extend to the rescued rather than rescuer, while the rescue is perilous and the path to survival uncertain. It should also be placed in comparison with the only other guerrilla group in what was Yugoslavia, the Četniks, who were allied with the West, but whose leader, General Mihailović, never established full control over his units. Only very few Jews could find protection in his headquarters, for example, such as his personal doctors.72 The Rogers, Guerilla Surgeon, p. 89. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 289. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 221–22. A list of internees returned to Zagreb in the World Jewish Congress’s ‘Surviving Jews in Jugoslavia as of June  1945’, New York (the list submitted by the Federation of Yugoslav Jewish Communities) includes around one hundred and thirty names of those saved by the Partisans. Unfortunately, the lists from some of the biggest communities, such as Belgrade, Subotica, and Sarajevo, are missing, as well as any common methodology in these registers of Jews reported by local communities in 1945. Emil Kerenji, ‘“Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism”: Yugoslav Communists and the Rescue of Jews, 1941–1945’, Contemporary European History, 25/1 (2016), 57–74 (p. 63). Aleksandar Lebl, ‘Jevreji-partizani-četnici’, Danas, 29 November 2006.

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Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in January 1942 about Jewish participation in Četnik resistance.73 Other sources point to the fact that Mihailović had to ban anti-Semitism among Četniks after a score of Yugoslav Jews were killed by Četniks, mostly for their sympathies for, or association with, the Partisans. While individual Jews were hidden by Četniks in Serbia, their numbers were small, and no evidence of any rescue attempts or strategy exists to date.74 While there were individual cases of rescue before, the capitulation of Italy presented Partisans with a much more significant challenge, nowhere more so than when they took over the control of the Rab internment camp. Dr Jaša Romano, one of the internees, calculated that three thousand out of the three thousand five hundred Jews on Rab survived the war by joining the Partisans, with 136 falling in battle and 141 being killed in air raids or similar.75 In recent analysis, Emil Kerenji estimated down the number of the rescued to around two thousand five hundred.76 An incomplete list of survivors from Rab camp kept at the Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade contains around one thousand nine hundred names, with at least 242 being identified as foreign citizens when they were later evacuated to Bari.77 Among the Polish refugees interned in Rab who gave their lives as Partisans we find Gina Offenba(k)h born in 1927 in Lodz, who joined as a nurse, and died in action in Slovenia in 1944, Kurt Knoll, also killed in battle, aged thirty-three, and Josef Schneider from Frelinova, who died with the rank of lieutenant fighting the Ustaša and Germans on 18 January 1945 in Hercegovina.78 Most personal testimonies insist that Jews in Rab, and other places in Dalmatia, joined the Partisans enthusiastically, and that some did so to avenge their families. Even those who did not join them, such as Lucy Begov from Vienna, believed that their struggle Report published in Die Verfolgung und Ermordung, p. 423. Marian Malet, ‘Narrating the Jews of Belgrade and the Second World War’, pp. 244–58. The Military Archive in Belgrade (Reg. Nr 17/1-1 / K 282) holds a Četnik appeal, ‘Democratic Yugoslavia Agency Free Mountains on 29 June 1944’, bulletin 185, sent on 4 June 1944, claiming to represent Jews from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia who were with Četniks and formed a special Committee with the task to present themselves to military officials in the country and conduct Jewish affairs abroad. No other information could be found to support this appeal. Similarly, no information on the whereabouts of the foreign Jews among Četniks could be found. Seventeen Yugoslav Jews were imprisoned after the war because of their participation and association with Četnik forces. They were released and allowed to emigrate to Israel in the early 1950s. Dr Jaša Romano, ‘Jevreji u logoru na Rabu i njihovo učešće u oslobodilačkom ratu’, Zbornik JIM, 1973/2, pp. 1–68. Kerenji, ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, p. 66. JIM Beograd, 3692, K. 22-9-2/5. Yad Vashem lists Gina Offenba(k)h as murdered in the Shoah. The other data are from Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, p. 450.

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was common with the Jewish struggle, and that their victory was her victory.79 On the other hand, as Ivan Singer wrote, the Communist Party was enticing them because ‘the Jews had no other choice’.80 Several testimonies and incidents present the Partisans in a different light. According to Olga Njemirovski, the Partisans were very suspicious and saw spies in everyone.81 Having dated Italian officers previously, she became an easy target. A daughter of a wealthy merchant from Zagreb, she could not find a good word to say for the time spent with them before she was eventually rescued from Lastovo island by a British warship, together with thirty other Jews.82 Vladimir Müller, alias Zeev Milo, described the lack of trust of Jews, and numerous incidents of anti-Semitism among the Partisans, despite praising their effort to rescue Jews from Rab.83 Paul Parin stressed that, due to their background and circumstances, many Partisans felt respect only for those who were fighting in the forest, and not for intellectuals or those who spoke several languages.84 Several Rab inmates were executed for a variety of reasons that are difficult to evaluate after many decades and without any written records of their trials. Helga Heim, a photographer, was executed for alleged collaboration with the Italians, which turned out to be a jealous revenge.85 Albert Breslauer was executed for allegedly trying to cash in his gold coins, or for trading with the British. His brother died fighting as a Partisan.86 Emil Gutmann, whose son Ivo, an anti-fascist activist, was among the first Ustaša victims, was accused of a similar offence to Breslauer, only that he was trading with Americans. According to Zeev, he just disappeared.87 Another mysterious case is that of engineer Gerhard Zeilinger from Vienna, who we saw as a leader of the Samobor group of refugees, travelling during the war to Zagreb and Sarajevo to collect aid, but who was criticized Begov, Mit meinen Augen, p. 44. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 99. More elaborate in Ivo Goldstein, Antisemitizam u Hrvatskoj od srednjeg vijeka do danas (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2022), and Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, pp. 449–53. Njemirovski, The Holocaust and the Jews of Yugoslavia, p. 26. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 171–84, 218–19. Parin, Es ist Krieg und wir gehen hin, p. 145. ’Heim, Helga’, in Židovski leksikon. Zeev, who knew her sister, described this incident as the personal revenge of a commander, whose love Helga did not return, in Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 196. More detail in Goldstein and Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, p. 449. ‘Breslauer, Albert’ in Židovski leksikon. His younger brother was killed as a Partisan, and his parents were captured and murdered by the Ustaša after trying to flee to the Italian zone. According to Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p.  146, the younger brother, Pavle, might have been deliberately sent into battle. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 216.

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and rejected by the group. According to his father, Georg, he later served on the British Military Mission and was arrested for a sabotage by the Partisans and disappeared.88 It is impossible to establish with any certainty if, and to what extent, antiSemitism played a role in their deaths. Throughout the war, Partisan guerrillas practised revolutionary justice, with victims among all Yugoslav ethnic groups. Previous Communist activism and loyalty was also not enough to offer protection from kangaroo courts and often unfounded accusations. Some were later rehabilitated. Kerenji’s analysis of Communist Party and Partisan policy does not find any traces of anti-Semitism in their official policy. In fact, there was no special policy on Jews, as they were treated like all other Yugoslav peoples, and the wartime persecution of Jews is understood as part of the general situation and persecution in the country.89 Partisan priorities were further determined by their circumstances, and their location far away from urban centres and their victimized Jewish inhabitants. Their answer to persecution of Jews was not a ‘rescue’, but a joint struggle against fascism that was causing all the suffering, and offering equal treatment in that struggle. As early as July  1941, Jurica Ribar, brother of Ivo Lola, the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Youth, approached the members of Belgrade’s Hashomer Hatzair, inviting them to join the Partisans as the only way out of the terror that engulfed the city, and the majority heeded the call.90 This was the message of Jewish Communists to other Rab internees. Some of them maintained links with Partisans while still under Italian protection in the Rab camp, where a clandestine unit of around one hundred and fifty people was created ready to join the Partisans at the opportune moment. When the capitulation of Italy happened, they went around the camp to declare freedom, but at the same time called upon all to join the Partisan anti-fascist struggle on the mainland. Eventually, 243 volunteers joined the short-lived, but later much mythologized, Jewish Rab Battalion, led by David Kabiljo and engineer Evald Erlih, who later died fighting.91 Joining with the Slovenian prisoners from the nearby camp, For his father Georg Zeilinger’s statement see [accessed 14  November  2021]. Yad Vashem recorded him simply as being shot, as testified by another family member, ‘The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names’ [accessed 14 November 2021]. The British Military does not possess any information on Zeilinger. Kerenji, ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, p. 60. In only a few instances do Communist and Partisan publications or papers specify the persecution of Jews. Interview with Sara Alkalaj. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, p. 282. The Commander was David Kabiljo, his deputy Miko Salom and commissaire Evald Erlich (killed in battle). Unit commanders were Joseph Kabiljo, Marcel Vajs (Weiss), Moritz Kampos, and Ela Samokovlija.

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they disarmed the surrendering Italians, and unfurled the five-pointed red star flag.92 They negotiated evacuation to the mainland to join the Partisans with one of their top commanders, former International Brigadier and revolutionary Elias Engel, who later died in fighting and was declared a Yugoslav National Hero.93 The civilians in Rab were represented by Franjo (Ferenc/Franz) Spitzer (who later changed his name to Ervin Sinkó/Šinko) (1898–1967), writer and veteran of the Hungarian revolution, and one of the first critics of Stalinism from within the Communist movement, and his wife, Hungarian-born Viennese doctor Irma Rothbart.94 Spitzer spoke with a heavy Hungarian accent to a mass rally organized in the camp, advocating joining the Partisans, which was accepted with an overwhelming majority.95 Soon after, the core group, and the group of Jewish women and girls trained as nurses, left the island and joined the Partisans. Yet the others were torn apart by family, ideological, and logistic concerns and, as seen in Chapter  5, several hundred decided to stay on the island or to buy transfer to Italy. As recorded by Rochlitz, the Partisans acted admirably, and they spared no effort in evacuating scores of elderly people, families with children, and others to the mainland and then into the mountains, placing them out of the Germans’ immediate reach.96 Therein lie some of the conflicts that emerged over the following two years, as not everyone was enthusiastic about the Partisan style of ‘rescue’, nor were they able to share in the enthusiasm of others due to their age, (foreign) background, and many individual circumstances. For some, ascending to safety turned into a lengthy and messy ordeal, often under German bombardment, with a few losing their lives along the way.97 They compared it to (Xenophon’s) anabasis or exodus from Egypt. Similar scenes unfolded throughout the previously Italian-held coastal areas. The Partisans evacuated many Jews from Split into the mountains, while Kerenji, ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, p. 65. ‘Engel, Elias’ in Židovski leksikon. Spitzer came from the same Viennese circles as Manés Sperber. After stints in Moscow and Paris, he came to Zagreb in 1939, escaping to Dalmatia with the outbreak of the war and becoming the leader of the refugees interned on the island of Brač. The Novel of a Novel: Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018) is his memoir in the form of a journal first published in Yugoslavia in 1955, based on his personal diary, letters, clippings, and other materials kept by Sinkó during his two years in Moscow between 1935 and 1937, years in which the Soviet cultural policy of the Popular Front was giving way to the Great Terror. Polić, Imao sam sreće, p. 94. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 119. Rochlitz’s uncles Ferdinand and Oscar, and his wife Camilla, were killed by the SS in January 1944, ibid., p. 125. A similar fate befell members of the Goldstein family, as told by Slavko Goldstein, 1941: Godina koja se vraća (Zagreb: Novi Liber, 2007), p. 410.

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others were evacuated to the island of Vis (and eventually to Italy). Italian soldiers were allowed to evacuate back to Italy, but most were not able to do so. Instead, many were killed if resisting, or captured by the invading Germans, while others joined the Partisans. Zeev described the jubilant atmosphere in Novi Vinodolski, where Partisans and local sympathizers swam naked and celebrated their takeover, although everybody was aware that it would be a short one, as their forces were not even close to matching the German ones.98 Similar to what unfolded among Rab internees, 36 Jews interned on Korčula and 159 refugees in Split joined the Partisans, who also became the main destination of escape for hundreds of Jews from the Ustaša, and Hungarian and Bulgarian prisons, as well as from confinement or internment in Italy.99 Eventually, most historians estimate that at least two thousand five hundred out of three thousand Jews from Rab camp reached the Partisan-held territories in the Croatian mountains.100 The Jewish Rab battalion made up of Communist sympathizers was disbanded, and their members were attached to existing Partisan units. According to Romano, in addition to the first 243 volunteers, another 69, mostly women, joined medical units, and 53 of them had lost their lives by the end of the war. Many became commanders, commissars, and other leaders. Hundreds of other evacuees were assigned different duties, from caring for livestock, cooking, and sewing, to administration, photography, arts, and the newly founded judicial system.101 According to Romano, out of 1027 who joined in various other capacities, 85 lost their lives, mostly in enemy raids. Others were housed among villagers in the mountains, and they often had to transfer from place to place, depending on German and Ustaša threats. Out of 1812 civilians rescued and housed in the Partisan-held areas, 126 were killed in enemy attacks and 15 died (mostly from typhus).102 Individual figures Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 142–46. A priest was arrested along some other ‘collaborators’; the latter were released, but not the priest. After 1943, the Partisans were joined by forty-eight Jews escaping Ustaša camps, seven from Nazi camps, forty-two liberated by Partisans from the Bor mine, eleven from forced labour in Hungary, seventeen from prisons in Hungary, sixteen from prisons in Ukraine, and twenty-six from Bulgarian prisons. Ten came from Albania, four from Greece, 129 from Italy, and thirty-six from medical assignments in Bosnia; Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, p. 282. Anna Pizzuti is currently collating all possible data, and has identified 3331 Jews interned on Rab, although there are many unknowns regarding their destinies after the capitulation of Italy, ‘Gli ebrei internati nel campo di RAB – Identificazione e destino’ [accessed 14 November 2021]. Goldstein estimates the number of those active with Partisans at eight hundred in Godina koja se vraća, p. 414. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, pp. 283–4.

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may never be accurate, but most Jewish internees from Rab survived with the Partisans. A detailed look at the personal testimonies of survivors reveals a multitude of experiences influenced by individual circumstance and different social and cultural backgrounds, but dispels any claim that more Jews died in battle or in hiding than due to any special (mal)treatment. The majority remembered their experiences as, or with, Partisans positively, thanking peasants who offered hospitality despite their extremely precarious living circumstances.103 ‘Distinctions weren’t made openly between Jews and non-Jews for the most part, and [Partisan leader] Tito’s attitude to the Jews was officially favourable’, assessed A. B., a Jewish doctor among them.104 There were some happy moments, such as the birth of Joseph Schlesinger, whose parents Imre and Rivka met in Rab camp and joined the Partisans together, and also the birth of Jakov Finci, current president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina.105 Nevertheless, many recalled boarding with local peasants in Partisan-controlled territory in miserable conditions as a nightmare. Sleeping in barns or on haystacks was the norm. Most Partisans had not seen running water from taps since they embarked on their struggle, as testified by Parin. For a long period before some assistance came from the allies, both refugees and Partisans were constantly on the edge of starvation, while infested with body and hair lice, which could also spread more serious disease. Refugees made little difference between the Partisans and local peasants, who more or less supported the former, which caused misunderstandings. On the other hand, most peasants were reported as not knowing who or what the Jews were. However, according to Polić, cooperation prevailed, and soon after their arrival from Rab, everybody celebrated Christian holidays together, which even the Communist-led Partisans embraced during the war.106 For the next year and a half, thousands of Jewish refugees were housed in peasant houses, and moved Kerenji bases this conclusion on the overview of a number of testimonies of survivors published in the five volumes of Mi smo preživeli: Jevreji o Holokaustu and video testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation. He also evokes the so-called Partisan Haggadah, a story kept and transmitted orally among the Sarajevan Ladino-speaking Jews comparing their experience to the story of liberation of ancient Israelites from Egyptian slavery in ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, p. 72. ‘Eyewitness Testimony 54: The Jewish Doctors of the Yugoslav Partisans’, in Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecutions, p. 301. When Joseph was born on 26 March 1945, he was wrapped in a British military parachute. He became a biochemist and long-serving chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University. See Joseph Schlessinger, ‘Borio sam se za Izrael, izumio Sutent: Sad mogu natrag u svoju Hrvatsku’, jutarnji.hr, 16 October 2012. Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 241–42.

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from village to village alongside the Partisans, in order to escape German, Ustaša, and other pro-Nazi formations attacking or capturing them. Imre Rochlitz left a most nuanced portrayal of the Partisans, and the Serb peasants of Croatia, among whom most Partisans were recruited, as being antiintellectual, and driven by blind obedience and ideological rigidity, based not on an understanding of Marxism or Communism, but on their experience of class exploitation prior to the war and genocidal extermination by the Ustaša during the war, further exacerbated by the precarity of their guerrilla existence and rivalry with the Četniks.107 Partisan ‘anti-intellectualism’ would sometimes be mistaken for anti-Semitism.108 Based on his personal brush with Partisan justice, and on the experience of hundreds of others around him, Rochlitz also stressed the importance of the whims of local commanders, who were often ignorant, outright inimical, or even Četnik moles, rather than representing any policy or ideological anti-Semitism.109 Parin, whose position allowed for more of an outsider’s analytical perspective, insisted that Partisan success was due to clan(ish) patriarchal mentality, which he saw as positive and similar to any other anti-colonial struggle, but dangerous at the same time, as it could easily turn against any ethnic or other perceived enemy. Even Partisan sex taboos, about which many Jewish refugees were puzzled, were imposed to fortify the clan patriarchal mentality of Balkan peasants turned guerrilla Partisan fighters.110 Class difference mattered more than religion or race. Zeev admired Partisan commitment and bravery, but he did not share their political agenda, which he rightly saw as being against his family, class, and economic interests.111 Some clearly anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviour were driven by Partisan fierce antibourgeois disposition.112 Some refugees still possessed precious objects – jewellery, watches, gold coins, golden cigarette boxes, or dollars – allowing them to buy food and other necessities, but raising eyebrows among others Jews or Gentiles, who were completely destitute.113 Recounting their experience among the Partisans, many Jewish survivors display tropes that we know from ‘Orientalist’ travelogues of European aristocrats in the Levant or Russia: the Partisans are characterized by vulgarity and lack of shame, especially in relation to nudity and body functions. The biggest shock was reserved for Bosnian Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, pp. 140–45. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 148, 162–63. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 167. Parin, Es ist Krieg und wir gehen hin, pp. 137–54. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 196–97. Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked, p. 56. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 188–89.

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Muslim peasants who personified the Orient and backwardness.114 The most used term to describe Partisans is ‘primitive’, and even staunch Communists such as Dr Leo Kraus expressed his shock at how ‘primitive’ almost exclusively peasant-born Partisans were, ‘the most primitive’ being the ones from Glamoč plateau in Bosnia. For the three days that he spent with them, no one washed their hands, let alone their faces.115 Zeev recounted the episode when the Allies delivered badly needed shoes to the Partisans, which all turned out to be too small, as peasants were used to walking barefoot and thus all had very big and wide feet. The Partisans were furious and thought that the small shoes were sent on purpose.116 A young urban man such as Imre Rochlitz struggled to find Partisan women attractive, as ‘most […] resembled the men; they were sturdy in body, coarse in language, and rough in behaviour. They also shared the strenuous life, deprivations, and lack of hygiene of their male comrades.’117 Yet soon, attitudes began to change. Božidar Štraus recalled that when someone new came from Zagreb to join, they always wanted to brush their teeth in the evening, which made the Partisans and all those already accustomed to the new circumstances burst into laughter.118 Dr Kraus too, whose whole family joined the Partisans voluntarily, having seen their bravery, soon forgave all their primitiveness and lack of hygiene, only to conclude: ‘with “civilised” people only, who can’t live without “certain conditions” there could be no successful resistance and war against bloodthirsty Nazis, Fascists and Ustaša, especially not in the wild terrain of the Balkans’.119 Imre Rochlitz realized it too, after he befriended one of the peasant girls while dancing kolo, the Balkan folk circle dance. After dancing vigorously for five hours, the girl intended to carry explosives to a railway line twenty kilometres away and blow it up, only to return by dawn because there were cows to milk and fields to plough. Imre was impressed by her hardiness and bravery. Yet as they spoke, he heard a splashing sound on the ground, and he realized that she was urinating where she stood, arms folded while still conversing. All he could conclude was, ‘The Germans didn’t stand a chance.’120 Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 172–85. Kraus, Susreti i sudbine, pp. 356–59. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 202. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 151. Kerenji, ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, p. 70, citing Štraus, USC/Shoah foundation interview code 4306, tape 2, segment 56–7. For Zeev, and presumably many other bourgeois refugees, toothbrushes and other remnants of pre-war living standards were essential, as noted in Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 181. Kraus, Susreti i sudbine, p. 359. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 153.

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Nevertheless, the German Army, Ustaša, and assorted collaborationist forces continued their attacks, which caused most of Jewish civilians’ deaths listed above, as the Partisans were simply unable to hide or move so many people. An attempt by the Partisans to move the Jewish civilians to Slavonia led to an investigation by Jewish representatives and a formal rejection by refugees themselves due to the dangers involved and their vulnerability, as stated in the official correspondence with the Partisan leadership.121 Another more obvious escape route – evacuation with the Allies – was constantly delayed. The surrender of Italy took place four months after United Kingdom and United States officials met in Bermuda at the end of April 1943 to discuss the issue of Jewish refugees liberated by Allied forces and the Jews who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe. Yet, just as at Evian before, the Bermuda Conference led to no change in policy; the Americans refused to change their immigration quotas to accept the refugees, and the British would not alter their policy regarding allowing Jews to enter Palestine.122 Rochlitz pointed out that the mass evacuation of Jews by the Partisans in autumn 1943 went hand in hand with a protracted investigation and negotiations by a relatively numerous British military mission that would eventually seal the switch of Allied support from the Četniks to the Partisans. Jewish refugees could also witness and make contact with the Allied representatives, especially the British missions to the Partisan forces, which over the next couple of years intensified their presence, supplies, and communication. In 1944, as the Allied bombing of German targets intensified, Jewish refugees among the Partisans in the Croatian mountains could also participate in the rescue of hundreds of Allied (mostly American) airmen. After brief recovery with the Partisans, they were usually evacuated and transported by Allied aircraft to bases in Southern Italy.123 The planes flew back empty, at most taking severely wounded Partisans along, but not stranded Jewish civilians, despite Tito’s order to the Partisan headquarters in Croatia, made at the end of July 1944, to evacuate also children and elderly Jews to Vis and further to Italy without special

Kerenji, ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, pp. 70–72. For further discussion on this issue see Menahem Šelah, ‘Sudbina jevrejskih izbeglica na otoku Rabu’, Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja, 7 (1997), pp. 190–96. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (New York: New Press, 1984), p. 293. Rochlitz personally participated in the rescue of over fifty airmen downed in the area of Kordun, where the veterinary hospital of which he was in charge was located. Accident of Fate, pp. 154–56.

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permissions.124 This was a month after the British mission in the Croatian mountains was joined by major Randolph Churchill, whose figure is another common trope in all memoirs of Jewish survivors, who all see or meet him at some point, usually indulging in the local fruit brandy (rakija), blustering and ranting at everybody, and even hitting his inferiors with a stick.125 While low in terms of the military hierarchy, Randolph Churchill enjoyed the clout of his father, and soon upon his deployment, he intervened on behalf of Jewish refugees with his superior, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, the head of the British mission and the key negotiator responsible for switching Allied support.126 As a document published by Rochlitz indicates, this move was rejected by British Air Officer Commanding (AOC).127 It took many long and exhausting months before anything was done to help, or to evacuate, over two thousand Jewish civilians in the Partisan-held areas of Croatia. The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, Headquarters Allied Control Commission APO 394 reported on 25 September 1944 about one thousand two hundred Jews, including Yugoslav, Polish, Hungarian, German, and Austrian Jews, in the area of Topusko, and another three hundred in the area of Đulovac, near Voćin in Lika (Voćin is not in Lika but Western Slavonia), who desperately needed assistance that the Partisans could not provide, so an evacuation to Italy was required. The report mentions only twenty-nine persons already evacuated to the Bari Transit Camp. The representative of the Committee, Sir Clifford Heathcote-Smith, warned that no political – especially antiSemitic – movement should be caused by this evacuation, and thus suggested the gradual evacuation of foreign Jews first, then orphan children, then the sick and elderly, and so on. Besides the danger on the ground, Heathcote-Smith reminded that British Mandate Palestine had not replied yet to the request that the Jews in Yugoslavia be added to the list of emigrants.128 A month later (on 21 October), a report from an unidentified British officer in the Military Mission with the Partisans reiterated the desperation of the Jewish refugees to be evacuated, and the approval of the Partisan General Gošnjak. Yet the process Order nr. 317, 29.7. Zbornik dokumenta i podataka o NOR Naroda Jugoslavije, Book VIII, Vol. 2 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski Institute, 1961), p. 586. Brigadier Maclean described Churchill Junior when they met in Cairo as usually ‘getting drunk, leaping on blondes, insulting generals, and making a real nuisance of himself’, Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, pp. 181, 184. Zeev saw him drinking slivovitz in water glasses, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, p. 206; Polić, Imao sam sreće, p. 188. Maclean described his mission in a memoir, Eastern Approaches (London: Jonathan Cape,1949), with numerous subsequent editions. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, p. 182. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), War Office (WO) 202/293, AC/A/8050.

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was extremely slow, with only forty evacuated, and a further fifty expected in the near future. Instead of evacuation, a further humanitarian drop was agreed. Among many who tried to intervene was the Jewish Military Chaplain for Eastern Italy, I. Rapaport, who wrote letters to the British Military Mission about the alarming situation, citing the number of children, starvation, the constant attacks from the Germans and Ustaša, and appealing for evacuation so that Jews would ‘regain their faith in the sincerity of the freedom-loving nations’.129 The refugees formed their own Committee, led by Schechter, a refugee from Romania, to lobby directly with Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, as well as with Randolph Churchill. Time and again, the most vulnerable were taken by the Partisans to an improvised airfield near Topusko and waited, but no evacuation took place, raising despair and tensions among the refugees, as recorded by Zeev and Novak. By that time, the refugees were all suffering from a special fever that they jokingly called ‘Baritis’, or longing to go to Bari. Yet a very strict hierarchy was established for the evacuation, which prioritized the very sick and elderly, and which proceeded very slowly. Able-bodied men who could fight or contribute to the Partisan cause were not allowed to leave.130 In September 1944, Churchill was joined by his friend and drinking buddy Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest writers in English literature of the twentieth century, who left both documentary and novelistic accounts of his experience, as well as about the fate of the Jewish refugees he encountered. Given that Waugh spent almost six months on the ground, and later wrote at length about his time in Yugoslavia, his account requires scrutiny. Staunchly Catholic, traditionalist, and anti-Communist, Evelyn Waugh wrote a report on ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’ while there, and subsequently presented it to the Foreign Office. In the report, Waugh highlighted a number of executions of Catholic priests, and unequivocally condemned the Communist and proRussian Partisans, maintaining that most of the Catholic clergy did not cooperate with the Ustaša and were unjustifiably persecuted. He later maintained that the Foreign Office suppressed his report, allegedly to maintain good relations with the Communist leader, Tito, but Pope Pius XII, who Waugh also personally met to inform him about his findings, did not do anything either.131 Years PRO, WO 202/293, AC/A/8050. Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 190–96; Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked, p. 53. Sir Ralph Stevenson, the British Ambassador to Belgrade, wrote a substantive eleven-point assessment rejecting Waugh’s recommendation for change of British policy in Yugoslavia. Maclean dismissed Waugh’s informants as Ustaša sympathizers. Recent studies claim that history seems to have vindicated Waugh in his argument that religious freedom was incompatible with Communism in Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. See Milena Borden, ‘Evelyn Waugh’s Yugoslav Mission: Politics and Religion’, Evelyn Waugh

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later, Waugh described in detail the plight of refugee Jews in Yugoslavia in the third book of his Sword of Honour trilogy, entitled Unconditional Surrender (1961, published as The End of the Battle in the US, and preceded by Men at Arms in 1952 and Officers and Gentlemen in 1955), which many critics hailed as the best English novel about the war.132 In the novel, the figure of British Captain Guy Crouchback, acting as Waugh’s, or Randolph Churchill’s, alter ego, is appalled by the Partisans, their outward roughness, and their ideological dogmatism and obsessive suspicion of anything foreign. This is most evident when Crouchback befriends a group of around a hundred Jews in Partisan-held Topusko. During his stay, the refugees receive aid from Jewish organisations in the USA, infuriating non-Jewish locals.133 Crouchback then clashes with the Partisans for not providing him with the list of Jews to be evacuated, and he bemoans that the refugees are afraid to express their demands because of the conflict over aid from the US. According to Crouchback, the refugees could not stand the Partisans, and watched with disbelief how the British and Americans promoted them into allies.134 He alerts the Allied Command in Bari, and the situation only slightly improves when Tito makes a provisional agreement with the Yugoslav Exile Government (the order mentioned above). Yet, for a long time, the Allied planes cannot land due to bad weather.135 Crouchback’s attempts to save the Jews ultimately makes matters worse for the recipients. Upon returning to England, Crouchback is told that some of his friends in Yugoslavia were shot as spies, allegedly because they had become so friendly with him.136 With a pronounced agenda on behalf of the Catholic Church, and with his official reports that denigrate the Partisans, Soviets, and Communists, Waugh is Newsletter and Studies, 49 (1) (Spring 2018), 2–25; Donat Gallagher and Carlos Villar Flor, In the Picture: The Facts behind the Fiction in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour (Amsterdam and New York: Brill, Rodopi, 2014), pp. 270–91. The novel is developed from a short story, ‘Compassion’, written in 1949. Waugh’s reporting on refugee Jews in Yugoslavia in the novel, as well as in his other articles and diary, is discussed at length in Jeffrey Heath, The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and his Writing (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), and Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography Evelyn Waugh, The Early Years 1903–1939 and No Abiding City 1939–1966 (London: Flamingo, 1993). This is confirmed by Polić, Imao sam sreće, pp. 241–42. Yet Zeev insists that the row was quickly overcome, and that the locals admired the Jews for taking care of each other by distributing aid. See his Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 212–13. Waugh, Unconditional Surrender, pp. 224–50. Ibid., p. 300. A couple called Kanyi, who Crouchback is trying to help, feature prominently in the novel. Could it be that this refers to Zagreb dentist Leo Wilf and his wife Irena or Judita Abinun, mentioned above?

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not an unbiased source, and his portrayal of Jews could be a part of an agenda to oppose the uncritical and sycophantic attitude of Randolph Churchill towards the Partisans.137 What is certain is that the Partisans were hostile to Westerners who, until autumn 1943, supported their bitter rivals, the monarchist Četniks; befriending them was potentially seen as treason.138 Rochlitz is similarly ill disposed to Partisan ideological blindness, but he praised their courage, determination, and willingness to help. How far Waugh was involved in the rescue or improvement of the position of Jews remains questionable, however, as none of the preserved first-hand witness accounts of the survivors mention or recall his presence. Moreover, the events described above all took place long after Waugh left Topusko, going first to Dubrovnik and then to Rome. There was also a considerable language barrier, with Waugh communicating in Latin and broken Italian. Waugh could only talk to them via the Jewish Partisan Leo Mates, who was official liaison officer and interpreter at the time, and later Tito’s personal secretary, who he dismissed as a Russophile in his writings. Most other translators for Partisans were Jewish, like Arthur Schwarz or Ivan Singer, and the British mission was even assigned a Jewish woman as a cook.139 A number of other Jewish refugees came into contact with American and British personnel, but none of them could be sourced as Crouchback’s, or Waugh’s, informers.140 While Jews undeniably suffered with the Partisans, their fate was similar to all others. Quite contrary to Waugh’s impressions, many were entrusted with important duties and powers. After only a brief period with the Partisans, Rochlitz was selected for pilot training, and only a more urgent need for veterinarians dashed his hopes, and, as it turned out, saved his life when those selected were murdered by Germans while on their way. What Rochlitz’s case confirms is that the Partisans remained reluctant to let go of Jews who were holding important combative or logistic roles.141 Zeev shares Waugh’s antiCommunism, but stops short of discrediting Partisan anti-fascism or of In his meeting with Pope Pius XII, who expressed concerns about the Catholics in Yugoslavia, Randolph Churchill is reported as saying: ‘What Marshal Tito and the Partisans have done should serve as a model and example to all enslaved countries of Europe They have developed the technique of guerrilla warfare as it seldom has been before. Here in Yugoslavia, there can be seen in miniature the new Europe which is being created. Their work should serve as a pattern for the political reconstruction of other countries of Europe’, ‘Pope Receives Randolph Churchill’, The Palestinian Post, 14 June 1944, p. 1. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, pp. 123–24. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, pp. 286, 296. Singer claims that some Yugoslav Jews were indeed recruited by the British as informers or spies, in ibid., p. 297. Rochlitz, Accident of Fate, pp. 129–30, 187–94.

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detecting any official anti-Semitic policy, instead praising their rescue efforts.142 Singer admits that there were frequent conflicts between refugee Jews and the Partisans, but then points out that conflicts were also frequent among Partisan Jews themselves.143 Anti-Semitic comments were taken much more lightly by the Yugoslav Jews, who had more in common with the Partisans, and for whom they only find words of praise, while images of villains were kept for the British.144 Survivors’ testimonies make for an overwhelming affirmation of Partisans’ ideological unacceptance of anti-Semitism, and their proven desire to help the Jewish evacuees. Conflicts, as in Kerenji’s conclusion, are attributed to the extreme circumstances, along with rampant social and cultural frictions.145 So, what to make of Waugh’s account? Waugh himself was known as a vocal anti-Semite, which is usually attributed to upper-class British snobbery, along with his views that Jews were agents of capitalism, democracy, and secularism. It was only as a reaction to the Holocaust that Waugh sought to blunt his anti-Semitism – unsuccessfully, according to critics.146 In his encounters with Jews in Yugoslavia, Waugh’s alter ego, Guy Crouchback, is often condescending, describing them as grotesque in their bourgeois civility, greedy, gesticulating. He observes oddly that most of them did not look Semitic at all to him, and that instead they were ‘fair, snub-nosed, high cheek-boned, the descendants of Slav tribes Judaized long after the Dispersal’.147 A special disdain is reserved for James Klugmann from SOE, who Waugh met in Bari and blamed for the Soviet-Jewish shift in British policy towards Yugoslavia. Could it be that Waugh’s attempts to rescue Jews were blundering, disregarding the British opposition to allowing Jewish migration to Palestine, as well as Allied Command’s unwillingness to sacrifice its pilots and other staff, given the precarious position of Partisan mountain hide-outs? By condemning the Partisans, and absolving the British, Waugh pursued his anti-Communist agenda, similarly to with the issue of Catholics, all contrary to decisions taken by his superiors, most notably Brigadier Maclean. Indeed, he continued to campaign against Tito and Yugoslavia, and persuaded George Orwell to support his cause, but not the British government.

Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp. 142–43, 160, 185. Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p. 334. Ibid., p. 339–45. Kerenji, ‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’, p. 72. David Jonathan Bittner, ‘Evelyn Waugh and the Jews’ (MA dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 1989). Waugh, Unconditional Surrender, p. 226.

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On the other hand, the odyssey of Jews in Yugoslavia continued long after Waugh and Randolph Churchill were gone. Three hundred refugees who we saw found shelter in Đulovac in Western Slavonia were, at the end of 1944, eventually evacuated to Hungary by the Partisans and with the help of the Soviet Red Army, and then to liberated territories of Yugoslavia behind the front line. On 29 January 1945, an unidentified member of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees again raised the issue of the biggest group staying around Topusko, asking Maclean and Churchill to influence Tito to allow the emigration of Yugoslav Jews, while also admitting that many of those already in Italy wished to return to Yugoslavia. It is only in the secret report of 1 March 1945 that we learn about the evacuation on 26 February of 103 foreign Jewish refugees from Yugoslavia to Bari, among whom were fifteen Hungarians (including twenty-year-old Imre Rochlitz and other Austrian Jews with Hungarian nationality), sixty-eight Austrians (including artist Johanna Lutzer), seven Polish, one Palestinian, four Czechoslovaks, three Brazilians, two Germans, and two Russians. The report states that most of these people had been residing (sic) in Yugoslavia for about five years. Some of them were even born in Yugoslavia, although they were foreign citizens. As we have seen, many remained with the Partisans until the end of the war and later. Years later, one of the refugees, Menachem Shelah, became a chronicler of their agony and rescue, sounding the verdict that Tito and his Partisan staff tried to save the Jews, but that the British refused or delayed it.148 Postponing, or slowing down, the evacuation of refugees sheltered by the Partisans inevitably had a high human cost. Michael Maor, born in 1933 in Halberstadt, Germany, and his parents were among those desperate refugees arriving in Yugoslavia as the only destination when the war started. Interned in Derventa in Bosnia, they escaped certain death by fleeing to Italian-held territory and were among three thousand Rab internees evacuated by the Partisans. However, Michael’s parents were killed in late 1944 in a German aerial attack on Partisan-held Topusko in Croatia, before any evacuation was attempted.149 In the meantime, many Yugoslav Jews from Ferramonti and other camps and confinement areas throughout Italy headed to Bari to join the so-called First Overseas Brigade, with plans to go to Yugoslavia and join the struggle

In a letter to Zdenka Novak in 1989. See Novak, When Heaven’s Vault Cracked, p. 69. Michael was placed in an orphanage and said he suffered harassment and abuse for being the only Jew. After spending time with various foster families and always feeling like an outsider, Michael Maor eventually came to Israel a couple of years after the war, Yad Vashem Quarterly Magazine, 49 (Spring 2008), 13 [accessed 18 November 2021].

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with the Partisans, despite the opposition of the British. On 3 October 1944, the first Partisan boat (Bakar), led by Commander Sergije Makiedo, arrived in Bari carrying wounded Partisans, more Jewish refugees, and a few Italians, and soon the link was established between the Allied Command in Bari and the Partisan-held Adriatic islands carrying arms and supplies, and evacuating people in the famed Operation Audrey, mostly due to American Commanders’ enthusiasm.150 Many Yugoslav Jews, such as Armando Moreno, opposed the Zionist plans to move them from camps in Italy to Palestine, and instead went back to Yugoslavia to fight for the Partisans against the Nazis, some even returning from Palestine to fight for the Yugoslav cause.151 Towards the end of the war, and at the opposite end of Yugoslavia, the Partisans contributed to the rescue of some of over six thousand Jews from Hungary and Hungarian-occupied parts of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, who had been brought as labour force to the copper mines in Bor in Eastern Serbia in 1943.152 In Bor, they were placed in a labour complex employing thirty to eighty thousand forced labourers from Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Greece, and France, and, eventually, a large number of Italian prisoners of war organized by the German military labour organization Todt (OT) and Siemens factory, exploiting formerly French-owned copper, nickel, tin, and lead mines. Around two thousand five hundred out of six thousand slave labourers died as a result of the terror and exploitation to which they were exposed, most tragically on the retreat to the Reich in 1944, which turned into a death march.153 However, several hundred forced Jewish labourers were Walter  R.  Roberts, Tito, Mihailović, and the Allies, 1941–1945, p.  149. See also ‘Operation Audrey’ [accessed 18 November 2021]. Šalom Finci, S Titovom vojskom u Jugoslaviji (translated from Hebrew by Hajim Salmona) (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1974), pp. 13–14; Singer, My Father’s Blessing, p.  256. Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, p.  323; ‘Armando Moreno’ [Obituary], Los Angeles Times, 7 April 2005. Moreno, who was born in Vienna to parents originally from Belgrade, where they were both murdered, escaped to Italy with Jewish children evacuated from Zagreb. When they brought the children to Switzerland, Moreno moved to France, where he joined the Resistance and eventually came back to join the Yugoslav Partisans, becoming a prominent Yugoslav and UN official after the war. The force also included between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and eighty Jehovah’s Witnesses, eighteen Sabbatarians (Seventh Day Adventists) and nine Nazarenes from Hungary, who were incarcerated due to their refusal to perform military service. Among those forced into death marches, some were rescued by the Red Army, although many, including one of the greatest poets of the Hungarian language, Miklós Radnóti, were executed by Hungarian, ethnic German, and Bosnian SS troops. Miklós Radnóti wrote poems as means of resistance. Even on the death march, he kept his notebook, writing poems that he ironically called Razglednice (Serbian for ‘postcards’). The notebook was found when his body was excavated two years later. The tragically beautiful poems

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liberated by the Partisans, and they spent the rest of the war fighting with the Partisans.154 Many of them were doctors, who provided desperately needed medical assistance to Partisans during the liberation of Yugoslavia at the end of 1944 and in 1945, such as Otto Frankl, Endre Kelemen, Nandor Schnizler, and Pal Vörös, all from Budapest.155 Some Jewish labourers, such as Samuel Weiss, originally from Czechoslovakia but recruited into Hungarian labour battalions, escaped on their own to join the Partisans.156 Finally, from autumn 1943, the Yugoslav Partisans hosted, assisted, and helped transport further Jewish paratroopers/commandos, as part of the effort by the Jewish Agency to infiltrate the occupied countries of Europe and undermine the ongoing Holocaust. Out of thirty-two commandos dispatched to Europe, fourteen landed with the Partisans, among which, four were Yugoslav born. One of them was Ernest Löhner, who was among the few youths able to leave the Kladovo transport on time.157 For various reasons, their bravery did not produce concrete results, which is a story told elsewhere.158 Here it suffices to mention that despite some problems, and at least one tragic incident, the Yugoslav Partisans turned out to be reliable partners to the British Secret Services and the Jewish Agency in these operations. The most famous of them was Hanna Senesh, who was parachuted into Yugoslavia on 14 March 1944 with appear in Miklós Radnóti, The Complete Poetry in Hungarian and English (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014). Years after the war, some, such as former rabbi of Osijek Charles Steckel in his Destruction and Survival, p. 38, condemned the Partisans for not liberating the Bor mine and rescuing the Hungarian forced labourers. Much more frequent and serious are accusations against the Partisans for not liberating Jasenovac, where so many more died. As they stand, these are nothing more than speculations, or possibly evidence for Partisan weakness, rather than their anti-Semitism or anti-Serb attitude, which are the contexts in which they were made. For Hungarian Jewish slave labourers in Bor, see Randolph  L.  Braham, The Politics of Genocide, pp.  47–49; Tamás Csapody, Bortól Szombathelyig – Tanulmányok a bori munkaszolgálatról és a bori munkaszolgálatosok részleges névlistája (Budapest: Zrínyi Kiadó, 2014), and Bori munkaszolgálatosok: Fejezetek a bori munkaszolgálat történetéből (Budapest: Vince Kiadó, 2011). A few Hungarian Jews were also rescued/captured by the Četniks and forced to serve in their ranks. David Venditta, ‘He Fought with Serbs in WWII’, The Morning Call, 16 May 1993. Löhner was a parachute liaison officer in Tito’s headquarters, and afterwards he rose in the Israeli army to the rank of general. The parachutists were a segment of two hundred and fifty Jewish men and women in Mandate Palestine who volunteered to join the British army and parachute into German-occupied Europe between 1943 and 1945, with the mission to organize resistance and rescue civilians and Allied personnel. Nenad Goll, Nemoguća misija; Židovski padobranci u Hrvatskoj 1944. godine (Zagreb: Despot, 2014).

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Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein.159 After spending several months in Yugoslavia with the Partisans, the three parachutists crossed the border into Hungary, where their plans went awry. Senesh was arrested shortly after crossing the border and executed in Budapest on 7 November 1944 at the age of twentythree. A talented poet, Senesh is celebrated in Israel as a resistance hero. For many Jews, the end of war and the Communist takeover meant more suffering, especially as often there was nowhere to which to return, with most losing family members and property.160 Yet, the post-war developments in Yugoslavia, and especially in Albania, should not obscure their Partisans’, or the common people’s, resolute anti-fascism, and their role in saving the lives of many Jews and others.161 The failures of their socialist experiments, and especially the crisis and wars in the 1990s, for which some former Partisans and Communists bear responsibility, should not disillusion us was the message of a Swiss Jewish doctor, Paul Parin, who always believed that volunteering for the Partisans in 1943 was the noblest act of his life.162 Similarly, we should not allow the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust and its commemoration to obscure Jewish participation in Yugoslav anti-fascist resistance, both before and during the war, as proportionally the most massive and life changing in all of Europe. This chapter has made a small contribution by emphasizing the For more about this failed attempt, see Yoel Palgi, Into the Inferno: The Memoir of a Jewish Paratrooper Behind Nazi Lines (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), and Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). After the war, when the Communist-led Partisans took power in Yugoslavia, their vision of a classless society did not envisage reconstitution of Jewish property, lost through nationalization, confiscation, or theft. In some cases, the new authorities raised dubious accusations of collaboration by some Jews with the Ustaša regime in Croatia. Many other Jews, both Yugoslav and foreign refugees, also faced the reluctance of the new authorities to regain objects of art, money, and other valuables which were requisitioned or stolen from them during the war by the Ustaša. See Naida Mihal Brandl, ‘Jews Between Two Totalitarian Systems: Property Legislation’, Review of Croatian history, 12 (2016), 106–27; Zeev, Im Satellitenstaat Kroatien, pp.  252–53. Also Robert Bajruši, ‘Krvavo porijeklo općenarodne imovine’, Jutarnji list, 20 January 2019. For post-war developments, see Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979); Emil Kerenji, ‘Jewish Citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish Identity in a Socialist State, 1944–1974’ (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008). Parin, Es ist Krieg und wir gehen hin, pp. 275–76. A Polish-born doctor David Mel (1912– 1995), who spent the war in Italy, also volunteered to join the Partisans in 1944 and eventually remained to live in Yugoslavia, becoming an army colonel. See ‘Mel, David’, in Znameniti Jevreji Srbije [accessed 18 November 2021], p. 155.

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great role played by foreign/refugee Jews in that resistance, and by describing the Partisan role in saving at least three thousand Jews from Rab, and hundreds or thousands of others from Bor mines, fugitives from prisons and death camps, and escapees from towns throughout the region, as well as assisting the common Allied effort.

Conclusion Refugee Survival Guide

Having completed the main body of work on this book, I found myself challenged to produce some concluding thoughts on a history that was overwhelmingly a litany of misery, suffering, and struggle for survival, with some examples of resistance in the ultimate chapter. How to make sense of it all? Is there a lesson to be drawn for refugees of our days, for readers, for humanity? One of the women who inspired this book, German poet Dinah Nelken, who spent almost eight years as a refugee, with a last couple of years on Korčula, wrote at the end of her exile: One life only? That is a joke, We need years, not months, weeks. To make up what we missed. To fulfil what we imagined. And, recognizing the guilt, to rectify, What we took away from others and ourselves.1

To make up, and to rectify, is also what the simple villagers of Porodin, who we met at the beginning of this book, tried to do when repenting for the murder of a Jewish peddler before the war inferno. The subsequent Nazi German invasion of the Balkans caused such immense suffering to its population that the need for repentance multiplied ad infinitum. Once noted for its comparative lack of anti-Semitism, the Balkans saw the most horrifying slaughter of its Jewish population, with the share of those lost only comparable to Poland and parts of the Soviet Union. Among the victims, there were also Jews who fled Germany, Austria, and other Central European countries, seeking refuge in the Balkan remoteness and backwardness, or who simply ended up there for lack of any other option. For decades, researching or commemorating their fate was neglected, or split between different countries, which attracted or denied their loyalties while they were still alive. This book attempts to rectify the lacunae in knowledge by gathering the most comprehensive picture to date, coloured by the narratives of the survivors. The turn to personal narratives was not only due to a frequent lack of other sources, but also due to their emotional, as well as cognitive, effect on the reader. Or, to sum up Nelken, to rectify the survivors to themselves and others. My translation from the excerpt in Puschak, ‘Fluchtpunkt Korčula. Dinah Nelken 1900–1989’, p. 40.

© Brill Schöningh, 2023 | doi:10.30965/9783657791743_010

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As is even less widely known, thousands endured in their exile. Most Jews in the Balkans escaped death by crossing over to the territories occupied or annexed by Italy, such as Dalmatia and Albania. A few fled to Hungary, where some braved death alongside Budapest Jews. Some hid in remote areas among destitute peasants. Others joined Yugoslav and Greek Partisans, where most survived, despite the Allies refusing or delaying their evacuation. They made this book possible by leaving their testimonies. Some, such as Irene Grünbaum, wrote immediately after the war, thinking that it was their ‘duty to live, to fight, to tell about what had happened’.2 Yet, hers and many other memories were not published and did not raise much attention. Decades later, in a different atmosphere, marked by a much wider knowledge of the Holocaust, many other survivors, prompted by the fear of dying, wanted their own experience to become known, understood, or acted upon. Their memories from the Balkans turned out to be crucial for this knowledge to emerge, and to be sketched out in this book. In this way, the book moved away from the traditional history, particular in retelling only what had happened, and approached the more elusive literature, with its unlimited potential, or what might happen, as devised by Aristotle in his Poetics, when distinguishing history as particular from poetry as universal. Using the redemptive power of memory, memoirs, and interviews, frequently called upon in this book, framed the experience, turning it into a sort of representation. They both conveyed and produced knowledge in ways that historiography cannot. Therefore, instead of attempting to draw a conclusion to the multitude of stories and experiences, this last section will only explore the survivors’ observations about their own survival. Their recollections fused, in a way that W. G. Sebald perfected in his oeuvre, historiography with ‘poetry’, combining the reality of observation and what is always the fictionality of representation. While far removed from Sebald’s works, this book was inspired by some of his perennial preoccupations – emigrants/refugees/ survivors, representing and memorializing victims, the individualization of history, and the constant tension between individual memory and official historiography in general.3 More than an obligatory corrective to some master historiographical narratives, the voices of survivors in this book invite further reflection on the Holocaust, forced migration, and the state and meaning of foreignness. One question that echoed throughout most memoirs and interviews, one that has followed the survivors for the rest of their lives, was what they did Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, p. 145. Among many works on Sebald see the essays in the volume W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History, ed. by Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

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to remain alive, and what, if anything, they could have done better to save their loved ones. Contemplating why so few survived, Lucie Begov blamed the so-called Jewish optimism, the belief in truth and justice.4 The fate of the overwhelmingly secular and assimilated German Jews, who made up the bulk of refugees in the Balkans, conforms to this trope, although Begov seems somewhat harsh, considering the enemy they faced. There were differences in survival chances. It was easier for German Gentile refugees, either political, or those married to Jews. Most German Gentile refugees survived, despite the tremendous hardship they underwent, such as the Wukitzevits, father and son, who were imprisoned and tortured, but not executed. Gertrude Neumann was released as an Aryan, married to a Jew, just before she was to enter a gas van designed to exterminate the Kladovo Jewish refugees and Belgrade Jewish women and children. The Gentile wife and daughters of Max Schohl were drafted into forced labour after he, a German nationalist and war veteran, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. The differences among the Jews were noted too. The Polish Jews who managed to reach the Balkans were more prone to escape and react to threats than the German Jews. Similarly, younger people were more fearless and mobile, and less bound by family and societal concerns, and thus were more successful in their attempts. Others learnt along the way, as summed up by Irene Grünbaum, when interviewed about her desire to emigrate further by an UNNRA officer in Rome in 1945: I wanted to go forward. I couldn’t just sit there idle again and wait around for what would happen to me […] I had to be able to decide for myself. I had learned it in the years I had spent alone.5

Marijana Munk thought it was her faith and optimism that saved her, never giving up, and never imagining that she would not make it, despite losing her husband and brother along the way.6 Importantly, as numerous testimonies pointed out, personal wealth and elite status often made a difference to the chances of escape and survival, although not always.7 Finally, it was sheer luck, or accident of fate, as Imre Rochlitz formulated it, that was often singled out as the key factor accounting for survival. This book has also highlighted the role of Balkan patriarchal hospitality, as illustrated by the proverb ‘guest in house, God in house’, with which Csokor Begov, Mit meinen Augen, p. 18. Grünbaum, Escape through the Balkans, p. 123. Interview with Marijana Munk. Cf. Matthias Blum and Claudia Rei, ‘Escaping Europe: Health and Human Capital of Holocaust Refugees’, European Review of Economic History, 22/1 (2018), 1–27.

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was greeted by his Korčulan host, Milica, and which reigned supreme in Albania.8 Social integration, and especially linguistic acculturation, was the most one could do to secure welcome and improve one’s chances of survival.9 Eventually, that acculturation prompted many refugees who spent the war in Yugoslavia, Greece, or Albania to remain there after the war, and even to continue their careers, such as musicians Walter Pfeffer, Fritz Kahn, and Fritz Lunzer, scenographer Rudolf Bunk, actress Tilla Durieux, football coach Illés Spitz, engineer Marko Menachem, and housewife Anna Weininger. Initially suspicious about its patriarchal, ‘primitive’ nature, most refugees became fond of the Balkans, turning its Orientalist image, which they shared upon arrival, on its head. What astonished most was the stoicism of the locals in bearing the hardship of the war. Alfred Missong described how his family ran for shelter, away from the horse wagon on which they were travelling amid bombing: but the very old peasant woman who was pulling the wagon seemed absolutely unimpressed with what was happening. Remaining still during the attacks, she held the horses, and waited calmly for the sign to continue the ride.10

On the other hand, Ludwig Biró described the paralysing malaise of refugees, recalling his experience in Maribor and Zagreb from 1938 to 1940: In the midst of an orderly social organism, one finds oneself on an isolated sidetrack, dependent on the hospitality of the country, and its more or less emigrant-friendly inhabitants. One feels oneself as a burden, and as an anonymous member of an amorphous mass, the ‘emigrants’. When the others work, you must watch; when they deal with their problems, you are a stranger; and your own concerns are ‘managed’ by the welfare committee. Nobody knows you or feels the need to get to know you, and if your fellow migrants behave badly, which happens all too often, you feel it first-hand. That is why the emigrants mostly and preferably live among themselves, where one ‘knows’ one another, and where one can talk about one’s own needs and worries; but that’s also why the childish, little deceptions of these people occur, or they try to glorify their own past and make an impression on those around them.11

After the Nazi occupation, this malaise turned into a preoccupation with death, and food, which were thoroughly entangled. As experienced by Mira Crouch, life was mostly about lunch; how to get food, and how to put it to the best use were constant preoccupations, pervading and largely making up everyday Csokor, Als Zivilist im Balkankrieg, p. 123. Interview with Dorrit L. Ostberg. Alfred Missong, ‘Als Emigrant in Futog’, Zwischenwelt (2010), 1–2, p. 61. Biró, Die erste Hälfte meines Lebens, p. 302.

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life.12 Crouch claims that they were sustained, rather than thwarted, by their fantasies about food. Thus, her memoir is interspersed with recipes and advice about how and what to make out of few ingredients, if any. Many other survivors wrote about the lessons drawn, and insisted that they be shared, as relevant not only for Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, but for all subsequent and contemporary refugees. Other parallels with contemporary refugees trying to reach Europe and North America illegally have been explicit throughout this book. To reach and/or remain in the Balkans, the Jewish refugees faked and forged their documents, bought and sold on the black market, married and divorced for papers, converted to whatever religion was available, and made thousands of other, often humiliating, compromises. They spoke or wrote openly about it, swore by these illegal strategies, and sometimes elevated them to a purpose of their storytelling. One of them, Ernst Pollatschek from Vienna, who spent six years on the run through various lands, provided ten simple rules that summarized his survival strategy in his memoir, aptly entitled The Art of Survival. Not all are applicable for all, and in all contexts, but many could be deemed useful. Rarely does a history book end with such practical guidance, based on the experiences from past times, but I can think of no better way of ending this book, which has relied so heavily on the experiences of the survivors. It is a book about a tragical crime, which ends with the words of someone who outwitted it. Here are Pollatschek’s commandments: 1) Carry as little as possible: A handbag with which you can climb over slippery hills; a suitcase that can last for half a century. 2) Go always alone; you are only responsible for yourself, and some things, that are otherwise impossible, you can only do on your own. 3) Go always first, confidently that you are an interesting person that can tell whatever you want, and that no one else has control over. Besides, in the beginning, there are possibilities that later disappear. 4) Try from the start to talk with the highest authorities responsible for you, make a contact. Later, people would treat you differently if they knew you before you needed them. 5) Do not worry about regulations that imply control of refugees and their movement. Most will not bother controlling, as that implies extra work. 6) When you are in another country, learn immediately their language. If you know it, you are a King; if you don’t, you are a Slave. And learn practically: not only words, but whole sentences, so that for every noun you have a verb that follows.

Mira Crouch, War Fare: A Memoir of Belgrade 1941–1945 (Rosebery NSW: Gavemer Publishing, 2007), p. 12.

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Conclusion 7) As soon as you know the language, look for a job. Emigration is not a waiting room for the next train. Emigration is a way of life in extreme circumstances. One always must work to survive, and there are no exceptions. 8) Consider your residence temporary, and always be prepared for the next move. 9) Do not lose yourself in longing for normal life. Instead, try to make the most out of the life you have. If you eat little, or much, bad, or good, remember your head always must be fed and in good place, as it is the spirit that moves the body. 10) Have no prejudice against this or that [person], or these or those [people]. You can learn something even from a donkey. At least how not to be one.13

Pollatschek, Die Kunst des Überlebens, pp. 28–29.

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Index Abravanel, Rafael Rudi 274, 279 Abyssinia 46–47 Ada 7 Adabbo, Michele 219 Adanja family 149 Adler, Alfred 39–40 Adler, Arthur and Riya 133 Adler, Gertzen, Rudi, Izabella 133 Adriatic Sea (Adriatic coast) 40, 50, 57–58, 70, 118, 163, 172, 174, 180–181, 210, 226, 228, 242, 256–257, 264, 277 Agamben, Giorgio XLI Albania XVI–XVII, XX, XXIV, XXVI, XXXI–XXXII, XLI, 2, 23, 36, 44, 65, 69, 71, 89, 109, 145, 148–149, 180, 183, 195–197, 201, 229, 239, 259–288, 325, 328, 330 Aleppo 110 Alexander–Katz, Dr Hermann 120 Alkalaj, Chief Rabbi Dr Isak 15, 85, 106, 116, 161 Alkala(j)y family 58, 243 Alkalaj, Haim 252 Alkalaj, Sara 274 Alcalay, Albert and Samuel XXXV, 180 Almansi, Dante 251 Almuli family 243 Alps 70, 73, 86–87 Alsace 155 Altarac family 243 Altarac, Majer and Eli 177, 249 Alter, Léon 73 Altman, Hans 267 Altmann, David and Katica 133 Altmaier, Jakob 291–292 Altmaier family from Frankfurt 219 Ambrosio, Vittorio General 194–195, 198 Ambrus, Charlotte or Lotte 167 America, Unites States, North America (US)  XVI, XXII–XXIII, XXXII, XXXV, 5, 9–10, 24, 27–28, 31, 37, 41, 43–45, 47–48, 50, 53–54, 63, 68, 70, 76, 92–93, 104, 112–113, 118–119, 135, 152, 158, 162, 215, 230, 235, 244, 257, 265, 267, 316, 319 Améry, Jean XLI

Amico, Giuseppe General 214–215 Amreich, Salomea 133 Amsterdam 33 Andreis, Leo 235, 254 Angelo 149 Ankara 109 Anschluss of Austria XIX, XXV, 22, 27, 36, 43–49, 77, 102, 114, 122, 234, 263, 294 Anti-Semitism XVII, XXVI–XXVIII, XXXI, XXXVII, 1, 3, 9, 15, 17, 20, 23–25, 28, 33–34, 36, 44, 55, 57, 63–64, 66, 88, 105, 119, 122–123, 125, 135, 139, 141–142, 144, 152, 161, 174–175, 177–178, 180, 185, 214, 219, 221, 229, 242, 256, 260–262, 265–268, 273, 275, 285–286, 308–310, 314, 321, 327 Antolić, Vladimir 42 Aquila 209–210 Arendt, Hannah XXVII, XXXVIII Argentina 71, 257 Arnerić, Dr Juraj (Đura) 247, 257 Arnthal (Ehrenthal), Eduard and Hedwiga 234, 254 Armstrong, Lilly 67 Arnold, Dr 169 Aryan XVI Aschermann, Fred 205 Asti 187 Athens XIX, 16, 29, 47, 120–121, 145–146 Atlas, Richard 263 Auerbach, Markus, Chame, Leon, Josef 133 Auschwitz XXXIII, XXXIX, 43, 52, 99, 133–134, 140, 143, 145–146, 167, 169, 184, 216, 227–228, 245, 305, 329 Australia 66, 100, 121, 158 Austria XVI–XVII, XIX, XXV, 1, 4, 8, 17, 28, 44–48, 62–63, 70–73, 77–82, 86, 98–99, 103, 107, 113, 118, 129, 133, 159, 167, 170, 184, 231, 238, 264–265, 288, 291–296, 298, 301, 304, 328 Austria–Hungary (Habsburg Monarchy) 3, 5–6, 25, 49, 57, 86, 102, 161, 174, 246 Avramović family 276, 282 B’nai B’rith 14, 19, 37, 54, 61, 126, 158

Index Babinger, Dr Franz 38 Babuscio–Rizzo, Francesco 266 Bačka 117, 141–143, 156 Bačka Palanka 164 Bačko Petrovo Selo 7 Baer, Max 87 Bakar 187 Bakić-Hayden, Milica XXX Banat 123, 141, 156 Banija (region in Croatia) 172, 304 Banja near Arandjelovac 36 Banja Luka 130–131 Banjica prison and concentration camp  139–140 Baranja (Baranya) 22, 141, 143 Barber, Herma 76, 204, 206 Barcelona 295 Bari 93, 227, 252, 255–256, 267, 299, 304, 308, 317–323 Barnes, Julian XXVII Barta, Judith 197 Barthou, Louis 25 Baruhović, Haim and family 62, 281 Basel 159 Bastianini, Giuseppe 182, 211–212, 216, 223 Bauer, Anton 163 Baum, Drago 230 Baum, Franz (Franjo) 294 Baumgarten, Josef 135 Bayer 149 Becker, Alfred 292–293 Becker, Fritz and mother An(n)a 92–93, 202 Begov, Lucie and family XXXIII, 220, 226–227, 308, 329 Beirut 110 Bela Krajina 190 Belajac, Ivana 152–153 Belgium 51, 67 Belgrade XIII, XIX, XXIV, XXXI–XXXII, 2–7, 9, 13–14, 24, 26–32, 34–39, 41–42, 47–48, 51, 54, 57, 61–62, 64, 67, 70–74, 77–78, 89, 91–95, 98–110, 112–119, 122–125, 128, 135–141, 144, 147–151, 153, 156, 158, 160, 162–163, 166, 180–183, 188, 192, 195–197, 203, 209, 212, 236–240, 243–244, 250, 268–270, 272–276, 282, 287, 290–293, 298, 308, 329

373 Ben–Amnon, Ivan 59, 117, 133–134 Ben–David (Walden), Erika 109 Ben–Yosef family 280 Benbassa, Esther 5 Beneš, Jaroslav 57 Benijaminović, Marko 197 Benjamin, Walter 32 Benzion, Lazar 79 Berat 271–272 Berenyi, Ladislaus and Walter 301 Bergen–Belsen 284, 305 Berger, Edmund XXXIV, 190, 220 Bergl, Zdenko 186–187 Berkeš, Pavle 88 Berlin XXVII, XXXII, 12, 14, 24–28, 30, 35–40, 42, 67–68, 73, 80–82, 95, 99–103, 109, 153–154, 217, 227, 229, 232, 234–235, 251, 263, 282, 291, 295, 297, 301 Bermuda 316 Beršići 150 Bet(h)ar 19, 22, 46, 69, 298 Bethke, Karl 156, 169 Biçaku, Ibrahim 283 Bier, Edmund 185 Bier, Rudolf 206, 218 Binder Stern, Trude and husband Walter Weiner XXXIII, 85, 116, 190 Birmingham 39 Biró, Ludwig XXXII, 45–46, 49, 54, 60, 63, 65, 74, 77, 79, 330 Bischof, Carl 170 Bismarck, Otto von 215 Bistinger, Leon 42 Bitola (Monastir) 2, 19, 21, 144–145, 275–277, 282 Bjelinski (Weiss), Bruno 243 Bjelovar 8, 152 Blanari, Elfirede 21 Bled 51, 70 Blumenthal (from Frankfurt aM) 30 Blumenthal, Dr Ernst (and wife Dorothea)  37 Blumenthal, Dr Ferdinand 35–36 Blüh family 71 Blum family (also Schmitt Wilhelm, Paulina, Kler Rudolf and others travelling with them) 139–140 Boehm (Böhm), Livia Lili(ka) 296

374 Böhme, Franz 137 Bologna 268 Bomba 299 Bombay 119 Bonamici, Colonel 187 Bondi, Dr Ruth 149 Boran (Brucks) family 227 Borger, Emil and Stella 267 Borgus, Emil 263 Borowski, Tadeusz XLI Bošan, Magda 159 Bosanski Brod 94 Bosanski Petrovac 68, 132 Bosanski Šamac 130 Boscowitz, Berta and brother Siegfried Zeisl, 88 Bosnia and Herzegovina 2–3, 19, 58, 68, 90, 94, 103, 108, 117, 121, 127, 129–131, 133, 147, 181, 195, 198, 203–204, 212, 216, 218, 229, 243–245, 298, 304–307, 312–315, 322 Brač island 208, 217–219, 223, 249 Brand, Fraziska 152–153 Brand, Joel 119 Brandenburg (Neuendorf) 83 Brar 282 Brazil XXII, 23, 158, 235, 257, 322 Brčko 36, 108, 112, 129–130 Bremen 133 Breslau (Wroclaw) 21, 26, 38, 40, 102 Bresslauer family from Vinkovci 195 Bresslauer, Albert 309 Breyer, Pavle 181 Bril, Slavko 185 Britain, United Kingdom (UK), England  XVI, XXII, 9, 15–16, 30–31, 36, 42, 45–48, 50, 54, 59, 69, 74–75, 81, 90, 98, 104–105, 112, 114, 118–121, 151, 158, 219, 230, 233, 265–266, 291, 316, 319 Brno 28, 133 Brodheim family (Marcus, Fanny, Adolph)  48, 94 Bronca, Mario Menaše 42 Brosan, Alice 108 Bruck, Paul 101 Brukner, Medea 162, 180, 194 Brunner, Walter XXV Bucharest 38, 98 Buchenwald camp 76, 135, 157, 294

Index Budapest 48, 59, 72, 86, 110, 139, 141–143, 150, 161, 324–325, 328 Budenitz 87 Budisavljević, Dijana 153 Budva 37, 70 Bukiš, Danilo 151 Bulgaria (Bulgarian) XVII, XXIV, 2, 6, 25, 71–72, 98, 110, 116, 120–121, 139, 141, 144–145, 151, 245, 269, 272, 274–276, 299, 312 Bunk, Rudolf Gerhart 42–43, 330 Burghausen 95 Burgenland 52–53, 55, 89 Burgyn, James H. 177 Burian, Richard 35 Buschbacher, N. 166 Čačkez, Samuel 243 Cairo 146, 293 Čakovec 68, 87 Camus, Albert XXXIV Canada 100, 245, 257 Cape Town 119 Čapljina 204, 217–218 Caprino Veronese 52 Capudi, Giuseppe 209 Carinthia 8, 85, 147, 229 Carniola 8 Carpi, Daniele XV, 215 Carzoli 209 Casertano, Raffaele general 215 Cërrik 283 Cesarec, August 40 Chandler, Douglas 235 Chile 5, 158 China 10, 46, 80 Churchill, Randolph 317–320, 322 Churchill, Winston 293 Ciano, Galeazzo Count 215, 217, 267 Ciner (Zinner), Pavle (Paja) 148, 181, 210, 270, 272 Cia(r)jaković, Vera 209 Četniks 113, 123–124, 151, 209, 215–216, 247, 290, 307–308, 314, 316, 320 Ciringa 86 Cividale del Friuli 180 Cohen (Koen) family from Skopje 278 Cohen, Karl 263 Cohn, Max 301

375

Index Colllard, Rev. Frederick 50 Cologne 162 Colombia 27 Corfu 146 Cozincer 149 Coudenhove–Kalergi Graf von, Richard Nikolaus 103 Crete 119–120, 146 Crikvenica 184, 219–220 Croatia XV, XX, XXV, 2–3, 94, 96, 104, 116–117, 121–129, 133–136, 141–142, 147, 157, 164, 166–169, 172, 177, 183, 186, 188, 190, 192–193, 195, 198, 200, 203–204, 206, 211–212, 214, 220, 223, 229, 243–244, 258, 300, 307, 314, 316–318, 322 Crouch, Mira 330 Csokor, Franz Theodor XIII, XXXII, XXXVIII, 98, 100–104, 113, 118, 156, 175, 181, 237, 239, 242–243, 245, 247, 251, 253–255, 305, 329 Cuiuli, Vincenzo 224 Čurug 159 Cvetković, Dragiša 55, 104 Cvijić, Đuro and Stjepan 40 Cyprus XVI, 145 Czechoslovakia XVI–XVII, 13, 22, 44, 48, 56–58, 68, 70, 74, 97, 103, 118, 122, 133, 159, 238, 281, 323–324 Czernowitz 151 Dachau camp 46, 52, 72, 76, 80, 82, 106, 135, 146, 228 Đakovo 68, 128, 132, 185, 245 Dalmatia XV–XVI, XXVI, XXXIII, XXXV, XXXVIII, 42–43, 100, 118, 121, 135, 148–149, 172, 177, 181–182, 184, 188–189, 194–195, 198, 200–203, 206, 208, 211–220, 223, 226–227, 230–232, 236, 238–239, 244–250, 255–258, 268, 299, 304, 308, 311, 328 Dalmazzo, Lorenzo general 182, 215 Daniel, Mika L. 58 Danon, Moric 240–241 Danon family 249 Danube River 8, 48, 66, 69, 80, 110, 141–143, 298 Darmstadt 114 Daruvar 22, 94, 97, 128

Davičo, Oskar 181, 236 De Beauvoir, Simone XXXIV De Certeau, Michel XL De Leo, Andrea Colonel 197, 271 Debeljača 141 Dečani (Deçan) 278 Degani (Habergrutz), Joshua 82, 110 Degenstueck, Malvina and Samuel 86 DELASEM (Delegazione Assistenza Emigranti Ebrei) 186, 190–191, 196, 199, 203, 212–214, 223, 228, 239, 241–242, 246, 248–249, 252 Deleon, Gabi and mother 189 Dell’ Era, Tommaso 266 Delnice 94 Demajo family 243 Đeras, Moše 277 Derventa 90–91, 108, 117, 129–132, 241, 322 Dessau 83 Deutsch, host in Maribor 83 Deutsch, Josef 58 Deutsch, Otto Rabbi 186 Dietrich, Marlene 103 Dojaka, Marilena Langu Domany (Grlić), Eva 68 Dominican Republic 44 Donja Stubica 94 Donji Lapac 92, 94–95 Donji Miholjac 59, 117, 133–134 Dortort family 76, 96 Draganić 100, 128 Drassl, adviser for NSDAP 169 Drava river 86, 119, 141–142 Dresden 219, 306 Drvar XXXV Dubrovnik 14, 24, 40, 43, 57, 101–102, 147, 173, 177–178, 181–182, 193, 198–200, 203, 205–206, 214–219, 223–224, 227, 233, 235–237, 239, 250, 264, 320 Duke of Kent 53 Đulovac 317–322 Đurđevac 86 Durrës (Durazzo) 263–266, 270, 272, 279 Durrieux, Tilla (Ottilie Godeffroy) XXX, 43, 102, 113–116, 124, 153, 163, 302, 330 Ecuador 22, 71 Eger, Antonio 234 Egypt XXXV, 43, 121, 255, 311

376 Ehlbaum, Manfred 82 Ehrlich, Abel 264 Ehrlich, Julius 41 Ehrmann, Aleksandar 23 Eibiswald 85 Eichmann, Adolf XIX, 135–136 Eisler, Otto and Stephanie 94 El Shatt, Sinai Peninsula 43, 255–256 ELAS 145–146 Elbasan 283 Engl (Pavlović), Đuro 248 Erlih, Evald 310 Eshkenazi (Aškenazi), Dr Isak 148–150, 195 Eskenazi, Bobby 114 Evans, Richard XXXVIII Evia–Çesme escape route XVI, 145–146 Évian 44, 316 Favoloro, colonel 217 Feiner brothers Paul, Hans and Sep 130, 304–305 Fellner, Gustav 95 Ferramonti internment camp XXXIV, 116, 163, 186, 191, 201, 230, 268, 322 Fiammiferi, 218 Finer, Prof. 262 Finci, Jakov 313 Finci, Markus 227 Fingerhut, Shlomo (Solomon) 165 Finland 46, 48, 95 Fischbein (Fišbajn), Herman 202 Fischer, Bela 301 Fischer, Endre 96 Fischer, Erwin 278 Fischer, Eva and family 240, 246, 268 Fischer, Wolfgang XXX, XXXII, XXXVIII, 17–18, 30, 47, 60–61, 91 Fischl 117 Fischl family from Vienna 219 Fisher (Binzer), Irene (and mother Helene)  28–29, 151–152 Fishta, Gjergj 287 Fleischmann family 219 Florence 43, 223, 249 Flörsheim, 157, 170, 291–292 Forst, Willi 103 France (French) 15, 25, 29, 52, 54, 57, 71, 106, 109, 147, 154, 229, 296, 323

Index Frankfurt Am 30, 80, 82–83, 133, 219 Frankfurt an der Oder 21 Frankl, Otto 324 Frederick, Dr David 306 Freidenreich, Harriet 4, 19 Freier, Recha 82, 84, 191 Frelinova 308 Freundlich, Emil 193 Frey, Liana 307 Friedländer, Saul XXXVIII, XLI Frischler, Stella 129 Fritz, Željko 222 Froning, Eva 297 Fürnberg, Louis 103 Fürst, Dr Klara 306 Fürstenberg, Maria 95 Fürth 13 Futog 117 Fužine 94, 96 Gabler, Leo 294 Gacko 203, 205 Gacsal, János 141 Gaetano, Giuseppe 250 Galicia 39 Galitzky 267 Genoa 27, 71, 158, 223, 248–249, 252 Genzer, Paul and family 96 Gerechter Johanna and family from Hamburg 263, 267 Germany, German XIV–XVI, XVII Gertler, Josef 267 Giamminola, Carlo 209–210 Gitman, Esther 178 Gjirokastër (Argirocastro) 266 Glamoč 315 Glasners from Vienna 219 Glaus, Leo 234 Gleise von Horstenau, Edmund 129, 169 Globocnik, Odilo Lothar Ludwig 226 Glück, Zvonko 243 Gog, Gregor 295 Goebbels, Joseph 60 Goldberg family 71 Goldberg, Gita 90 Goldštajn, Ivo 86 Goldstein, Ivo and Slavko 18 Goldstein, Peretz 325

Index Goldstein Willim, 165 Golenić 2, 12, 21–22, 54, 56, 67 Golomb, Michael (and fiancée Dagmar)  30–31 Gorica/Gorizia 305 Gorkić, Milan 40 Göring, Hans 163 Görring, Hermann 60 Gošnjak, Ivan general 317 Gospić 127–128, 132, 165, 184, 193–194, 294, 301 Göttingen 39 Gottlieb, Hinko and family 221–222, 225 Graz 45, 49, 51–52, 71, 74, 76, 78–86, 91, 96–98, 130, 133–134, 192, 245, 301 Greble, Emily 148 Greece XVI, XIX–XX, XXIV, XXXIV, XLI, 2, 5–6, 16, 19, 23, 29, 44–45, 47, 50, 63–65, 69, 72, 80, 89, 99, 108–114, 118–122, 141, 144–147, 154, 177, 229, 231, 260–262, 267, 274, 277–279, 281, 303, 323, 328, 330 Griemann, Johann 72 Grimes, Rev. Hugh 50 Gross, Salina 61 Grünbaum, Irene XXXII, XXXV–XXXVI, 114, 123, 144, 273, 275, 279–280, 282–284, 328–329 Grünfelder (Gruenfelder), Anna Maria  XXV, 11, 97, 135 Grünspan (Grynszpan), Herschel 60 Grünwald, Ernest and Stefania 235 Grünwald, Trude (Scarlett Epstein) and family 74, 264–266 Gruž 205 Gutman, Ruth (husband George) XLI, 17, 50, 66, 141, 143 Gutmann, Emil and Ivo 309 Guttmann, Dr Frida 306 Gutmann, Viktor 21 Gutmann family from Zagreb 302 Gyor 301 Hachshara 2, 12, 21–22, 46, 54–55, 67, 80, 82–83, 236, 239–242, 248–251 Hacker, Heinrich and Margarete (Weiss) and Gertrude 128, 130 Hafner, Louise and son Alexander 58 Haganj 152

377 Haifa 16, 47 Haiker, Rudolf and Rosa 167 Hajon, David 199–200 Halbrainer, Heimo 79, 85 Halévy, Fromental 24 Halle (an der Saale) 55 Halutzim 12, 19, 22 Hamburg 21, 42, 57, 219 Hammerschlag, Peter 99, 106 Hanau, Julius 290–291 Hara, Rebeka 285 Hartlieb, Hans 295–296 Hashomer Hatzair 21–22, 67, 118, 191, 236, 249, 274–275, 296, 310 Hauser, Bela 158 Hauser, Berthold 165 Hauz(s)er, Lazar 165 Heathcote–Smith, Sir Clifford 317 HeChalutz 21, 191, 249, 298 Hecht, Reuben 69, 124 Heidelberg 38 Heidrich, Reinhard 292 Heilig, Lisa 108, 191 Heim, Helga 309 Heim, Jacob 301 Heitler, Max 166 Heller, Rudolf 74 Hempel, Willy and Marta 295 Henderson, Sir Neville 59 Herbert, Dr Elias (and wife Dr Ada) 37 Herschman, Dr Erwin 87 Heršković family 246 Herzer family 187, 225 Herzog, Dr Milan L. 133, 212 Hesterberg, Trude 33 He(t)zel, Erich 41 Heumann, Jolán (Hojman, Jolanda) 39 HIAS (Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America) 53 HICEM XXV, 12–13, 27, 53–54, 73, 77–78, 83, 96 Hirsch, Paul (Shaul) 28 Hilberg, Raul XXXIX, 11 Himmler, Heinrich 139, 169, 226 Hirschler family 246 Hitler, Adolf XXI, XXIV, 9–10, 24, 31, 60, 101, 104, 108, 112–113, 121, 130, 157, 162, 174, 215, 226, 233, 267, 281, 291

378 Hochberger, Ignatz, Maria, Wilhelm, Sam, Max 127, 304 Hofeneder, Rudolf 101 Hoffman, Mira and husband 187 Hoffmanova, Katarina 222 Hoffmans from Prague 219 Höfner, Walter 232 Holland (Netherlands/ Dutsch) XXII, 37, 48, 56, 74, 95, 162, 292 Holly See 93 Honduras 95, 113 Horn, Mr 267 Horthy, Admiral Miklos XXIV Hoxha, Enver 273, 287 Hreljin 186 Huggan, Graham XXXIX Hungary (Hungarian) XV–XVI, XXIV, 2–5, 7, 13, 22, 29, 48, 50, 56, 59–61, 70, 72–74, 86–88, 98, 108, 111, 118–119, 121, 141–144, 161, 174, 184, 203, 222, 279, 295–297, 301, 304, 306, 311–312, 317, 322–325, 328 Husadžić, Meho 68 Huyssen, Andreas XL Hvar (island) 43, 217–218, 223, 245, 249, 254–255 Hyman, Joseph 105, 107 IKG (Israelitische Kultus Gemeinde) 10, 46, 80–81 Ilok 7, 66, 164 India 119, 158 Indig, Josef Joschko 191 Innsbruck 61 Ioannina 281 Iorga, Prof Nicolae 38 Iraq 119 Ischia 43 Israel XVIII, 36, 98, 243, 258–259, 325 Istanbul 71, 110, 123, 212, 293 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev 69 Jacobson from East Prussia 267 Jacobson, Werner–Joachim 57, 90, 205 Jacomoni di San Savino, Francesco 266–267, 270–271 Jadovno killing site 193, 301 Jagoda, Flory (Flora Kabiljo) 244 Jagodnjak 22

Index Jafa family 160 Jaffa 16, 18 Jakobowitz, Dr Josef 129 Jasenovac camp 40, 100, 103, 128–133, 165, 171, 185, 193–195, 245, 301–302 Jastrebarsko 94 Jelsa 217 Jerusalem 145 Jesenice 75 Jevtić, Bogoljub 15 Jewish partisans Joachimovitz, Dr Robert 37 Jochvidson, Professor Boris 191 JOINT (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) 10, 14, 64, 91, 105, 107, 178, 199, 264, 267 Jokl, Norbert 287–288 Josif, Enriko 236 Josefsberg, Simon, Gisa, Leo 130 Jun–Broda (Ehrlich), Ina 20, 40–41, 195, 237 Jünger, David 1, 10 Justus (Rozenzweig), Juliane 167 Kabiljo family 244 Kabiljo, David 310 Kabiljo, Isak 251 Kadischson, Ava 150 Kadmon, Stella 99 Kahane, Margarete 128, 197 Kahane, Wolf 299–300 Kahn, Fritz 90, 330 Kaiser, Gertrude 58 Kaiser, Wilhelm Gerhard 301–302 Kajon, Jakob 218 Kalef, Marcel and Tilda 240 Kalke, Josefa 61 Kallner, Dr Gertrud Bertha 36 Kalman, Givon (Karl Kleinberger) 82–83, 110 Kalomeja 296 Kamhi, Moisi 270 Kandel, Mavro 19, 61 Kandel, Rudolf (and Blanka Selinger)  XXXIII, 158, 189–190 Kandt, Maximilian (Max) and family 244 Kanik, Aleksandar 86 Kanitz, Oskar 32, 100 Kanjiža (Kanizsa) 7

Index Karaoglanović, ira 268 Karlovac, 184, 195 Karlsruhe 95, 157 Kasche, Siegfried 129, 214, 217 Kascheno(l)g, David and Leon 95 Kaštela, Kaštel Stari 201 Katowitze 216 Katzengold from Cracau 139 Katzenellenbogen, Ludwig 102, 113, 154 Kaufmann family from Hanau 139 Kavaja/Kavajë 183–184, 268, 271–277, 280–282 Kavalla 64 Kelemen, Endre 324 Kenya 293 Kerenji, Emil 307–308, 310, 321 Kertész, Imre XLI Kika, Josip 87 Kikavica 87 King Aleksandar I Karađorđević (Alexander Karadjordjevic) 9, 25, 33 King George V 53 King Peter II Karađorđević 106, 121 King Zog 262–263, 273 Kirsch, Carl, Johanna and Susan 50, 70–71, 113 Kissi, Kristofor archbishop 282 Kladovo transport XIV, XIX, XXXII, XXXV, 62, 67, 76, 88, 96–97, 109, 130, 159, 297, 300, 324, 329 Klajn, Emil 67 Klausner, his wife and sister Lilly Karoly (Natalie Klausner) 103 Klein (Arnon), Aleksandar 11–12, 14, 52, 211 Klein, Eugen 301 Klein, Franz Eugen 99 Klein, Hans 76–77 Klein, Otto 135 Klein, Pa(u)l 301–302 Klein, Walter 299–300 Klose, Helmut 295–296 Klüger, Robert 93 Klugman, James 321 Knoll, Kurt 308 Knoll, Suzana 152 Knoop, Willy and Margret 42 Koen, Afred 137 Koen, Alegra and family 276

379 Ko(j)en, Leon 192 Koen, Mira 272 Kohen, Nina, David, Elio and Anna 281 Kojetice 74 Kokoschka, Oskar 43 Koljanin, Milan XXV, 10 Koločep 43 Kon, Geca (Geza) 29–30, 35 Kondenar, Fani 323 Konfino, Bojana 274, 279 Konforti brothers 272 Konforti family from Skopje 278 Konforti, Salvatore and wife Olga Hamburger 187 Königsberg 264 Konin 86 Konstanz 75 Koppel, Kurt  128, 197 Koprivnica XXX, 62, 87, 127–128, 300 Korčula Island XX, XXIX, 13, 22, 40, 101, 147, 149, 178, 180–181, 198, 201, 209, 218, 223–224, 231–258, 268, 304, 312, 327 Kordun (region in Croatia) 172 Korn, Arthur 42 Körner, Markus, Maria, Arnold, Isidor et al  130 Kornfein, Walter 135 Kornweitz, Julius Bobby 293–294 Korošec, Anton 33, 52–53, 55, 88, 105 Kos 146 Kosovska Mitrovica 268 Kosovo 62, 139, 148–149, 180, 195–197, 259–260, 267–272, 274, 278–279, 284–285 Kostelić, Ivka 152 Kotor 37, 172, 182–183, 189, 198 Kovač, Antal 142 Kovno 304 Krajner, Pero and Zora 303 Kraljevica (Porto Re) camp 188, 220–224, 242, 250 Krall, Hans and Anni 267 Kramer 135 Kramer, Ernst and Betti 167 Kransz, Alexander and Gabriele 167 Kraus, Dr Lavoslav Leo 162, 315 Kraus, Walter and Vera Klein 103 Krauss family 267

380 Kreft, Ivan 181, 219 Kreutz, Jan 95 Krips, Josef 41–42 Kristallnacht pogrom XIX, 44, 54, 60, 69, 75, 147, 157 Krivoshein, Moshe 69 Krleža, Mirosav 40 Kroch, Ernst (Ernesto) 21, 32, 54, 56 Kroll, Herman 86, 116 Kruja 280 Kruja, Mustafa 270 Kruščica camp 199 Kuby, Erich (girlfriend Ruth) 25 Kuehnel, Vilko 184 Kulturbund 8–9, 130, 134, 161, 163 Kupa river 190 Kupari 205–206, 217–218 Kuršumlija 196 Kuršumlijska Banja 116–117, 138, 195–196 Kutscher, Max 301 Lakajnar, Johan Nepomuk 171 Lamešić, Marko 163 Landau Steinz, Laura 193 Langer, Jan (alias Julius Brunner) 95 Langer, Lawrence L. XLII Laquer, Walter XXI–XXII Large, David Clay XXII, 156, 160, 165, 169 Larič, Vilko 7 Laska, Vera 87 Lastovo island 255, 309 Lateiner, Siefried 301 Lazarevac 151 Lazić, Živojin 15 Lederer sisters 181 Lehrensteinsfeld near Heilbronn 27 Leibel, Karl 94 Leibnitz 76 Leipzig 21, 75, 82, 191, 300 Leitner, Marko 101, 245 Leitner, Milica 101, 237, 246, 255 Lejeune, Philip XXXVIII Lendt, Edith 232 Lengel–Krizman, Narcisa 224 Leo, Dr 267 Leskovac 268 Letica, Zvonko 236 Leutschach 83, 85

Index Levi family from Zagreb 191 Levi, Bruno and Barbara 51 Levi, Heinrich 241 Levi, Jasha (Jaša) 4, 173 Levi, Josif rabbi 267 Levi (Alkalay), Joy 181, 200, 242, 253 Levi, Primo XXXIX, XLI, 111, 174 Levičanin family 148 Lev(w)inger, Ilsa (Elisabeth) 297 Levinger, Max 95 Levy, Rudolf 43 Lewin, Herbert 21–23 Lewitus, Zigmund and Dorothea 299 Lewy, Rudolf 27 Licht, Aleksandar 16, 19, 192 Liebert (Levy), Prof Arthur 38–39 Lika (region in Croatia) 317 Lipljan 269 Lipovac 22 Lisbon 151 Lithuania XVI, 21, 67, 306 Livorno 223, 249 Ljubljana 52, 75, 108, 116, 124, 180, 191–192, 202, 211–212, 290, 305 Löbl, Friedrich 129 Löbl, Wilhelm 7 Lodz 300, 308 London XIII, XXXIII, XXXVI, 12, 33, 37, 42, 45, 54, 104, 146, 162, 203, 250, 289 Loewinger, Bernard 187 Löhner, Ernest 324 Loker, Zvi 193 Lopud island 181, 205, 217, 219 Lorković, Mladen 215 Lorvus, Friedrich 263 Löwenstein, Ludwig and Ruth 167 Löwy, Irma (?) and husband 167 Lozica, Ivo 250 Lubienski, Zlata 153 Ludwig (priest) 50 Lumbarda 250 Lunzer, Fritz 47, 222, 330 Luther, Martin 214 Lutzer, Johanna (Schermann) and Paul  XXXVI, 159, 163, 322 Luzzatto, Enrico 248 Luzzatto, Franco 255–256

381

Index Maccabi sport club (Zagreb) 126–127, 193 Macedonia (North) XXIV, 2, 5, 25, 139, 144, 148, 195, 268–269, 275–276, 284 Maček, Vladko 24 Macerata 93, 208 Mackensen, Hans–Georg von 215 Maclean, Fitzroy 317–318, 321–322 Maestro, David 249 Maestro, Josef 241 Magnus, Sir Philip 262 Majstorović, Ivan 15 Makarska 58, 90, 94 Makiedo, Sergije 323 Malcolm, Sir Neill 53–54 Man, Stela 66–67 Manchester 75, 80 Mandel, Walter and Finny 267 Mandil, Moše and family 280, 286 Mandl, Josip 200, 205, 227 Mann, Klaus 24 Maor, Michael 322 Maribor 7–9, 13, 28, 49, 54, 65, 74–77, 83–84, 86, 97, 108, 149, 264, 290, 293, 330 Marić (Mayer), Arthur 23 Marić (Mayer), Milan 23, 115 Marić (Mayer), Zora (née Alexander) 227 Marinković, Vojislav 6 Marinović, Vinka 258 Marković family 302 Markovics, Hans 301 Marseille 25, 54 Matel, Leo 320 Mautner, Franz 7 McDonald, James 262 Medias 301 Međumurje 141, 143 Meier, Gottlieb 301 Melanow 279 Meljine 37 Menachem, Marko (Mordechai) 274, 282–283, 286–287, 330 Menzer, Aron 83 Meštrović, Ivan 237, 250 Metajna 194 Metaxas, Ioannis 64 Metković, 189, 218 Mevorah, Vida and family 271, 280–281 Meyer family from Hamburg 263, 267

Mežica 73 Mihailović, Dragoljub Draža 123, 307–308 Milan 157, 223, 249 Milinov family 124 Milosavljević, Olivera 35 Miloti 281 Minsk 288 Misler, Kremzir (?) and Magda 142 Mislowitzer, Dr Ernst 35 Missong, Alfred 117, 330 Mitchell, Ruth 70–71, 113 Mittler, Lady 76 Mlini 205, 217 Mljet 236 Modena 187, 240 Moni Kario, Solomon 276 Montenegro 2, 37, 70, 113, 118, 125, 149, 172, 182–183, 198, 209, 255, 257, 268, 304 Montiljo family 243, 253 Montiljo (Montiglio), Haim 208 Montiljo, Juda 93 Montiljo, Zumbul, Isidor, Salomon 108, 112, 130 Moral, Dr Hans 34 Mordo, Renato 120 Morgenshtern, Yosef 159, 162, 194 Moreno, Armando 83, 109, 323 Morpurgo, Carlo 57 Morpurgo, Viktor 199–200, 211–213, 223–224, 227, 242, 251–252 Morpurgo family from Trieste 223, 249 Morris, Katherine 289 Moser, Jonny 135 Mostar 118–119, 147, 181, 189, 198–200, 204, 212, 214–218, 243, 303–304 Mošić, Aleksandar 239 Muller, Paul 51 Müller, Dr Fero 49 Munich 31, 130, 157, 165, 303–304 Munk, Marijana 270, 279, 329 Mura river 87 Murska Sobota 52, 66, 81, 85 Mussolini, Benito XV, 121, 174, 182, 198, 201, 215–216, 223–224, 227, 238, 251, 277 Mytilene 110 Nagel, Thomas 27 Nachheiser (Nachhäuser), Erich 67

382 Nadai family 202 Nahir, Ehud (Erich) 67 Nahmias, Albert 270, 278 Najmann (Neumann), Gertrude XXXII, 29, 81–82, 137, 329 Naples 267 Narwa (Estonia) 36 Natan family from Skopje 278 Nedić, Milan 139–140 Neeman, Meir 46 Negri, Paride General 214, 250 Nelken, Dina XXXII, 41, 234, 238, 251, 327 Nelken, Peter 41 Neuburger, Dr Max 37 Neufeld, Edo 193 Neufeld, Enrico 299 Neufeld family 225 Neufeld (Najfeld), Dr Alfred M. 306 Neumann, Johanna Jutta XXXI Neumann, Paula 305 Neumann, Ziga and family 189 Neumann family 246 New Haven 35 New York XXXIII, 43, 104 New Zealand 66, 100, 158 Ninčić, Momčilo 6 Niš 104, 114, 125, 138–140, 149–150, 269 Njemirovski, Olga 206, 241, 255, 309 Nonantola, Modena 191–192, 212, 228, 249 Nosi, Vasil and family 283 Novak (Steiner), Zdenka 6, 108, 187, 318 Novi Sad 67, 72, 117–119, 141–143, 161, 296–297 Novi Vinodolski 219–220, 312 Nuremberg (laws) 1, 25, 50–51, 125 O’Montis, Paul see Wendel, Paul Oblath Alessandro, Anna, Milan, Dušan, Anna 305 Obrenovac 125, 137 Odra Sisačka 152 Ofer, Dalia XVIII Offenbakh, Gina 308 Ofner, Francis and Eili XIII–XIV Ohlenmacher, Heinrich 234, 251 Öhler, Frank and Gertrude 294 Olomutz 102 Omiš 201

Index Opatija (Abbazia) 57, 174 Orgel, Doris 50 Orthodox Jews 5, 7, 18, 25, 62, 80, 164, 264 Orwell, George 321 Osijek 2, 6, 8, 63, 101, 119, 133–134, 164, 219, 245 Osterode 21 Ostrogorski, Prof. George 38 Oswego camp US XXXV Otranto 278 Ottoman (Empire) 2–6, 38, 113, 160 Oxford 42 Ozmo, Daniel 185 Pacifici, Gioffredo 228 Pag Island 124, 127–128, 193–194, 294, 301 Paggi, Claudioi 255–256 Pakrac 94 Palatuci, Giovanni 228 Palestine XVI–XVIII, XX, XXIV, 1–2, 4–5, 10, 15–23, 25, 36, 40, 46–47, 53–56, 58, 64–67, 69, 71–72, 74, 78–82, 96, 98, 103, 109–110, 118–119, 124, 136, 145, 191, 236, 249, 256, 262, 264–267, 293, 299–300, 316–317, 321, 323 Palgi, Yoel 325 Pali, Nu 281 Palmier, Jean–Michel XXI Pančevo 112, 125, 138, 156 Panić, Blagoje 151 Pannwitz, Rudolf 43 Papo, Avram 241 Papo, Mirjam 67 Papo, Salomon 228 Paraguay 54, 158 Pardo, Leon, Esperanza, Tina 276, 282 Parin, Dr Paul 257, 309, 313–314, 325 Paris XXII, 12, 27, 35, 40, 104, 157, 233, 287, 291 Parma 223, 249 Partisan(s) XX, XXV–XXVI, XXXIV–XXXV, 36, 43, 123, 130, 134–135, 138, 144–145, 151–153, 167–172, 183, 205, 207–209, 219–220, 225–227, 234, 241, 243, 247–258, 275–276, 280–284, 286, 289, 297, 302–325, 328 Pashuk Biba and Kol(y)a 278 Pavelić, Ante 121, 168, 182, 193, 198, 215, 238

383

Index Pawel, Ernst XXX–XXXII, 26, 29–31 Paz (Fass), Mika 109 Pecs 301 Pelješac 231, 236, 255 Perez, Daniel 259, 279 Peter, Dr Franz 37 Pfeffer, Walter 120, 330 Pfeifer, Vladimir 14 Piderman, Dr Guido 257 Pièche, Giuseppe general 214, 216 Piedmont 230 Pijade, Moše 250 Pinkas, Haim 183 Piraeus 120 Pirker, Peter 290–292 Pirot 145, 274 Pisker family 22 Pius XII, Pope 318 Pizzuti, Anna 203 Ploče 181 Plovdiv 299 Poale Zion 19 Podravska Slatina 53, 89, 94, 97, 128 Pohoryles, Hermann and Wilhelmina 152 Poland XV–XVII, 4, 7, 16, 21, 36, 38, 44, 48, 56–57, 63, 68, 71, 76, 81, 86, 95, 98–99, 102, 107, 113, 116–117, 125, 128, 131–132, 137–138, 159–160, 174, 226, 238, 271, 295–296, 298, 306, 323, 327 Polić, Branko XXXV, 51, 61–62, 162, 220–221, 313 Poljukan family 243 Pollak family from Vienna 139, 205(?) Pollak, Herman 95 Pollak, Izidor 66 Pollatschek, Ernst 51, 62, 76, 90–91, 108, 117, 123–125, 131–132, 181, 202, 210, 241, 331 Popper family in Ruma 160, 167 Popov, Duško 65 Porodin XIII Portugal XV, 2, 23, 146 Požarevac 125 Prague XXVII, 22, 57, 59–60, 70, 73–74, 87, 117, 120, 219 Pressburger, Gertrude and family 52 Preže 281 Prince Paul (Regent) and Princess Olga 53, 64, 112

Priština 117, 149, 196–197, 212, 267, 269–272, 284 Prizren 149, 271 Proskauer, Dr Arthur Fritz 36 Pšerhof (Pscherhof), Heinz 41 Pšerhof (Pscherhof), Makso 14, 52, 187 Pusta Marićevac 21 Quakers 31 Queller, Heinrich (Zwi) XIV, 104 Rab Island (camp Kampor) XXXIII, 172, 178, 184, 218, 221–227, 250, 256, 304, 308–313, 322, 326 Radaković, Prof Konstantin 49 Radan, Vladimir (Rechnitzer, Aladar) 23 Rafajlović, Boža  118, 125 Raisky, Sara XXXVI, 18, 51 Rajner, Mirjam XXV, XXXVI Rajs, Dina 161, 164 Rakić, Toma 166 Rank, Wehrmacht Commander in Ruma  169 Rapallo 43 Rapaport, I. 318 Raspopović, Vladimir 209 Ravasz, Tibor 301 Razovsky, Cecilia 93 Rechnitz 52–53 Rechnitzer 205 Rechnitzer, Alexander and Irma 209 Rechnitzer (Raspopović), Vera 209–210 Red Sea 9 Reich, Herta 298–299 Reich, Elly, Renate and Werner 134 Reich, Romek and his brothers 298–299 Reich, Werner (father Wilhelm, sister Renate)  XXX, 17, 25, 28, 54, 60, 122 Reichmann, Hans 47 Rein, Ivan Reinhardt, Max 43, 102, 143 Reisman, Greta 66 Reisner, Dorrit 219 Reisner, Fritz Fred 58 Reiss Kinel, Erika 106, 225 Reiss, Paul 95 Reiss/Pollak family 190 Rendel, Sir George 58

384 Rendi, Simon 245 Requard, Willy 129 Reynolds, Robert 265 Rezniqi, Arslan 278 Rheinholds from Hamburg 219 Rhodos 146 Ribar, Ivo Lola and Jurica 310 Ribbentrop, Joachim von XV, 214–215 Ricci, Riccardo 218 Richter (Wolff), Annemarie 40–41, 68, 195, 302 Richtmann, Zvonimir 40 Riewe, Elsa 295–296 Rijeka (Fiume) 12, 22, 57, 69, 96, 163, 172, 174, 178, 180, 185, 187, 227–228 Rilke, Rainer Maria XXXIV Rismondo, Piero 100–101, 237 Risiera di San Sabba 226–227 Ristović, Milan XXV, 11 Roana near Vicenza 202 Roatta, Mario general XV, 177, 214–216, 220, 223 Roberts, David 178 Robić, Dr Robert 235 Robotti, Mario general 214, 225 Rochlitz, Imre XIII, XXXIV–XXXV, XLI, 17, 50, 66, 91, 129, 132, 179, 311, 314–317, 320, 322, 329 Rochlitz, Irene 132 Rodogno, Davide 176–178, 186 Rodrigue Aron 5 Rogaška Slatina 264 Rogers, Lindsay 306–307 Rojnica, Ivo 193 Roland, Ida 103 Roma (Gypsy) XXX, 104, 137, 139, 164, 171, 181, 264 Romania (Romanian) XVI–XVIII, XXIV, 4, 7, 16, 38, 48, 56, 61, 69, 72, 86, 95, 98, 102, 110, 113, 118, 120, 124, 135–137, 202, 295, 298, 301, 318, 323 Romano from Split 213 Romano, Jaša 224, 303, 306, 308, 312 Romano, Leon and Abram from Sarajevo 251 Rome 177, 182, 199–200, 202, 215, 224, 252, 266–267, 271, 273, 320, 329 Roncoroni, Alfredo 250 Ronski(y) (Rosenfeld), Emilio (Milan) 208

Index Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor 44, 92–93 Rosenbach 75 Rosenbaum, Rudolf 29, 120 Rosenberg, Dragutin 11 Rosenberg, Mirko 248 Rosenberger family from Belgrade 162 Rosenberger, Joel and Dr Alice 41 Rosenfeld, Peter 106 Rosenstein, Paula and Joseph 132 Rosenstein (Milićević), Franziska 132 Rosenthal family 49 Rosettenstein, Alfred 21 Rosner, Marko 77, 108, 119, 125 Rosners from Budapest 139 Rostock 34 Roth, Stephen 71 Rothkopf, Julius and family 202–203 Rothschild family 265 Rothstein, Lavoslav 58 Rottenstreich, Dr Karl 135 Rožman, Gregorij bishop 190 Rudley, Ida and mother 97 Rudolfer, Franz 95 Ruggero, Vittorio General 199 Ruma XX, XXIII, 13, 67, 111–112, 128, 141, 156–171 Russel, Bertrand 31 Russia (Russian Jews) XXXV, 7–8, 38, 88, 112, 137, 143, 265, 314, 318, 322 Ruttner, Josef 72 Šabac 62, 96–98, 104, 109, 114, 135–138, 165–166, 297–299 Sabukoschek, Egon 77–78, 135 Sacher–Masoch, Alexander von XXXII, XXXVIII, 41, 73, 91, 100–101, 147, 237–243, 245–246, 251–255, 258 Sacher–Masoch, Barbara 41 Sachsenhausen camp 100, 159, 191 Sadit, Alkalaj 258 Salom family 246, 249 Salz, Hinko 135 Salzer (Schlesinger), Malvina 68 Samlaić (Somlei), Erich Eliša and wife Ljerka 185 Samobor 76, 90, 97, 152, 203, 205–206, 299, 303 Samokovlija, Danko 218 Sao Paulo 157

Index Sarajevo 2–5, 22, 24, 50, 59, 61–62, 67, 70, 92–93, 101, 105, 117–119, 128, 147–148, 167, 181–185, 188–189, 197, 199, 202–204, 208, 218, 228, 236–244, 248–251, 268, 295–298, 309 Sarfatti, Michele 197, 271 Saucha, Valerija (née Schrenger) 23 Sava River 129, 137–138, 165 Savić, Aleksandar Alel 127 Savin (Schön), Makso (Max) 243 Savo, Giovanni 213 Schaechter, Simche (Simka) and wife Anna Brandes 97 Schäfer, Emanuel 138 Schaffgotsch (Count), Franz and wife Hedwig 43 Schechter from Romania 318 Schildt, Otmar 185 Schiller, Miroslav (Fred) 243 Schlatzer, Dr from Vienna 235 Schleich, Joseph XXV, 77–86, 191 Schlesinger family in Šid 160 Schlesinger, Abraham 132 Schlesinger, Adolf (Arthur) and Dora 59, 117, 133 Schlesinger, Imre, Rivka and Joseph 313 Schlesinger (Šlezinger), Dr Maria 306 Schlesinger, Viktor Schmidhuber, August 284 Schneider, Gertrude XXXIV, 10 Schneier, Isaac and Josephine, daughter Ruth 80–81, 96 Schneider, Josef 308 Schneider, Max and wife Pepi Druckman 87 Schneider, Rolf Gero 234 Schnitzler, Nandor 324 Schohl family, Käthe, Hela, Liesel, Max  XXII–XXIII, 156–158, 160–163, 165–166, 169–170, 292, 329 Schönfein, Hedwige 137 Schönherr, Fritz 33 Schöntal, Otto 42 Schreibers from Vienna 139 Schulbaum, Friedrich 132 Schulte, Alfred 153 Schützer, Theodor 138 Schwartz family from Vienna 139 Schwarz in Albania 283 Schwarz, Arthur 320

385 Schwarz family Dr Alois and his wife, brother Oscar and his family), sons Fred and Fritz 47, 74–75, 204–205, 218, 225 Schwarz–Sever, Giza and Emil 235 Schwiefert, Peter XXXIV, 68–69, 154–155 Scotti, lieutenant 219 Sebald, W. G. 328 Selinger, Bertha and family 162 Senesh, Hanna 324–325 S(z)enta 7, 108 Serbia XIII, XXIV, 2–4, 25, 36, 61, 98, 104, 107, 116, 123, 125, 131, 135–142, 144, 147, 150, 164–165, 195–197, 204, 212, 243, 270–272, 305, 308 Shanghai 47, 78, 80, 159, 179 Shellah, Menachem 11, 177–178, 215, 224, 229, 322 Shen Gjergj 281 Shkodër (Scutari) 263, 266, 270, 272, 274, 279, 281 Shpancer, Talma (Rena Deutsch) 150 Šibenik 87, 95, 202, 213, 306 Šid 160, 167 Sienna 202 Šik (Schik), Lavoslav 16, 65, 78, 91, 129 Silberzweig, Josef 95 Silesia 43 Silvestro, Giorgio 271 Simeon, Hildegard 95 Simić, Milan 115 Simon, Hildegard 207–208 Simson, Ernst 51 Sinani, Shaban 261, 265, 283–284, 286 Singer, Ivan XXXIV–XXXV, XLI, 119, 148, 181, 210, 212, 239, 270, 272, 302, 307, 309, 320–321 Singer, Julius 96 Šipan island 205 Sisak 133, 162 Skopal family 166 Skopal, Lucia 222 Skopje 24, 113–115, 139, 144–145, 269–279, 282 Slano 194 Slavoni(j)a (region in Croatia) 22, 59, 121, 133–134, 156–157, 163, 167, 316–317, 322 Slavonska Požega 8 Slavonski Brod 58, 133 Slovakia XV, 70, 74, 96

386 Slovenia 2, 8, 52, 70, 74–75, 77, 84, 180, 255, 291 Smederevska Palanka 115 Smoje, Bruno 209 Soča/Isonzo river 180 Sofia 72, 274 Sojfer (Säufer?), Rabbi Abraham 67 Sokol, Đorđe 86 Solomon, Basil 302 Sombor 66, 301 South Africa 119 South America 10, 47–48, 53–54, 68 Soviet Union (Soviets) 36, 112, 143, 247, 294, 298, 321–322, 327 Spain XV, 2, 43, 51, 68, 146, 202, 296 Sperber, Manès (and wife Mirjam) 39–40, 230, 233–234, 237, 293 Sperber, Vladimir (Vladim) 41, 49 Spiegel, Helfrida 98 Spielfeld 76, 81, 84 Spielmann, Fritz Fred 99 Spitzer, Franjo (Ervin Šinko) 311 Spitzer, Dr Irma Rothbart Sinko 306, 311 Spitzer, Joseph 299 Spitzer (Špitzer), Šime (Shimon, Shime) 7, 52, 61, 109–110, 150, 159, 163, 298 Spitzer, Stjepan 184 Split XXXV, 12, 26, 43, 64, 93, 117, 131–133, 172, 178, 180–183, 185–189, 198–214, 223–224, 227, 233, 236–242, 244, 246, 248–252, 255–256, 264, 268, 296, 305, 311–312 Springer, Dr Vladimir 36 Sprung, Marko 217 Srebrno 217 Srem (region now shared between Serbia and Croatia) 134, 156–157, 167, 170 Sremska Mitrovica 159, 162, 164–165, 167 St, John, Robert 112, 117, 120 Stanzl, Siefried 101 Stara Gradiška 128, 132 Stara Moravica 87 Staro Sajmište concentration camp 137–138, 197 Steckel, Rabbi Charles W. 63, 119 Steeholm, Hardy 92 Šteg, Sigmund 200 Stein, Dr Beno 40–41

Index Stein, Hermina 281–282 Stein (Ehrlich), Vera 19–20, 40–41, 195, 237 Steiner family in Ruma 161 Steiner family in Vukovar 185 Steiner, Gertrude 86 Steiner, Karl 95, 293 Steinhauer, Max 301 Stemmer, Salman (Eigner, Solly) 25 Stepinac, Alojzije Archbishop 127 Steppers from Dresden 219 Stern, Heinrich and wife 267 Stern, Margarete 13 Sternschein from Saarland 91 Štip (Shtip) 144–145 Stock family 26, 200, 223, 249 Stojadinović, Milan 33 Stojka (?), Alexander 49 Stoković family 150 Stolzberg family from Vienna 141, 143 Straki, Gestapo chief 197 Štraus, Božidar 315 Strauss, Ilse (and husband Walter) XXXIII, XXXVI, 18, 55–56 Strauss, Maria 234 Strauss, Dr Richard 235 Strumica 72 Stubičke Toplice 57 Stutecka, Olga 267 Stuttgart 80 Styria 8, 84 Subotica (Szabadka)  2, 7, 67, 72, 141, 143, 208, 296–297, 307 Sussman, Dr Lav 125–126, 179, 186, 197 Süssman, Erwin 40, 302 Süssman, Erwin 301 Sušak 12, 22, 57, 69, 87, 95, 163, 185–188, Suvin (Schlesinger/Šlesinger), Darko 18, 241–242 Sweden 70 Switzerland XVI, 11, 48, 65–66, 102, 135, 138, 146, 158–159, 228, 235, 244, 257–258, 296 Syria 71, 109, 119 Szeged 72 Szanto, Andria 301 Tämpel, Ignac 306 Tänzer, Klara 167

Index Tartaglia, Dr Ivo and brother Oskar 207 Tau, Mr and Mrs 267 Techelet Lavan 22, 236, 275 Tel Aviv 99 Tenzer, Iby 208 Testa, Temistocle 180, 185–187, 207 Tetovo 274–275 Tis(z)a river 141 Thalheimer, Max and family 27 Theresienstadt 85 Thessaloniki (Salonika) 2, 5, 110, 121, 145, 153, 262, 274, 290 Thomas, Adrienne (Hertha A. Deutsch) 103 Thrace 121, 144–145 Tintner, Georg 100 Tippel, Sofia 95 Tirana XXII, 263, 265–266, 270, 272, 274–276, 279–281, 286 Tito, Josip Broz XXXV, 40, 172, 303, 313, 316, 318–322 Todorova, Maria XXX Tolj, Ivan 167 Tolman, Susan 59 Tomić, Viktor 168 Topusko 317–322 Tot, Janos 86 Tovbini, Boris 95 Travnik 198 Treblinka XXIV, 144–145, 275 Trenčin 96 Trevlazer 281 Trieste 12, 56–57, 69, 71, 74, 100, 174, 199–200, 207, 212, 223, 226, 228, 243, 249, 252, 263, 305 Trogir 43 Tudiower, Hedwig 301 Turkey XVII–XVIII, 6, 23, 47, 71–72, 109–110, 115–116, 119, 133, 145–146, 294 Turner, Harald 139 Udbina 94 Ungari, Dr 202 Unterberger, Andor 168 Uroševac 270, 272, 274 Ustaša XX, XXIV, 11, 14, 24, 36, 43, 63, 65, 68, 94, 96, 100, 103, 119, 121–131, 133–135, 147, 152–153, 160, 162–171, 173, 175, 177–178, 180, 182–189, 193–195, 198–199,

387 203–205, 207, 209, 211, 214–217, 220, 226, 238, 244–247, 294, 301–303, 308–309, 312, 314–316, 318, 325 Vajler, Zlatko 301 Vajnštajn (Weinstein), Rašela and family 272 Valder, Milan 255 Valentinčić, Vera and Ludvik 152 Valobra, Lelio Vittorio 242, 248 Vanka, Maksimilijan Max and Margareta Stetten 235 Varaždin 8, 133 Varna 110 Vatican (The Holy See) 93, 193, 215, 237 Vela, Darinka 209 Vela Luka 22, 201, 223, 236, 239–242, 246, 248–251 Velika Plana 114 Venice 263 Venizelos, Elefterios 64 Veress, Lajos 141 Veseli, Refik 280 Vicenza 93, 203 Vidaković, Filip 159 Vidau, Luigi Conte 271 Videk, (Stipe) Mate 189 Vienna XIV, XXVII, XXXII, XXXVI, 17, 36–37, 39, 41–42, 45–53, 58–59, 63–64, 66–68, 70–71, 75–77, 79–86, 90, 92, 94–103, 106, 109, 116, 119–120, 124, 128–129, 132–139, 141, 143, 151, 159, 167, 180, 204 , 219–220, 234–235, 237, 263–265, 270, 287–288, 294, 297, 299, 301, 304, 306–309, 331 Villach 75, 147 Vinaver, Chemjo 24 Vincent, Otto 78 Vininger, Johan 87 Vinkovci 67, 167, 195 Vinski, Pavel 219 Vinterštajn (Winterstein), Pavle 37 Viroviticia 86 Vis island 225, 252, 255–256, 312, 316 Višegrad 58, 216 Vlasenica 244 Vlasotince 151 Vlorë (Valona) 201, 266, 272, 281 Voigt, Klaus 11, 203

388 Vojvodina 9 Völkl, Katrin 11 Vörös, Pal 324 Vranić, Vladimir and family 187, 225 Vrata 94, 96 Vršac 9, 123, 138 Vukliš, Vladan 295 Vuković, Ivan 87 Vukovar 167 Vulesica, Marija XXV, 12, 18, 53 Vunić, Milan 208 Wagschal, Szerena and daughter 133 Wagner, Franz 166, 169 Wagner, Otto 42 Walker, David 112–113 Wallenberg, Raoul 143, 161 Walter family 225 Walter, John 262 Warsaw 7, 28 Wasservogels from Vienna 139 Waugh, Evelyn 318–321 Webb, P. B. Major 256 Weber, Toni (Fani) and Manfred 75 Wehrmacht 129, 134, 138, 162–163, 165, 169, 226, 254, 277, 280–281 Weimar Republic 26, 42 Weinberger family from Osijek 187 Weinberg(er), Hans and family from Vienna 159, 163 Weiner–Bosnić family 224 Weininger, Anna 81, 91, 151 Weininger, Arnold 191 Weinmann, Ernst 197 Weinstein family 267 Weintraub, Franziska Tsipora Faigele and Esther, Saul, Joel, Viktor 150–151 Weiss from Ruma 141 Weiss, Fritz 295 Weiss, Laszlo 96 Weiss, Marcus and Hermina 128 Weiss, Marko 61 Weiss, Misha 163 Weiss, Robert (and family) 48, 58, 79, 83, 180, 190 Weiss, Samuel (American) 119 Weiss, Samuel from Czechoslovakia 324 Weissbart(h) (from Munich) 32

Index Weisberg, Samuel 190 Weissberger, Egon, Arabella, Erika, Egon Junior 147 Weissberger, Lazar 301 Weissman, Manfred 95 Weisz, Fritz 301 Weisz, Paul 47, 92 Weisz, Ruth 136 Weitzmann, Fritzi and family 263, 267 Weizmann, Chaim XXXI Wells, Sumner 93 Wendel, Paul (Paul O’Montis) 99–100, 106 Werner, Ivan 245 Wesel family in Ruma 161 Wessely, David 132 White, Hayden XL Wiener, Alfred 33 Wiener, Frieda Fanny 299 Wiener, Jan 73–74 Wiesbaden 170 Wiesel, Elie XLI Wiesenthal, Simon XXXIII, 78 Wilhelm, Franz 170 Wilk, Gerhard H. 12 Wilkenfeld, Gershon Elyakim 83, 110 Wimmer, Josef 301 Wohl, Laura Lola 296 Wolf, Menashe, Resel and Julius 267 Wolff, Karl 139 Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) 14, 18, 98 World Jewish Congress 63, 93, 133 Wukitzevits, Gottfried and Werner 71–72, 329 Young, James E. XXXIX Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)  22 Zadar 95, 172, 178, 182, 207–208, 211, 250 Zadek, Otto XXXIII Zagreb XXX, XXXV, XXXVIII, 2–14, 18–19, 21, 23–28, 30–31, 33, 36–37, 39–43, 46–47, 49–54, 57–58, 60–62, 65–66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76–78, 81–87, 89–91, 94–100, 102, 105–110, 113, 115–116, 119, 122, 124–129, 132–134, 140–141, 152–153, 156, 158–159, 162–166, 168–169, 177,

Index 180–181, 183–193, 195, 197, 202–204, 206, 208–209, 211–212, 214, 216, 219, 227, 231, 233, 237–239, 243, 245, 249, 264, 278, 281, 290, 293–294, 300–303, 305, 309, 315, 330 Zamora, Marcus and Joseph 83 Zasavica 137 Zbor fascist party 63, 140 Zeev, Milo (Vladimir Müller) 163, 179, 184, 309, 312, 314–315, 318–320 Zeilinger, Gerhard and Georg 204, 206, 309–310 Zemun 124, 150, 183, 185 Zerbino, Paolo 207–208, 210

389 Ziegler, Richard 232–233 Zilzer (Cilcer), Edith 69, 124 Zionist (movement) XVII, 2, 4, 6–7, 16–20, 46, 53, 56, 57, 65, 67, 78, 83, 108, 119, 125, 136, 161, 192, 228, 236, 243, 291, 298, 323 Zon, Dr Milan 200 Zrenjanin (Bečkerek) 138 Zuber, Stanislav 273 Zuccotti, Susan 175 Zuma, Selim 283 Zweig, Stefan 32 Žitomislić Monastery 204–205 Žun, Uroš 84