Diary of Bergen-Belsen

by Hanna Levy-Hass

  Having converted to Zionism, they considered themselves the political avant-garde of the Jewish community in the lands from which they came. The only problem was that this imagined community did not exist—a problem most nineteenth-century nationalists were bound to face at some point—and that, more importantly, Jews who were imagined to belong to it were utterly disinterested in this kind of belonging. So when these Viennese students returned to their hometowns for the summer holidays, they were annoyed to find out that few of their compatriots had ever heard of Herzl, and that fewer still were interested in caring about Jews in other south Slav lands.

  There were good reasons for this lack of interest. The lands that would end up comprising the first Yugoslav state in the aftermath of World War I were politically divided—moreover, they lacked any semblance of a common past—and Jewish communities populating them were extremely diverse. Native lands of most of the members of Bar Giora—the name of the “society of Jewish academics from the Yugoslav lands” that these students founded in 1902—lay in the southern provinces of Austria-Hungary (Croatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina); some members came from Serbia, a former Ottoman territory that had first won autonomy in the first half of the nineteenth century, and then independence by 1878; and “Jews from the Yugoslav lands” in the view of the Zionists from Bar Giora, encompassed all these territories, including what is today Macedonia, which, at the time, was still under Ottoman rule. Not only was this “Yugoslav” landscape thus crisscrossed by fairly fortified political boundaries—which, in the case of Serbia’s and Austria-Hungary’s Bosnian border, separated enemy states, deeply suspicious of one another’s intentions—but the Jewish communities in these lands mainly considered themselves parts of larger communities whose centers lay far beyond the “Yugoslav” lands. The German-speaking middle class Jews of Croatia were not sure that they had anything in common with Hungarian-speaking Jews of Slavonia; but if this link was questionable, what then to say of the Bosnian Ladino-speaking Sephardim, steeped in Ottoman Jewish culture, impoverished and dismissive of well-fed Ashkenazi intruders who started settling in Bosnia after the province was taken from the Ottoman Empire and forcibly put under Austrian rule in 1878? And what to make of the fervently nationalistic “Serbs of Mosaic faith” in Serbia, who, like most Serbs, despised Austria-Hungary and, most of all, its Jews, whom they saw as par excellence agents of its effeminate Western civilization?

  Early Zionist work in the “Yugoslav” lands was, therefore, not at all easy. Persuading Ashkenazim from Zagreb that they had anything in common with Sephardim from Sarajevo—let alone with Sephardim from Serbia—was an uphill battle. But despite all the differences among the Jewish populations of the “Yugoslav” lands, what was increasingly going to bind them together, the Zionists understood correctly, was their “Yugoslav” language. New generations of Jews were becoming bilingual, and along with their traditional first languages—German, Hungarian, Ladino, and Yiddish—they increasingly spoke fluent “Yugoslav,” in its regional variants. In Serbia, it was called “Serbian,” in Croatia, “Croatian”; but whatever the appellation, because of the strategic decision of Serbian and Croatian elites to standardize the language in the first half of the nineteenth century, this was the tongue that diverse populations, non-Jewish and Jewish alike, from northern Adriatic to southeastern Serbia could now understand, and a variant of which they now used on a daily basis.2

  Imagining Yugoslav Jewishness, therefore, became inseparable from this lingua franca of the Western Balkans; and political organization of Yugoslav Jews, in turn, became inseparable from Zionism. “Yugoslav,” thus, became the new language of Zionism. It is ironic that, while most Zionists elsewhere were twisting their tongues trying to learn Hebrew, the language of Jewish rebirth, Zionists in the Balkans were struggling to master the language of Balkan Slavs. This often assumed grotesque proportions: in 1904, at the “First Public Congress of Jewish Academics from the Yugoslav Lands,” held strategically in Osijek, one of the easternmost Jewish centers of Austro-Hungarian Slavonia (and thus closest to the Serbian capital, Belgrade), speakers addressed the audience in “Croatian” or “Serbian”; but the butchered address of one Otto Kraus was so insufferable that the panelists asked him repeatedly to switch to his native German—which, needless to say, he refused.3 There were high stakes in adopting this language; and one could not be a proper Zionist without mastering it.

  The first Jewish periodicals in the Balkans that looked beyond the parochial communities of German-, Ladino-, Yiddish-, or Hungarian speakers were thus published in “Yugoslav,” and were staunchly Zionist. The use of language of these publications—first Židovska smotra [The Jewish Review], and, later, Židov [The Jew]—reflected the linguistic heterogeneity of “Yugoslav”-speaking Jewish communities of the Balkans. Texts were published in whatever dialect of the language the contributors had originally written it, from Serbian Cyrillic to Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian variants written in Roman script. On the eve of World War I, a tenuous reading public had emerged, a Jewish readership across the Balkans, ready to view itself as a culturally heterogeneous, yet distinctly “Yugoslav” Jewish community with common political interests.

  II.

  It was into this political and linguistic context that Hanna Lévy-Hass was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina, in 1913. Her parents spoke Ladino; but Hanna, her daughter tells us, spoke “Yugoslav.” Her choice of language was illustrative of the shift that had occurred from the generation of Bar Giora to the next one: Jews now spoke the language of other south Slavs, and increasingly communicated in it both with other Jews and their non-Jewish compatriots.

  Although, as we have seen, “Yugoslav” had initially been the language of Zionism, once the Yugoslav Jewish public sphere was established, it became contested by various different political groups. Hanna Lévy-Hass’s Sarajevo, for example, was home of the staunchly Sephardist newspaper, Jevrejski glas [Jewish Voice], which vehemently opposed the Zagreb-based Union of Zionists of Yugoslavia, and their criticisms of alleged Sephardi backwardness and lack of political consciousness. But the wages of linguistic proficiency in the majority language did not affect just the sphere of Jewish politics; for the first time, there matured a viable generation of Jews—more numerous than their Zionist predecessors, whose Yugoslav choice, as it were, had been an exception, rather than a rule—who were either disinterested in Jewishness altogether (which was relatively painless in the Yugoslav ethnic mosaic), or were attracted by other political ideologies.

  In Bosnia-Hercegovina, more than in any other region of the Kingdom, it was the Communist movement that appealed the most to the new generation of Jewish youth. This was mainly due to the social profile of the Sephardi Jewish community in Bosnia-Hercegovina : unlike in other former parts of Austria-Hungary, where predominantly Ashkenazi Jews had gone through the process of embourgeoisement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and where their occupational structure overwhelmingly consisted of trade, industry, civil service, and free professions, a significant portion of Sephardim of Bosnia-Hercegovina (and, to a lesser extent, Serbia) were artisans and workers, and many were poor. The (banned) Communist Party of Yugoslavia—the only party in the interwar period that sought to forge a pan-Yugoslav political movement—thus appealed to many Jews.4 Matatya, a Sarajevo Jewish youth organization, founded in 1923, was a clearinghouse for Jewish workers’ activism, and a point through which close contact was maintained with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and its youth movement, Young Communist League of Yugoslavia.

  Many Jews of Yugoslavia were members of the Communist Party; some were very prominent, like Moša Pijade, a Belgrade Sephardi Jew who, despite impeccable Communist credentials, until the end of his life in 1957 considered himself a Serb. Pijade’s translation of Das Kapital is still the standard translation in Serbian; and from the early days of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Pijade served on its Executive Committee—when he was not in jail, in which he spent fourteen ye
ars of the short interwar period. Another indication of the appeal of the Communist Party to the Jews was the impressive number of Yugoslav Jews who volunteered to join the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic during the Civil War. For Sephardim from Bosnia and Serbia, fighting for the progressive Spanish Republic had an additional historical significance: their ancestors had been expelled from the Iberian peninsula in the late fifteenth century, and now a new, tolerant Spain, their distant motherland, was fighting its own historical demons personified by the clerical phalanxes of Francisco Franco and his allies, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

  All these coordinates characterized Hanna Lévy-Hass’s teenage years and early adulthood. If it was certainly not inevitable, it was probably a part of a larger historical pattern that she should be drawn to the Communist movement in Yugoslavia. In that sense, her choice to study at the University of Belgrade was by no means arbitrary: in the early 1930s, when she started her studies in the Yugoslav capital, the University was dominated by Communist youth, and was one of the few progressive spaces in the country. Disproportionate numbers of Jews were enrolled as students at the University of Belgrade in that period, and many were affiliated with secret Communist Party cells. It was also in the halls of the University of Belgrade that the Communist youth fought it out—sometimes literally, with fists and iron bars—with Serbian Fascists, bands organized by Dimitrije Ljotić, who would later, during the Nazi occupation of Serbia from 1941 to 1944, organize the Serbian quisling military guard and openly collaborate with the Nazis in suppressing the Communist-led insurrection and rounding up and exterminating Serbian Jews.

  As Hanna Lévy-Hass was beginning her studies in Belgrade, the country was drawing ever closer to Axis powers. Because of Italian and Hungarian revisionism—Serbia, as one of the victorious Allies in World War I, secured for the new state most of the Adriatic coast, traditionally claimed by Italy, and a former part of Hungary north of the Sava and Danube rivers—Yugoslavia’s foreign policy was very careful in the interwar years. However, by the mid-1930s, German and Italian economic hegemony had fateful consequences for foreign policies of all Central European countries, and Yugoslavia was no exception. By 1940, pressured by Nazi Germany, which, after the 1938 Anschluß, was now Yugoslavia’s neighbor, Yugoslavia introduced two anti-Jewish laws—one limiting Jewish enrollment at universities, and one banning Jews from dealing in food products. On March 25, 1941, Yugoslavia formally joined Hitler’s Tripartite Pact. Two days later, however, a group of pro-British army officers seized power in Belgrade, triggering mass anti-German demonstrations in the capital. Hitler was furious; ten days later, on April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded Yugoslavia.

  World War II in Yugoslavia was a complex web of interrelated civil wars, genocidal policies, occupations, partitions, and new patron-client relationships. The country was overrun in a mere twelve days, amidst general demoralization and mass desertion. Serbia and Banat were occupied by the Wehrmacht; a few months later, Milan Nedić became prime minister of a collaborationist government in Serbia, which acted as a Nazi bulwark against Communist insurrection and a facilitator of the plan for the extermination of the Jews. An “Independent State of Croatia” (known as NDH, Nezavisna država Hrvatska), a Nazi puppet state run by the genocidal ustaša regime led by Ante Pavelić, was proclaimed on the territory of Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina, with Italian and German troops occupying their respective spheres of interest. Slovenia was partitioned, its parts annexed by the Nazi Reich and Mussolini’s Italy. Parts of Kosovo and Montenegro were occupied by Italy, while Macedonia was annexed by Bulgaria and Bačka by Hungary. In April 1941, Yugoslavia ceased to exist.

  The fate of the Jews, although everywhere tragic, depended on the territory in which they found themselves in this arbitrary partition; new administrative lines determined who was to live and who was to die, and when. Serbian Jews were murdered already by the spring of 1942, by shooting and gas. In Croatia, the mass murder of the Jews was initially put on the back burner, as the genocide against the Serbs was a more pressing task for the ustaša regime, but was in full swing already in the summer of 1941. Macedonian Jews under Bulgarian occupation were deported to Treblinka in March 1943, while the Jews of Bačka were rounded up by Hungarians and deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. In Italian-occupied areas, however, anti-Jewish policy was much less strict, and many Jews were able to survive by staying in or fleeing to those areas—Dalmatia, parts of Montenegro and Kosovo—and later, after the capitulation of Italy in 1943, joining the Yugoslav partisans. Of the about 75,000 Jews of Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, about 15,000 survived the war.

  Most survived by joining the multiethnic, Communist-led Movement for National Liberation. Led by the charismatic Secretary General of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a Croat Josip Broz, known as Tito, this was the only genuine resistance movement in the country, and the only political option that was not antisemitic. It was also the only political movement that still regarded Yugoslavia as a relevant political framework, and which fought for the liberation of the entire country and the establishment of a federation of equal Yugoslav nations and national minorities. All this, of course, was appealing to the Jews, who could either join a resistance movement that genuinely accepted them as Jews—a virtual impossibility almost anywhere else in Nazi-occupied Europe—or risk almost certain death.

  Of course, it is possible to imagine antisemitic incidents in Tito’s motley army, mostly consisting, as it did, of peasants and workers of all Yugoslav nationalities, many of whom were certainly not emancipated, and certainly not free from anti-Jewish prejudice. At the levels of ideology, official rhetoric and the circle of leadership, however, the movement was not only not antisemitic, but it also referenced specifically, already during the war, the mass murder of Jews perpetrated by “occupiers and domestic traitors,” as the phrase went, as one of the crimes against the peoples of Yugoslavia, for which they (the occupiers and the traitors) would have to face justice after the war.

  It is thus easy to see how joining the partisans would have appealed to Hanna Lévy-Hass—as a Jew, but also as a politically aware woman. Until 1943, she stayed in Italian-occupied Montenegro, and occasionally took part in the actions of the partisans. But when the Germans took over in 1943, the final decision not to go—for fear of German retaliation against other Jews, as Amira Hass relates—sealed her fate. She was arrested by the Gestapo, and eventually deported to Bergen-Belsen.

  III.

  The unfortunate fact about the text of Hanna Lévy-Hass’s diary is that it is a translation from the French; the original, written in her native “Yugoslav,” has so far not been found.

  The translation itself is excellent, and it is much better than the first, 1982 English edition. Although Hanna Lévy-Hass herself translated the original text into French, in which she was fluent, only through the original would one of the most important themes of her diary fully come through: her absolute and unassailable conviction, amidst terrible suffering and uncertainty that she would survive, that a Socialist Yugoslavia was a viable option, and the best solution for the peoples of Yugoslavia. Even in the direst of circumstances, she found the strength to be a political human being. It is very difficult to write anything that does not ring hollow about a woman mustering her last atoms of strength to keep a diary in a Nazi camp in the mid-1940s, and I prefer to let the reader engage with the text on her own. It is not surprising, however, that Yugoslavia as a concept and as a hope occupies such an important place in the text. And yet once she was back in Belgrade after all this suffering, Hanna Lévy-Hass soon decided that her Yugoslavia was not really for her. In December 1948, she arrived in Haifa and became an Israeli—something she, as far as we know, never had any interest in becoming.

  Why did she emigrate to Israel? She was not the only one: many non-Zionist Jews had made the same decision and left the country in the first wave of emigration from Yugoslavia in 1948. Amira Hass rightly po
ints out the chasm that separated non-Jewish Yugoslav survivors of the Yugoslav catastrophe and the Jewish Yugoslav survivors of the Holocaust. The founding narrative in which the Communists, led by Tito, legitimized their new rule was the story of the “struggle for national liberation,” and it was heroism, and not victimhood and suffering, that was foregrounded and celebrated. The new Yugoslav leadership had no time for mourning Jewish victims and pondering the magnitude of the Jewish catastrophe; although there is no way of knowing for sure, we can imagine that, upon return, Hanna Lévy-Hass tried to publish her diary in Yugoslavia, without success. (It remains unpublished in any of the Yugoslav successor states to this day.)

  In the early 1950s, this changed: in order to differentiate its policies from those of the Soviet Union and its satellites, with which it had broken off relations in 1948, Tito’s Yugoslavia reached for the Holocaust and Jewish suffering. In 1952, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia published a volume entitled “Crimes of Fascist Occupiers and their Helpers against the Jews in Yugoslavia,” and followed it up with a high-profile campaign of dedicating five monuments, at different sites in Yugoslavia, to “Jewish victims of Fascism.” 5 A reviewer of the volume on the crimes against the Jews, writing in the journal published by the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1953, barely two months after the sentences had been handed down in the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, pointed out thatthe book represents an invaluable historical document, a monument to the dark age of Hitlerite medieval vandalism.… It is the indictment … not only of Hitlerite darkness … but also of new dark forces, whether they be the old forces of Fascism rearing their ugly head in West Germany … or their brethren in the USSR and its satellites, where a new witch hunt is waged, by well-tested infamous Hitlerite methods, against those same innocent Jews, decimated in the last war.6