by Daša Drndic
865. Szabo Viktor, 47
866. Schächter Rifka, 63
867. Schächter Josef, 33
868. Schächter Anna, 32
869. Schaner Franzuska, 39
870. Schapira Ignatz, 39
871. Schapira Minna, 47
872. Schatzker Jetta, 41
873. Schein Isak Levi, 50
874. Schein Herner Rifka, 48
875. Schenk Dr. Nathan-Aron, 28
876. Schenk Anna, 29
877. Scherf Salomon, 43
878. Scherf Gusta, 43
879. Schimper Scharl Stella, 31
880. Schindler Walter, 30
881. Schleifer Erwin, 30
882. Schlesinger Elka, 30
883. Schlimper Robert, 25
884. Schmetterling Karl, 43
885. Schmetterling Malka (?)
886. Schmittmayer Kela, 20
887. Schmitz Ernst, 22
888. Schneider Robert, 23
889. Schneider Albert, 27
890. Schneider Haim Pinkas, 37
891. Schober Ernst, 27
892. Schober Gisela, 27
893. Schober Josef, 29
894. Schönfeld Stella, 44
895. Schaner Theodor, 44
896. Schram Simon, 44
897. Schram Josefine, 41
898. Schreiber Leib, 50
899. Schreiber Max, 19
900. Schröter Anna, 39
901. Schröter Leo, 33
902. Schulemann Walter, 32
903. Schwachter Ignatz, 34
904. Schwadron Moses, 53
905. Schwadron Oskar, 24
906. Schwalbe Inge, 22
907. Schwamm Otto, 33
908. Schwamm Klara, 30
909. Schwarzblattel Otto, 36
910. Schwarzblattel Jannet (Jenny), née Dickmann, 27
911. Schwarz Egon-Eugen, 47
912. Schwarz Paula, 44
913. Schwarz Gustarv, 32
914. Schwarz Marcel, 20
915. Schwarz Stefanie, 54
916. Schwatzer Kurt, 54
917. Schweber Sara, 56
918. Schweber Markus, 55
919. Schwerger Malvine, 19
920. Stegl Fritz, 36
921. Stereifler Jonas-Jakob, 53
922. Stein Leo, 47
923. Stein Alice, 43, Zasavica
924. Stein Berich Leo, 28
925. Stein Moritz-Martin, 34
926. Stein Kurt, 22
927. Steinberg Leo, 23
928. Steiner Paul, 20
929. Steiner Edith, 49
930. Steiner Otto, 32
931. Steiner Franz, 44
932. Steiner Artur, 37
933. Steiner Hermann, 21
934. Steiner Julia, 20
935. Steiner Hans, 21
936. Stelper Kurt, 28
937. Stern Josef, 48
938. Stern Emil, 38
939. Stern Else, 42
940. Stern Mathias, 26
941. Stern Rudolf, 33
942. Stern Aladar, 35
943. Sternberg Bassia, 52
944. Sternberg Fabian, 52
945. Stolz Haim, 41
946. Strauber Dr. Solomon, 29
947. Strauber Franziska, 27
948. Strassmann Wolf-Leib, 43
949. Strassmann Isak, 33
950. Streifler Lotta, 33
951. Strübel Herbert, 20
952. Talert Egon, 31
953. Tannenbaum Herman, 19
954. Tannenbaum Ernnst, 22
955. Tannenbaum Robert, 32
956. Tauber Salomon, 30
957. Tauber Josef, 28
958. Taubenschlag Werner, 20
959. Trebitsch Herta, 20
960. Tuchfeld Herbert, 18
961. Tutter Heinrich, 21
962. Tutter Jetti, 21
963. Ullmann Kurt, 20
964. Urban Eduard, 29
965. Urban Ella, 29
966. Versändig Moses, 40
967. Verständig Malka, 37
968. Waldmann Malvina, 40
969. Waldmann Ernst, 63
970. Waltuch Fritz, 24
971. Wassermann Rifka, 44
972. Wassermann Simche, 44
973. Wassermann Friedel, 40
974. Weigel Walter, 34
975. Weinberger Emanuel, 61
976. Weniberger Martha, 45
977. Weitraub Sara, 32
978. Weitraub Moses, 42
979. Weinstein Sabina, 47
980. Weinstein Sandor, 20
981. Weingarten Betty, 20
982. Weinstock Haja Ides, 46
983. Weiss Eva, 16
984. Weiss Ruth, 17
985. Weiss Lisabeth, 19
986. Weiss Alexander, 20
987. Weiss Franz, 21
988. Weiss Fritz, 25
989. Weiss Gerold, 26
990. Weiss Karoline, 31
991. Weiss Adelberg, 39
992. Weiss Ester, 32
993. Weiss Frieda, 27
994. Weiss Rudolf, 40
995. Weiser Helene, 34
996. Weiser Georg, 39
997. Weissberg Mordoko, 43
998. Weissberg Bulin, 36
999. Weissberg Siegfried, 20
1000. Weitz Angela, 58
1001. Weitz Dr. Ignatz, 52
1002. Wellwahr Elwire, 27
1003. Wellwahr Emil, 26
1004. Wellisch Melanie, 34
1005. Wellisch Ernst, 33
1006. Wenig Hansi, 41
1007. Wettendorfer Bernat, 70, pensioner from Šabac
1008. Wettendorfer Alexander, 35, from Šabac
1009. Wettendorfer Franz, 32, from Šabac
1010. Werthim Alfred, 21
1011. Werdiheim Karl, 20
1012. Wesel Feiga, 23
1013. Wesel Paul, 29
1014. Wickelholz Ella, 25
1015. Widder Eugen, 30, from Slovakia
1016. Wieselberg Minna, 21
1017. Wieselberg Artur, 25
1018. Wieselmann Max, 19
1019. Wiesner Amelie, 49
1020. Wiesner Daniel, 60, engineer
1021. Wisternitz Hans, 20
1022. Widowsky Mordoko, 23
1023. Willner Wilhelmine, 42
1024. Wimmer Gottlieb, 45
1025. Wimmer Rachel, 41
1026. Wimmer Haim, 31
1027. Winkler Alexander, 23
1028. Witsches Sofie, 52
1029. Witsches Salomon, 46
1030. Wiesinger Ernst, 14
1031. Wohl Karl-Heinz, 19
1032. Wolfsohn Ester-Emma, 61
1033. Wollisch Dr. Friedrich, 38
1034. Wollmann Juliette, 46
1035. Wünschbancher Erich, 19
1036. Zámory Manfred, 17
1037. Zimmermann Lydia, 53
1038. Zimmermann Samuel, 60
1039. Zewitzger Robert
1040. Zuckerberg Zittel, 61
1041. Zuckerberg Anna, 33
1042. Zwicker Berta, 44, from Zasavica
1043. Zwicker Josefina, 48
1044. Zwicker Suzanne, 16
1045. Zwicker Siegfried, 56
1046. Zwicker Robert, 32
1047. Zwicker Ilona, 32
1048. Zwicker Julius, 43, from Vienna
1049. Zwicker Franz, 22
1050. Zwiebel Sofie, 40
1051. Zwiebel Süsskind, 41
1052. Zwirn Egon, 22
1053. Zeigfinger Benjamin, 41
1054. Zenner Rossa, 51, from Vienna
1055. Zenner Haim, 54, from Vienna
* * *
* Independent State of Croatia.
† In September 1941 he is arrested and taken to the camp at Banjica, where he is interrogated and tortured. In the camp he is executed by the SS Major and doctor Friedrich Jung.
‡ Franz Friedrich Böhme (Austria, April 15, 1885–Germany, May 29, 1947). After graduating from the Military Academy in Graz, he serves in the Austro–Hungarian army as an officer in the Headquarters. In 1938 he is appointed Chief of Staff of the Austrian army. He was also military observer in the war in Abyssinia. He takes part in the military campaign in Poland and France. He comes to Serbia in September 1941, with exceptional powers granted him personally by Hitler. Remembered for the infamous punitive expedition of September to December 1941, which left devastation and death in its wake. He introduces the “death key”: a hundred Serbs for one dead German and fifty for each German wounded. Up to December 5, 1941, (in just two and a half months) 11,164 hostages and 3,562 insurgents are shot. After this “mission,” Franz Böhme leaves Serbia and is reassigned as army general to Norway, where he is arrested. At his trial in Nuremberg he states that everything he did was in order for the population of Serbia “to achieve tranquility and peace as soon as possible.” On May 29, 1947, he commits suicide by jumping from the fourth-floor window of the prison where he is interned. He is buried in Friedhof St Leonhard in Graz.
§ Hermann Dasche, son of the shopkeeper Bernhard Dasche and Gisela, née Schnabel, was married to Felicija Winter and worked as a debt collector. He had to move from Mödling to Vienna, to 1 Sperlgasse, into a Sammelwohnung (the Nazi name for a shared apartment) on March 20, 1939. While his wife managed to escape to the United States, Hermann had tried to reach Palestine with the so-called Kladovo transport.
Today there are no Jews in Šabac.
Today Zasavica is a nature park, a special reserve.
Today in Zasavica one finds a picturesque woods, boggy meadows, wide banks and waterways, a wealth of plant and animal species, especially old, endemic and rare ones, and their communities, and a historical heritage that stretches back to distant times. Today in Zasavica visitors are offered tourist experiences: rest, recreation, boating and enjoyment of nature.
In May 2011 in the Zasavica special reserve there were recorded three new species of butterfly: the Brown Hairstreak (Thecla betulae), the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) and the Green Hairstreak (Callophrys rubi). The butterflies in Zasavica are protected, they fly.
Today Zasavica is lovely. And full of life. Several indigenous animal species wander freely through the reserve. There are Podolski cattle, and Pulin sheepdogs, five families of beavers and more than six hundred Mangalica pigs, so-called woolly pigs — Wollschweine — adorned with black eyelashes. Mangalica pigs are robust, resistant to disease, stress and all climates. The woolly pigs love to roam, they have a great need of movement, walking, of coming and going. The great freedom of movement is made possible by their powerful legs, strengthened by sturdy trotters. Unlike so-called thoroughbred strains, Mangalica pigs have no deformations in their locomotive apparatus, and are equally at home on plains, mountains and hilly meadows from the Alps and Pannonia to the Carpathians in the east and the Balkan mountain range in southeast Europe. Mangalicas love mud.
Oh, and most important: in the Zasavica Special Nature Reserve a farm has been established with one hundred members of a species known as the Balkan donkey, for the time being the only donkey farm in this part of Europe. Donkey milk and meat are used to make unique and expensive cosmetics and dried meat products. Donkey milk is high-quality milk, it has a low percentage of fat and a high percentage of protein. So, in the Zasavica Nature Reserve donkey milk is used for making face creams and body creams, and it is possible to buy enough of that milk (at least seventy liters) at forty euros per liter for a bath à la Cleopatra, for maintaining the softness of the skin. Yes, donkey milk is exceptionally expensive milk because donkey mares do not give much milk, at most 150 to two hundred milliliters in four milkings a day, so in two years one mare will only give twenty or so liters. But this milk does not contain bacteria, so it does not need to be pasteurized, it has sixty times more vitamin C and additional medicinal qualities. It is preserved by freezing.
Donkey milk cream — 25 euros
Donkey milk soap — 5 euros
Donkey milk liqueur, 1 dl. — 10 euros
Donkey meat sausage, 1 kg. — 15 euros
Donkey meat salami, 1 kg. — 20 euros
There. That would be the Zasavica Nature Park today.
My father was a religious fanatic, Rudolf Sass finally confesses to himself and to the psychiatrist Kaplan. A literate religious fanatic and a successful merchant. My sister died before the war, in unexplained circumstances. She was fifteen. I wanted to cast light on those circumstances, at some stage. No one ever talked about my sister’s death in our house. No one talked about anything in our house. An uncomfortable hardness ruled, says Rudolf Sass.
After graduating from high school, Rudolf Sass leaves the small town, not far from Šabac, where the Sass family had settled at the end of the war. I didn’t miss anyone, says Rudolf Sass. My mother — under the absolute dominance of my father, frightened and weak; my brothers, they got by somehow. I only regretted leaving my grandfather, with whom I had long, quiet conversations, I told him about my Jewish friends, who gave me money, just a few coins so that I could go to the cinema or buy sweets. Nevertheless, I decided that when I got stronger I would go home, I decided I would go and say to my father, You were a cruel and bad parent.
So:
It is 1946. Rudolf Sass secretly takes three one-hundred-dollar bills out of his father’s safe. He needs them to cover his living costs until he finds work. Rudolf Sass changes one bill on the black market and puts the money into his pocket. He hides the other two bills in his shoes. He walks twenty kilometers to the railroad station.
In the noisy smoke-filled station restaurant, Rudolf Sass orders tea and takes off his shoes, which are rubbing. His feet are swollen and bloody. The banknotes are crumpled, torn and smudged. Unusable. Rudolf Sass trembles, he is beside himself. He climbs onto the train. Limping. In the distance he hears a terrible voice, a deep, furious voice yelling, Stop, Rudolf, stop! His father is running along the platform, red in the face and waving a clenched fist. The doors close. The train leaves.
Rudolf Sass finds a place in a run-down student dorm, a room shared with two others, he does newspaper and milk rounds, plays basketball, gets a scholarship, he fits in, it is all meager but secure. He studies. He passes his exams. Now and again he goes to the theater, tickets are cheap, he has friends, he has a girlfriend, then he doesn’t, then he does again, life works, it goes on. He has no contact with his family. No one calls, no one visits. From time to time he exchanges letters with his grandfather. His childhood gradually disappears in the trash heap of his confined past, in the storehouse of days buried under his new life.
Some ten years later Rudolf Sass’s arms and legs occasionally swell again, and the tendons in his thumb and forefinger stiffen. These are irregularities that do not disrupt the rhythm of his life. The problem is diagnosed as an angioneurotic edema, that is, a psychosomatic illness, that includes allergies.
It’ll pass, say the doctors.
It’ll pass, Rudolf Sass repeats.
Poor Rudolf Sass. He cannot free himself from the problems of his body.
It is 1984. Rudolf Sass (57) has been living in Switzerland for a long time now, eighteen years. He is a specialist, an anesthesiologist, at a private clinic in Lausanne. When he’s not working, when he rests, he looks out at Lake Geneva and the mountain range in the distance. He is married to Laura, a nurse who works in the same clinic. At home they speak French. They have a daughter, Tina (16). Whe
n he is agitated, Rudolf Sass notices his heart occasionally skips a beat, his pulse becomes irregular. What now? These extrasystoles do not bode well, he says, and goes for a checkup. The tests reveal no anomalies. However, Rudolf Sass is convinced that this inner fluttering is connected to the discussions he has been having for some time with his wife Laura about his visit home. I’m going with you, Laura insists. No, I’m going alone. Rudolf Sass is determined. And so, Rudolf Sass goes to his homeland to carry out his mission, to bury his years-old nightmare, to cast the rotten, irritating burden out of his good, stable Swiss mountain-lakeside life, to tell and show his father what he thought and what he still thinks about him. But his father is no more, his grandfather has also died, in the family house only his mother is left. After his return to Lausanne, the extrasystoles retreat. But it is another event that contributes to the fact that Rudolf’s heart starts to beat properly again, quietly and regularly. He breaks off a love affair that has long been bringing chaos and disquiet into his spick-and-span Swiss life. And so, for a few years Rudolf Sass feels well, apart from the occasional recurrence of his allergy symptoms, redness of the face and swelling of his hands and feet.
Time rolls. Rudolf Sass ages. The clinic where he works is in financial difficulties, a crisis, savings have to be made at home and at work, the future is uncertain, old age too. Tina marries, not a doctor as Rudolf Sass had hoped for, but a stockbroker whom Rudolf does not like. At his son-in-law’s insistence, Rudolf Sass invests his life savings in some shares and loses all his money. Soon after that his itching starts again, his pruritus ani. Still I keep functioning. At work, at home, at table and in bed. No signs of depression, Rudolf Sass assures himself.
But troubles keep coming.
Rudolf Sass’s son-in-law falls ill with tuberculosis of the lungs. His condition worsens and he is moved to the Vaudois University Hospital in Lausanne. Rudolf Sass is upset. In addition to his wife and himself, he must now provide for his daughter Tina’s family. In 1988 she gives birth to Emma. His son-in-law is increasingly ill, spitting blood. The doctors invite their colleague Rudolf Sass for consultations. One evening, as he is walking in the hospital grounds with his arm around Tina’s shoulder, a chance passerby calls out, Now what, you’re seducing your own daughter! Rudolf Sass feels his cheeks burning, his heart starts beating rapidly and his head begins to pound. That night Rudolf Sass cannot sleep. I’m going to be ill, he keeps saying, I’m going to be ill. His anal itch gets worse — Rudolf Sass is saddled with a deep depression. Rudolf Sass avoids seeing patients, fearful that he might attack or injure them. He is afraid to be with his wife, with Tina and little Emma. Terrified and confused, Rudolf Sass does not understand what is happening, despite his hope that, as soon as his pruritus is cleared up, he will emerge from the dark. That mental blindness in Rudolf Sass is astonishing, the blindness provoked by the chance remark about him and his daughter, says Andreas’s friend the psychiatrist Adam Kaplan. The apparently harmless remark of a passerby reactivated in him a suppressed sense of guilt in connection with his wish for the death of his son-in-law, and his guilt about his fantasies of renewed control over the lives of his daughter Tina and his granddaughter Emma, Rudolf Sass reacts vehemently, maintaining that he is doing all in his power for his son-in-law’s recovery.