Diary of Bergen-Belsen
Page 13
Yugoslavia legitimized its new existence between East and West by pointing, as it were, to the fact that it cared about Jewish suffering, and that its Jews were fully integrated into society and supported the Yugoslav political project led by Tito (which was, by that time, largely true). To be Jewish in Yugoslavia, then, meant to be a Yugoslav without reservation, a person equal to all other Yugoslavs regardless of their background, while, in theory, preserving the Jewish historical heritage. This was an ambiguous gambit, one that, however, mostly worked until the mid-1980s.
In 1948, however, all this lay in the future. Upon her return from Bergen-Belsen, Hanna Lévy-Hass encountered in Belgrade both the wall of silence that she did not know how to tear down, and accusatory looks that greeted Jewish Holocaust survivors everywhere in Europe—“Are you still alive?” It was the dark shadow of this unspoken question that finally dissuaded her from ever settling down in Yugoslavia again, even in the late 1980s. And perhaps it was for the best: when she came to her native land for the last time, it was ready to explode again, this time without Hitler and external aggression.
1 Hillel Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
2 For a brief overview of the history of Serbo-Croatian linguistic unity in the nineteenth century, see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 24-31.
3 Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Prvi cionisti ki kongres u Osijeku 1904. godine,” asopis za suvremenu povijest, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2005), 479-495.
4 Jaša Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, 1941-1945: Žrtve genocidaiuesnici Narodnooslobodila kog rata (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1980), 40.
5 Zdenko Levental (ed.), Zlo ini fašisti kih okupatora i njihovih pomaga a protiv Jevreja u Jugoslaviji (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1952).
6 Vera Nikolova, “Zlo ini fašisti kih okupatora i njihovih pomaga a protiv Jevreja u Jugoslaviji,” Me unarodni problemi, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January-March 1953), 128-130, 128.
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a That is, the Yugoslavian partisans. (H. L.-H.)
b Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov (1883-1958): Soviet novelist whose works exalt the industrialization of the USSR and the transformation of social relations. His most well-known work is Cement, 1925. (S. H.)
c On July 25, 1943, the Italian king Victor Emmanuel III removed Mussolini from office and ordered his arrest. When, in September of the same year, the German invasion took place, he placed himself under the protection of the Allies. Michael I, king of Romania (from 1927 to 1930 and from 1940 to 1947), deposed the dictator Antonescu, an ally of the Nazis, in August 1944, as Soviet troops entered Romania. He abdicated in December 1947. (S. H.)
d Basement cell where the SS jailed “punished” deportees. (S. H.)
e “ Yes, sir, Oberscharführer,” “Yes, sir” here and “Yes, sir” there. (S. H.)
f “Jüdishe Presseagentur” i.e. “Jewish Press Agency.” The “Jewish Press Agency” was camp slang among the deportees in Bergen-Belsen for rumors that circulated within the camp. (S. H.)
g A stormy winter wind that blows mostly in Serbia. (S. H.)
h Hanna Lévy-Hass’ diary contains several passages in German that she has either translated in footnotes or in the body of her diary. While her written German in these passages in mostly accurate, the presence of some minor inaccuracies almost certainly reflects the genuine experience of camp inmates who, as she notes early on, spoke over twenty-five languages and who had to adjust to receiving and obeying orders given in a language that they may not have known. Some of her passages in German suggest the possibility that these words and phrases were learned aurally, so their transcription corresponds to what a camp inmate might remember having heard, rather than to strict grammatically correct German usage. (S. H.)
i The second-largest city in Montenegro after the capital. (S. H.)
j Armed Croatian collaborationist militia. (S. H.)
k Arabic for “catastrophe.” Nakba is how the Palestinians term the mass expulsion of some 700,000 people from their homes in the creation of the state of Israel during the 1948 war—the loss of their lands and property for the benefit of the new Jewish state, and the exile and the breaking up of the Palestinian community into several disconnected, debilitated communities, in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, and in many states of exile.
First self-published in 1946 in Yugoslavia. First published in book form by FIR in French and German in 1961. First published in English in 1982 by Harvester Books/Barnes & Noble.
This edition published in 2009 by Haymarket Bo
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© 2009 Amira Hass Translation © 2009 Haymarket Books
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This book was published with the generous support of the Wallace Global Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lévy-Hass, Hanna.
[Vielleicht war das alles erst der Anfang. English]
Diary of Bergen Belsen / Hanna Levy-Hass ; introduction and afterword by Amira
Hass.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-608-46077-9
1. Bergen-Belsen (Concentration camp) 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives. I. Hass, Amira. II. Title.
D805.G3L4213 2007
940.53’18092--dc22
[B]
2007034807