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I have an assortment of glasses from Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and even New York flea markets and I often say that they are my glasses. But they are not. I have a small collection of other people’s days, one could say — stolen, joys and sorrows bought for a song, toasts and commemorative speeches which here, in my half-empty room, like soft bells speak of every forced relocation of existence and being, of every violent interruption of abiding, and they send out a clear but ominous crystal sound. The objects with which I am surrounded, with which I surround myself, when the air stops the breath, when not even silence quivers, transformed into fluids they begin to penetrate the armor of my skin and sneak in among my organs, already poisoned by imprints of the past.
To carry out their general European plunder, pillage and villainy, the ERR in France engaged local transport firms which provided mechanical equipment, personnel, and Baron Kurt von Behr — who managed the whole program and later, in 1945, with his wife and the help of cyanide and champagne, parted forever from his accumulated spoils. Something of those French “goods” was stored and sorted in what had been until then the first French furniture shop at 85–87 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, owned by Wolf Lévitan, who, it is presumed, was taken away by the Gestapo, never to return. Then, from 1943 to 1944, in the heart of Paris, there were two other hidden satellite work camps of the Drancy transit camp: Entrepôts et Magasins Généraux, in other words state public warehouses, known also, because of their proximity to the railway station of the same name, as the Austerlitz storerooms, at 43 quai de la Gare, in the thirteenth arrondissement; and the Bassano work camp situated in the Aryanized palace of the Cahen d’Anvers family at number 2 rue Bassano, in the sixteenth arrondissement. The majority of the inhabitants of Paris know nothing or very little of the existence of these work camps in the city center, because even the survivors of the camps, those who by pure chance or thanks to spouses of Aryan blood were not transferred from Drancy to Auschwitz, were reluctant to speak about that episode in their lives, considering it a minor and inessential episode compared to the great and appalling transportation of humanity, which of course still conceals secrets. Because those camp survivors were, one way or another, after all saved, as was all that enormous property belonging to those who were not. Even Serge Klarsfeld, the famous Nazi hunter, said, Those work camps were not a great tragedy. The tragedy is that during the war nearly 80,000 French Jews were killed and that France collaborated with the Nazis in that.
At 85–87 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin then, in 1942 and 1943, worked 795 prisoners of whom 164 were deported from Drancy, never to return. Sorting through those stolen belongings, the prisoners often came across items from their own apartments or those of their friends, a small inventory that they later stacked on shelves, and then, as in a large department store, that “display” area was visited by the idle wives of SS officers who came “shopping” for trifling sums, and when they had the time the SS officers themselves would call in to choose for their nearest and dearest, again for next to nothing, some charming, unique gift.
It was only sixty years later, in 2003, that two young scholars, Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensburger, endeavored in their thoroughly documented book (Des camps dans Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, juillet 1943–août 1944: Fayard) to open the little chamber of forgotten collective memory, and yet another small void acquired outlines. A year later, in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, a series of photographs was found that document this until-then hidden Parisian theft.
In those Parisian work camps stolen goods were not only stored and catalogued, they were mended or altered. Imprisoned horologists repaired clocks, cobblers shoes, seamstresses and tailors altered fur coats and dinner suits, they gave a fresher, more contemporary look to evening dresses, little fashion salons were organized at which German gentlefolk acquired clothes for their feasts and celebrations for a song. Thus, all these removed people, all these murdered people, already dead, left the storehouses of the Paris work camps and for a long time afterward walked in their coats, in their suits, with their hats on their heads, with their leather bags over their shoulders, in their shoes, through the streets of their Paris, only now fused with other people’s bodies in which, like a requiem, there resounded their prayers — or their curse.
That ERR stretched its tentacles everywhere. In Serbia, in mid-February 1943, the ERR, known as the Arbeitsgruppe Südost, launched plundering campaigns coordinated first in Belgrade from 26 Gospodar Jovanova, from the office of the then Chief Rabbi, and then from 27 Obilićev venac, while in Croatia campaigns had already been operating in Zagreb and Dubrovnik since May 1941. In less than a month, the ERR Dienststelle, known as Der deutsche General in Agram, carried out 116 raids of houses and apartments, for the most part those owned by Croatian Jews, and at the end of June Mladen Lorković, the then Minister of Interior Affairs of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) entered into a lively correspondence with the heads of the Zagreb branch of the ERR, wholeheartedly offering his services. To Göring and Rosenberg’s regret, but fortunately for the looted, the value of the Balkan booty did not even approach that of the wealthy European families and consisted mainly of some appropriated libraries, documents, carpets, the occasional sculpture or oil painting by artists almost unknown in the outside world, and a multitude of worn household items such as cheap dinner sets and anonymous furniture. In its postwar application to the Federal Republic of Germany for the return of looted property, of objects of value the Yugoslav government sought one Rembrandt, belonging to the Yugoslav royal family, a flag of Friedrich the Great, an oil painting from the school of Raphael and a Caravaggio from the Montenegrin monastery of Ostrog. All right, they did also ask for the return of the inventory books from the collections of the Historical Museum in Zagreb, but also numerous objects stolen in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia. So, Yugoslavia asked that sixty pictures taken from the Jewish cultural society La Benevolencija be returned to Sarajevo, as well as 6,500 artifacts stolen from Zagreb’s Strossmayer Gallery. But the most valuable objects preserved from the gigantic bureaucracy of the Third Reich, with its perfectly functioning machinery, were the files deposited in the Russian State Military Archive and the copy of them in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Everything is written in these documents: there is a record of every theft of other people’s belongings carried out in Zagreb and the majority of those carried out in Dubrovnik; they record whose house was plundered, who carried out the theft and when, what was taken, and, in some cases, what fate the victims met. Here there is a detailed description of the anti-Semitic laws and anti-Semitic disposition that spread through Croatia, along with proof of the persecution of Jewish doctors, driven out of hospitals, and Jewish musicians driven from their jobs. In other words, it is all known. It is known.
What happened to all these people, who now live at their own addresses, in their own apartments, what do we want to know about them and what do we want or not want to remember? Memory and space are in a permanent clinch; when space collapses, it drags memory into its underground, into its nonexistence, and without memory, the present becomes sick, mutilated, a torso with extracted organs.
From 1991 to 1992, the American photographer and visual artist Shimon Attie projected onto shops, building façades and passersby in the eastern part of Berlin, in the former Jewish quarter of Scheunenviertel near Alexanderplatz, photographs of buildings and people from the time immediately before the events of the Second World War. Attie “cast” parts of the past into the everyday life of his present, which now twenty-something years later is being transformed once again — masking encroaching danger.
And so the erased past, nonexistent buildings, nonexistent people, their activities, their faces, their clothes, their lives creep into a new age. People pass Attie’s installations and observe the past adhering to the present, some in surprise, some with sadness, some with shame, some with fury. The past cannot be returned, because it does not
go anywhere, one has only to find the link that connects it to what is now and what is to come.
Let us imagine a randomly chosen address in the center of Zagreb, say today’s 16 Teslina, where the Vuković and Runjić bookshop is now. Let us imagine that over the shop window full of books slides an enormous projection of the “Radio” shop in the same building, in the same place, then at 16 Nikolić. Let us imagine that it is 1940. Let us imagine that through the window we see Josef Konforti, born in Travnik in 1912, talking with customers, surrounded by radio sets, bicycles, typewriters, and sewing machines, while some other customers leaf through the latest books by local and foreign writers. Josef Konforti was killed in the Jasenovac camp in 1944.
The cobbler Gabriel Kalderon, born in Bitola in 1901, lives at 94 Ulica Vlaška. He comes to Zagreb from Bitola in 1932. He lives with his wife and four children. Registering his property to the NDH authorities, he declares that in his workshop he has 120 pairs of shoes to be repaired and that his tools are worth 300 dinars. His eldest son, eighteen-year-old Jakov, is killed in the Ustasha camp of Jadovno, and in 1943 he, Gabriel Kalderon, is arrested along with the rest of his family and deported to Auschwitz. We see him on the first floor of 94 Ulica Vlaška sitting on a stool in his half-dark workshop turning a woman’s shabby shoe in his hands. Beside him sits a small boy tapping at something, and through the open window on the first floor we watch his wife by the stove, stirring something with one hand, while with the other she holds on her hip a little girl who is laughing. Beneath the projection of this enormous photograph we can make out the advertising board of the Pletix shop in which swimsuits and underwear were sold, here at 94 Ulica Vlaška, and immediately beside it we see the hairdresser Trans-X, with a woman sitting under a hair dryer reading Glorija magazine.
Let’s go to 63 Ulica Vlaška. At 63 Ulica Vlaška, Avram Levi, son of David Levi, born in Sarajevo in 1911, stands at the counter of his small shop selling clothes and shoes, he is looking out at the street, wondering whether he will sell anything to anyone that day. The aroma of freshly baked pizza comes from the Kariola pizza café beneath the projection, customers drink beer and peck at their smart phones and vacantly throw warm triangles into their mouths.
Avram Levi was killed by the Ustasha in Jasenovac in 1942.
Almost opposite, at 64 Ulica Vlaška, shines in large blue letters opto-centar, an optician and eye clinic in which misted gazes are sharpened. On its Facebook page the Opto-Centar addresses potential users of its services with the ambiguous question How is your outlook on the world?
Darkness is falling, the street lights come on on Ulica Vlaška. The neon letters of the Opto-Centar flicker. At number 64, Leon Altarac, son of Avram, born in Sarajevo in 1909, locks up his artisan knitwear workshop and goes home. It is 1942, or rather 2015. The blue, sharp eye of the Opto-Centar follows Leon Altarac’s supple step: as far as the killing field of Jasenovac, where for Leon Altarac the lights go out forever.
Moise D. Salom, born in Sarajevo in 1874, locks up his wholesale manufacturing business at 2 King Petar Square. He brings his palms to his temples and through the scrupulously clean glass casts a last glance into its dark interior in which, he knows, everything, all the goods, all the exclusive men’s and women’s clothing is tidily stored and catalogued. Moise Salom inhales deeply, puts the keys to his shop in the right-hand pocket of his trousers, does up the top button of his perfectly tailored white poplin shirt, rolls up his sleeves and goes for a glass of chilled white wine at the Esplanade Hotel. Moise Salom moved into the Esplanade Hotel a few days ago. It is the summer of 1941, let’s say July. Past Moise Salom’s shop cars drive, people walk, the young fiddle with their cells. Beneath the sign salom manufacturing retailer, at number 2 Victims of Fascism Square, there gradually appears the name of a shop, moderato, on the window of which is a sloppily pasted poster: Visit Moderato. At affordable prices we offer beautiful, sophisticated clothing for those who appreciate classical style and elegance. The comfortable, relaxing environment entices the majority of our customers to come back. There will be no coming back for Moise Salom.
Soon after the establishment of the NDH, Moise Salom registers his property; he specifies that more than 8 million dinars of his own capital are invested in his retail business, in 1940 he achieves a turnover of around 24.5 million dinars, while in the storehouse, according to records on May 26, 1941, when he makes an inventory under police supervision, he owns goods to the value of 7 million dinars.
So Moise Salom drinks a glass of chilled white wine in the Esplanade Hotel. His family is already in Switzerland. Tomorrow, Moise Salom will withdraw all his money and close his bank account. A ticket for the night train Zagreb-Zurich and a passport in the name of Marko Salopek is lying on the bedside table in his room. The partisan attacks on the railway lines have not yet begun. Not until August 1941 will the Swiss authorities impose an absolute ban on the reception of Jewish refugees. In other words, Moise Salom, alias Marko Salopek, has a chance of life.
But that evening, Moise Salom does not manage to go up to his hotel room. Two young men from the Ustasha police approach his table and take him away. Moise Salom is killed in Jasenovac in 1942.
After the global Nazi thefts of the lives of millions had so unexpectedly ambushed me in Paris, the fact that, after the death of Ada and my father Rudolf, and in contempt of his will, his wife, the then 87-year-old insatiable, complex-ridden creature who watched soap operas for years and leafed through trashy magazines, that political convert who, having once been a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, today virtually licks altars, she who in the course of the TV broadcast of the proclamation of Croatian independence, accompanied by the song “Danke Deutschland” dedicated to Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and performed by an anonymous singer dressed in a little pink dress, for that dinner she had roasted a suckling pig and opened a bottle of champagne, and in a threatening voice accused me, since I had not watched that tasteless spectacle, You were probably with some Serbs, she, who had once been married to a Croatian Serb who escaped from her and from Yugoslavia as soon as he had the chance even though they had a son, presumably, therefore, a little Serb, the fact that this woman stole paintings (with the artists’ dedication to our parents), sculptures, carpets, ornaments with the names of Marisa and Rudolf engraved on them (she threw the books out, and I came across one, dedicated to my father, on a used bookstore website, and I called them and asked them to keep it for me, which they did), the fact that she had appropriated a good part of a life lived outside her presence, but once I learned about the global Nazi thefts of the lives of millions, everything that this woman did seemed to me fairly trivial, so I was able to take the question of inheritance, the question of theft, which my stepmother had carried out thenceforth quite calmly.
Where that woman was concerned, I had clearly failed as a psychologist. In many of her unfounded outbursts of fury and hatred, I had recognized, oh yes, pathological jealousy, the need to possess the ostensibly loved object and remove — eliminate — the rival. Hence the elimination of things that either belonged to us or that we had given to our father. The walker I had bought for Rudolf, and after consultation with an expert I bought a mechanical one, the simplest, because I was told that walkers with handbrakes for semimobile people could be fatal, and Rudolf had moved about perfectly well, until that woman took my walker away and bought him the one with handbrakes, which he once forgot to operate and fell and ended up having an operation for a broken hip at ninety-two. Or when Ada made a large Reform cake for Đoja’s birthday, It’s a complicated cake, said Ada, it takes a lot of time, and she carried the cake all the way from Rovinj to Zagreb so that we could celebrate his birthday together (Đoja and Leo were still small and cheerful), that woman gave us each a thin slice and took the rest, a thirty-centimeter, magnificent cake made with chocolate and walnuts to a neighbor whom she could not stand. Leo said, I’d like some more, and that woman hissed, There isn’t any!
Fo
r that woman, anyone who attempted to get close to our father was dangerous and had to be got rid of. Over time, friends, Istria, his children and grandchildren disappeared from Rudolf’s life; all that remained was her, a wrecked and poisoned inner landscape echoing with the words, You are mine, mine alone.
The older our father got, the less he resisted.
When he came to visit us she would telephone five times a day, and should Rudolf decide to stay a day or two longer, she would go off demonstratively to a spa and on her return wouldn’t speak to him for days. On the other hand, if we visited our father, she would sit us down in the kitchen, seat herself at the head of the table, occasionally saying, All right, I’ll go away so that you can talk, and of course she didn’t stir.