by Daša Drndic
With relief, with a strange, short-lived gaiety, Andreas Ban plunges into that remembrance beyond his life, he embarks on a mental excursion of flashes of borrowed images. Because Andreas Ban is not a Jew, nor does he have any connection with Šabac. That is why he observes the Šabac wartime story as he might watch a film, he tries to decipher whether the story has any connection with Rudolf Sass’s diagnosed depression. And perhaps with him, Andreas Ban.
As early as April 1, 1938, as though it were a hideous April Fool’s Day joke, a train transporting prisoners, including around sixty Jews, sets off from Vienna to the concentration camp of Dachau. Whoever grasps what is going on — and there are not many who do — flees. It is mostly the young who flee. Less than two months later, on May 23, among the prisoners destined for Dachau are an additional fifty Jews. The following day all the police stations in Austria receive the order to arrest immediately every Jew who had ever come into conflict with the law. This marks the beginning of raids, of a frenzied manhunt. Those arrested are taken straight to the police prison of Rossauer Lände in Vienna, and from there to Dachau. On May 30, 1938, a new transport train sets off from Vienna carrying five hundred Jews, on June 2 a further six hundred, on June 16 another six hundred Jews disappear, and on July 15, the last transport for Dachau, another six hundred souls depart. Vienna empties. Vienna is cleansed and purged, 2,310 citizens of Vienna have been dispatched, last stop — Buchenwald. By order of the Gestapo, the remaining women and men, teachers, doctors, shopkeepers, bakers, butchers, and jewelers, perform gymnastics in pajamas in the squares and scrub the streets of Vienna with toothbrushes, their shops are marked with the handwritten word “Jude,” Jews are thrown out of their apartments while some other people waltz, enjoy cabarets and eat Sachertorte. The way it usually goes in wars.
On Saturday, February 6, 2010, the Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji list publishes a small photomontage of 104 pages, with some 120 photographs from 1941–45 entitled “Life in the NDH”* In these pictures, Zagreb is nothing but banquets, celebrations, parades, and full of idyllic scenes. The head of state Pavelić, as “the father of the homeland,” spends time with sweet, smiling children, with peasant women in ornate national costume, with devoted soldiers, while his wife Marija humbly takes care of war orphans. Culture and sport flourish, the ladies are au courant with European fashion, around the pavilion in the central park of Zrinjevac, crowds of citizens delight in a military band. At the same time, in the deserted town under curfew, night raids are carried out, families which no longer exist are carried off and their property plundered; trains for the Jasenovac camp and Auschwitz are full; large groups of hostages are shot, publicly hanged victims dangle from lampposts in the suburb of Dubrava. In other words, not everyone is singing and dancing. There are citizens of Zagreb who resist Evil and therefore lose their lives. I am Slavko Goldstein.
Austria is annexed to Germany, fused in submission and evil. Then comes the night on which the Neptune monster, accompanied by heavenly crystalline chords, dances his macabre Tanz, the night of November 9 to 10, 1938. Ninety-six Jews are killed, hundreds are injured, more than one thousand synagogues are burned, almost 7,500 shops are destroyed, graves desecrated, schools demolished, thirty thousand Jews are arrested and sent to camps.
In November 1939, groups of young people begin to organize the illegal emigration of Jews to Palestine, illegal because from as early as May of that year, Great Britain, on the basis of the Macdonald Letter, that is his White Paper, bans all Jews from the Third Reich from direct immigration into Palestine, they are considered “enemy aliens.”
So, according to existing regulations, during that winter of 1939, a total of 822 people set out illegally from Vienna, 130 from Berlin, fifty from Gdansk, and in Bratislava they are joined by another hundred Czechs and Poles. The winter of 1939 is harsh, the harshest of the wartime winters. The Danube is frozen over, river traffic is erratic and the refugees wait for ten days before finding a boat prepared to take them. The refugees finally embark on the excursion boat Uranus and look with unease at the Nazi flag adorned with a swastika fluttering on its prow, but at the Hungarian border the Uranus is turned back to the port from which it departed. In the middle of December, the refugees set sail again from Bratislava and get halfway, before they are sent back once more. Thanks to the Union of Zionists of Yugoslavia, that is through the connections of its chief secretary Šime Spitzer† with Mossad, the institution in Europe concerned with the illegal settlement of Jews in Palestine, 1,102 passengers are transferred to the excursion boats Tsar Nicholas II, Tsar Dušan and Queen Marija. This journey too is interrupted at the three-country border of Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria. There is no letup in the unprecedented Arctic winter. Ice floes float on the Danube. Temperatures sink to twenty below zero. Winds whip. At the turn of the year 1939, the boats sail toward the small, remote town of Kladovo, fifty kilometers from the nearest railroad station, cut off from the world and frozen in time. For nine months, in deplorable conditions, in filth, cold, without adequate food, more than a thousand people first waste their days on boats, then in huts thrown up on the marshy ground around Kladovo. Epidemics of malaria and various infectious diseases spread, there are cases of typhus and polio. There is no news of the arrival of any kind of ship to transport the refugees to Palestine. Anti-Semitic Romania expressly forbids the passage of Jews over its territory. And so, on September 22, 1940, this motley crowd of all ages, all professions, varied education, confronting the essence of evil and united, as it seems to Andreas Ban today, in a senseless effort to survive, this rabble of people thrown together haphazardly, needed by no one, discarded souls, is offered protection and hospitality by the mayor of Šabac, the doctor of law Miodrag Petrović, former Yugoslav consul in Bern, Trieste and Zadar. Into that small town of barely sixteen thousand inhabitants come 1,300 new people. Šabac, in which in addition to Serbs live some Slovaks, Roma, Russians and an occasional Croat, has its own integrated Jewish community, some hundred old settlers, and possesses that miraculous quiet and benevolent openness that propels small towns into the world of good and protects them from the world of evil. Unlike those other small towns, loathsome, through which flow the black waters of submission with deposits of decay; whose inhabitants are transformed into hounds, which at the command of their masters tear apart anything foreign, or like puppies put their tails between their legs and crawl on their bellies.
The majority of the new citizens of Šabac move into the mill belonging to the wine merchant Jakov Vukosavljević, others go to the warehouse of the Prague Bank, adapted to their needs, yet others are dispersed through the homes of local people, some of whom are well off, others not at all. A hospital is set up in a building in which a dozen newly arrived doctors and two locals work, everything in that hospital with some twenty beds is clean and safe.
After numerous conversations during which the psychiatrist Adam Kaplan, like a patient and experienced angler, draws out of Rudolf Sass’s deep pit of oblivion blurred, bleary images from his past, many of which are so brittle they are on the verge of falling to pieces, Rudolf Sass begins to construct the fragmented puzzle of his life. And recollections roll.
In 1941 the tailor Simeon undertakes small repairs for the Sass family, for Rudolf he shortens his father’s old trousers, turns his mother’s coat inside out. An improvised Jewish school is opened, someone composes choral songs for performances there, mostly they sing “Wir Packen, Wir Auspacken.” The Šabac football club Mačva is reinforced, “first-class” players are brought onto the field, the short but speedy spectators’ favorite Kurt Hilković, then the goalkeeper Otto Ferri, two halfbacks, Mandl and Goldschmidt, then Hermann Steiner and the fullback Emil Silbermann, who runs barefoot.
The cobbler Josif makes wooden sandals with leather straps, everyone wants them, Rudolf Sass wears them in the summer to Šabac’s wild beaches where he goes with Ernst Wiesinger, little Lili Mendelsohn and Suzanne Zwicker. And, of course, there is his beloved
Karl — Kari Kriss who just cannot scrape together the money for his escape. The “Zorka” factory runs at full tilt, there are increasing numbers of workers who make themselves understood in various languages, Russian, Polish, German and Hungarian, which is unheard of in Šabac. The streets are full of people. Even in winter. Children are born. In Šabac, the war is still only a whisper.
Then, April 1941, the bombing of Belgrade — darkness falls on Šabac.
Germans in uniforms move through the town.
In May comes dense rain and difficulty breathing. The SS officers arrest twenty prominent citizens of Šabac and take them away as hostages. Civilians are ordered to hand over their vehicles to the German Command. The Paris cinema is closed. Food is increasingly expensive and there is less of it. No singing, no celebrating, silence grips the town.
The SS officers hand out yellow ribbons to the refugees. Enzy Deutsch, in Šabac known as Zoran, throws his ribbon in protest at the feet of the SS officer and goes to the mill, not emerging for days.
Jewish shops are marked.
Near the Paris Restaurant someone breaks the window of “Mignon,” where shoes are sold.
The railroad station is deserted, trains do not run, the bridges are destroyed.
No sugar. No oil, no coffee or lemons, no tobacco. The shops are emptied, the German soldiers take, steal, whatever they find. Food coupons are distributed. The mill chimney emits no smoke, the Jews go hungry.
No silk stockings for love or money. Silk stockings are worn by . . . Rudolf Sass’s mother.
In June the Gypsies no longer play in Šabac’s restaurants, Jewish doctors are prohibited from working. Various notices with prohibitions hang all over town. The people of Šabac are denied access to the Green Garland Hotel, where German officers eat, binging at night, while unknown heavily made-up women sing. One night Rudolf Sass’s father comes home tipsy and says to Rudolf Sass’s mother, I’ve brought you silk stockings.
All radios are confiscated. People hug their radios, rock them like babies as they carry them to the German Command — at the Green Garland Hotel. The Sass family does not take anything to the Command. In the Sass family home the stations of the Independent State of Croatia, Croatian wavelengths, are received (and secretly listened to).
Rudolf Sass no longer goes to the wild beaches by the Sava River. Anyway, in June it rains a lot. No one goes swimming. Corpses float down the Sava. Someone says they are Serbs from the NDH The corpses are unrecognizable.
No flour. No salt. Peasants knock on doors offering eggs, chickens, maize, even flour — for a little salt. For a small cup of salt Rudolf Sass’s mother gets a large fattened turkey.
All the Jewish refugees, 1,107 of them, along with sixty-three indigenous Šabac Jews, are taken to the old Šabac castle on the Sava, now a concentration camp.
It is July 1941. Rudolf’s friends are gone, Kari, Enzi, the little “ballerina” Lilli who flits on the tips of her toes.
In August Rudolf Sass’s father entertains the commander, Captain of the Ustasha Army Josip Hübl, the noncommissioned officer, Sergeant Gjuro Majdak, and the corporal Franjo Kasa, all from the 37th Rifle Company, all in Ustasha uniforms. They go to evening Mass in civilian suits. Rudolf Sass does not go.
In August 1941, the killings begin. The doctors are killed, Dr. Bata Koen is killed, some shopkeepers and farmers are killed, Rudolf Sass does not know their names. From telegraph poles in the town hang the citizens of Šabac, shot by firing squad. Rudolf Sass’s father says, Don’t look, pretend you don’t see. But Rudolf Sass looks, Rudolf Sass wants to and has to look as he passes through on his way home. The ropes around the necks of the hanged soak up their blood, the lifeless bodies slip out of the noose and fall to the ground. Why they hang up murdered people Rudolf Sass cannot understand. Several days later the Germans take prisoners, the Jewish refugees, to a nearby camp; those ordered to hang up the bodies of the shot now load the Jewish corpses onto carts that take them out of town. Rudolf Sass looks again. The carts are crammed with corpses, their arms and legs tangled, bloody and filthy, they sway. A collective funeral procession with no escort, with no tears. The people in the street are frozen.
September 26, 1941. Some five thousand citizens of Šabac and 1,057 Jews from the camp on the Sava are transferred to Klenak and, from there, under blows from rifles, are forced to run twenty-three kilometers to the camp in the Srijem village of Jarak.
At the beginning of October General Franz Böhme‡ announces that members of the Wehrmacht have to shoot 2,100 Jews and Gypsies as a reprisal for the killing of twenty-one German soldiers, according to the principle of a hundred for one.
On August 12 and August 13, 1941, all those interned in the camp near Šabac are taken to Zasavica and shot.
There was a storm brewing, Rudolf Sass tells the psychiatrist Kaplan. The sky turned dark, the wind swirled down the empty streets of Šabac, stirring up dust. The night was ominously quiet. The next day, I hear from school friends about the massacre in Zasavica. In our house no one talks. Forty-five years later I listen to the recollections of Milorad Jelešić, then a farmer and witness to the shooting. On Michaelmas, Jelešić said, I was taken with forty other men to Mačvanska Mitrovica and from there to Zasavica. We thought they were going to shoot us. They dropped us on the marshy ground and told us, We aren’t going to shoot you, you’re here to bury people. Then a German company of about fifty soldiers arrived bringing fifty men in civilian clothes. Right away I realized that they were Jews. The soldiers said, Go to those stakes, and the stakes were driven into the ground at intervals of a meter or two, Jelešić said, Go to the stakes and straddle them. All the civilians were facing a pit, Jelešić said. Then four German soldiers came, went up to each of the Jews with a blanket and spread it out among them, each Jew threw something into the blanket, probably money or valuables. After that, said Jelešić, an officer gave the command and German soldiers with rifles aimed at the back of the Jews’ heads — two at each one. We had to go up to the dead at a run and throw them into the pit, but before that we shook out their pockets and took anything of value, watches, money, and we had to take off their rings, this didn’t go smoothly, Jelešić said, it was sometimes impossible, so the Germans gave us pliers to cut the rings off, while the Germans pulled out their gold teeth, except that this didn’t always go smoothly either, and when it didn’t, they kicked the teeth out with their boots. Then we threw the dead into the pit. When they finished with the first group, we had to run some distance away, while the Germans brought another group out of the stubble field to the firing squad, and so it went on, all over again. In the evening they took us back to Sremska Mitrovica, some forty of us, and shut us in a wagon. In the morning they took us back to Zasavica and the shooting went on as on the previous day. On the first day they killed only Jews, the next day there were some of our Gypsies, there were more Gypsies than Jews, they had probably already killed all the Jews. The whole time some German soldiers were taking photographs, they like doing that, clicking away, as though they were at some kind of performance, Jelešić said, they photographed different moments, they photographed the victims before they were shot, straddling those stakes, they photographed us throwing the bodies into the pit, they photographed the firing squad, from close up, different moments. On the first evening we left the pit open and the next day when we came we found a lot of dogs gnawing at the bodies. Then a German started killing the dogs, he pointed to the pit and shouted, Curs to curs, Jelešić said. Not all the Jews were obedient, Jelešić said. They did not all hand over their valuables, they did not all stand beside their stakes, some smoked, some embraced each other, one young man refused to leave his accordion so they shot him with his accordion on his chest. There, that is what I learned some forty or so years later, Rudolf Sass tells Adam Kaplan, handing him a photograph streaked with the white veins of age. This is my friend Kari Kriss, the one for whom I collected money to help him escape, mone
y my father had but didn’t want to give me. Kari Kriss taught me to swim, Kari Kriss was killed in Zasavica. He was nineteen.
Rudolf Sass could not tell Adam Kaplan how, during his visit to Vienna in 2007, he had been stopped in his tracks when he wandered into the little neighboring town of Mödling and came across Günter Demnig’s Stolperstein dedicated to Hermann Dasche. On that polished brass cube 10 x 10 x 10 cm embedded in the sidewalk, on that stumbling block in front of the house in which Hermann Dasche had once lived, that is 8 Eisentorgasse, the following is engraved:
Hermann Dasche
Born February 23, 1910 in Hohenau.
Killed on October 12, 1941 in Zasavica.§
In that year, 2007, Rudolf Sass, already an old man of nearly eighty, could only sigh: The past is haunting me again.
But then, in Mödling, the somewhat calmer Rudolf Sass (because of help from Adam Kaplan?) had already learned to cope with his ghosts. So he bent down to make out all the letters of the inscription, repeating in disbelief and out loud Zasavica, Zasavica buried in Austria, which might have looked as though Rudolf Sass was bowing, as though he was praying, paying his respects to the vanished Hermann Dasche.
In November 1942, the women and children from the Kladovo transport are sent, on foot, in bitter cold, through snow, to the Sajmište camp near Zemun. Old women, the sick and children die on the way. Four-year-old Luci, the daughter of Dr. Bata Koen, dies in the arms of her mother who then goes mad. Two of the children of Irma Hilković, wife of the popular soccer player Kurt, by then shot, die on the way, while the third, born in Šabac, freezes to death on her chest. Those of the Kladovo transport to survive, along with other prisoners, are killed by exhaust fumes in so-called soulstranglers, Saurer brand trucks which could carry between fifty and one hundred victims per “session.”