by Shmuel David
Dr. Pijade’s wife had shown the letters to Louisa to encourage her.
“Although in his first letter, he comforted everyone. He wrote there was nothing to worry about,” said Louisa. “Because everyone was fine, including Emil and the rest of them. But later on, in his second letter, he did tell how Emil had tried to protect Spitzer, how he was thrown into a cell, and transferred. We haven’t heard from Emil since then. I didn’t know what had happened to him for a long time, and in my heart, I believed the worst until finally the last letter arrived.”
The doctor’s wife was living with a friend in the city center, next door to the house where the David family had lived before leaving Belgrade for Eretz Israel, not far from Topovske Šupe camp. She knew he was there but couldn’t do anything to help him. She spoke of her tension and anxiety when she heard that at Topovske Šupe they executed Jewish prisoners in retaliation for Partisan military successes: fifty Jews for every German killed and twenty for every German wounded.
“My heart sank every time they announced a Partisan success,” she said. “When everyone rejoiced in the German misfortunes, I cringed. On the day Partisans killed twenty-one Wehrmacht people near Topola, in an attack considered a major success at the time, I shuddered, positive they’d execute Emil.”
Two days later, the commander of the Jewish department in the Belgrade office called her to his office. At first, she was very alarmed, thinking they were going to arrest her as well, but she was surprised to find that they’d called her in to give her a letter Emil had written. He didn’t complain, although he described the place in very frightening terms. Every morning, after a restless sleep on a concrete floor in a huge hall, they stood in line for a lukewarm coffee-like beverage and a small piece of bread for breakfast. A slice of bread for a prisoner is a hundred and fifty grams per day. Immediately after the meal, they go out to work at different jobs in the city and surrounding areas, and at work, they are given a bland soup for lunch. At the end of the letter, Emil asked Louisa to try and speak to the commander of the Jewish department at the police station who supervised the camp.
That very same day, Louisa personally appealed to the police commander to act on Emil’s behalf for his release. But she understood from him that there was no chance. He said that every day, more Jewish prisoners were brought to the camp. By the end of September, about one thousand men had been arrested and incarcerated in the city of Smederevo.
The police commander allayed her concerns, saying she had nothing to worry about, because conditions there were better than at Banjica and that the internal management of the camp was in the hands of Jewish prisoners.
“When I compare their situation there with this situation here, at Sajmište,” she said. “I realize that conditions here are far worse. But what most disturbed me, even more than the food, were the sleeping conditions on a concrete floor without mattresses. You know Emil. He writes that he is busy now making beds for each of the five hundred prisoners in the camp. At least he’s employed from morning until evening.”
March 18
Today was a long day. It began with the discovery of another letter and ended with a depressing meeting at the infirmary with Hilda.
Until today, I felt quite calm about Z. Pol. No. 71463. I even managed to smile at my first foolish thoughts about the horse to be given to Andorfer. But today, I discovered another letter, and again, I was worried. In it, I read that this Z. Pol. No. 71463 requested by Harald Turner, head of the military government in Serbia, would reach the Jewish hospital yard in Visokog Stevana Street on March 20. The vehicle came with an experienced team of two men, Getz and Majer, who knew how to operate the machine and had tried it successfully at the Polish border.
The letter also said that a message had been sent to Untersturmführer Emanuel Schäfer, head of the security police in Belgrade, to concentrate all Jewish staff members in the hospital yard as well. About seven hundred Jews would be present at the hospital on the day of the operation, including patients and medical staff. But secrecy was an important condition for the success of the operation. The day before, people would be informed that the truck would arrive to take them to their new quarters.
Again, I was alarmed, and a cold sweat broke out on my skin. I thought about Hilda, who had worked at that hospital, where she’d received her training before coming here. Her friends still worked there. I must speak to her about the letter. Hilda didn’t know anything. Two weeks before, she’d received a letter from her friend at the Jewish hospital in town saying that everything was improving and that they’d received new equipment.
That afternoon, Commander Andorfer stormed into the office and ordered me to write a letter to the medical team at the Jewish hospital. He apparently didn’t know I’d seen the letter he’d left on the table. He walked up and down the room in an effort to find the right words for the instruction to transfer the medical staff to their new quarters, a three-and-a-half-hour journey away.
In the same breath, he told me he couldn’t bear his work at the camp any longer, and that he’d applied for a transfer to the front, his rightful place, he said, not playing around ordering food or beds for the hospital.
“I wasn’t trained as an observer and tank commander for that,” he said angrily. “But the commanders in Berlin don’t want to hear it,” he pounded on the door frame. “I hoped they’d transfer me before that damned Saurer polizei gets here, but I see there’s no chance of that.”
It was the first time I’d heard the precise name: the Saurer polizei.
“Why is it so important to you to leave before the Saurer polizei gets here? What’s so terrible about it?” I asked innocently, in an attempt to understand the purpose of the Saurer.
“Don’t you understand?” he said angrily. “Do you have any idea of the pandemonium there’ll be here every day until we get everyone to the new camp?” He began to count on his fingers. “One, prepare flyers and lists of those leaving on that particular day so they can get ready. Two, make sure that only those leaving are ready to get onto the Saurer in the morning. Three, supervise them getting onto the Saurer. After all, everyone wants to get away from here. Four, in order to hasten the transfer, we may have to operate the Saurer twice a day. I have to make sure that’s possible.”
Again, I felt a rising hope that we would leave here. Commander Andorfer is very pedantic and leaves no loose ends untied. But I still had to talk to Hilda.
“We’ll start from the hospital on Visokog Stevana Street. The Saurer will get there in two days’ time, and the medical staff should get to the new place before the patients. So they will be the first to go.” He took a piece of paper out of an envelope in his drawer, which apparently included a list of the hospital staff.
“Untersturmführer Emanuel Schäfer sent me the list yesterday; he’s concentrated all the medical staff at the hospital. Here, can you see how orderly it is? But it requires a lot of work.”
By the time we’d finished preparing the announcement regarding the transfer of eighty-four hospital staff and thirty-three seriously ill patients, it was late. Commander Andorfer called his deputy, Edgar Enge, and told him to send it by messenger to the hospital at once.
Knowing I had a shift at the infirmary that night, I decided to try and rest a while before going to the Nikolai Spasič Pavilion. But I couldn’t sleep. Again, uneasy thoughts about the truth of the transfer rose up. Although Commander Andorfer had tried to calm me, painting a persuasive picture of the orderly preparation of prisoners to be transferred, I still suspected him of deliberately misrepresenting the truth.
That evening, I sat in the infirmary with Hilda. She repeated her hope that they’d all reach a better place as promised, but she also understood that her method of communication with the outside world would end now. She’d often used the opportunity to take patients to the hospital in order to exchange letters with her friends. She said she must get there the following day to
meet with Marianna, or at least pass on a last letter to Nada before they left.
I knew how important the outside world was to her, but not the extent, not that it was her life’s blood. With tears in her eyes, Hilda told me that her connection with her friends on the other side was the only thing that gave her the strength to go on living. Knowing that there was another life across the Sava, even if she was no longer part of it. Just knowing there was a world there, a world that went on almost like the one she used to know, gave her the strength to survive.
Only now did I notice how thin she’d become since I’d gone to Commander Andorfer’s office. The bones stood out in her elbows and hand joints, and the tight skin looked almost transparent. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin cracked from the cold and wind. Her almond-shaped brown eyes, once beautiful and full of life, were dull now and sunken deep in their dark eye sockets.
The severing of her link with her friends seemed like a death sentence for her.
When I told her of my concern that the transfer was merely a cover-up, she didn’t relate to it seriously.
“But Hilda,” I said. “It’s possible they are taking everyone to their death. We have to do something.”
“Nothing matters to me anymore. As far as I’m concerned, they can take me to my death.”
March 30
Again, it is late at night, and I am sitting writing in my room. I did another night shift at the infirmary last night. Hilda isn’t feeling well. Since the evacuation of the hospital on Visokog Stevana Street, she’s getting weaker every day. She is even thinner now, barely eats a morsel, and is apathetic to everything happening around her.
The day after I told her about the letter with its instructions concerning the hospital evacuation, she tried to organize the transfer of a group of gravely ill patients from the infirmary to the hospital, as a ruse to hand over another letter to her friends and meet with Dr. Pijade, her favorite doctor, who’d trained her as a nurse before she came here, but this time her request was denied. She was told that the Jewish hospital had been evacuated and that all the staff and patients had been transferred to a new more spacious and comfortable camp. Hilda pleaded with Commander Andorfer to allow patients to go there, at least for tests. He responded saying that soon we would also be sent to a new camp. But Hilda was distraught. She met me with tears in her eyes and said she didn’t believe a word Commander Andorfer said.
“They’re all liars. Murderers. I know it.”
Yesterday, late in the evening, two soldiers entered the infirmary. Short and squat, they resembled each other. Their uniforms weren’t ironed and clean like that of Commander Andorfer and his deputy, but rough, thick work clothes. One introduced himself as Majer, Sergeant Majer, and the other, who sat down heavily on a chair and showed me a large blister on the back of his hand, introduced himself as Getz.
“It’s a burn, see? Got it this afternoon.”
They didn’t have to introduce themselves. I immediately recognized them. They were the two drivers of the Saurer polizei. They were always together, most of the time standing and smoking next to the Saurer, their enormous truck. A week ago, once they’d finished their work at the hospital, the Saurer had also begun to transfer prisoners from our camp to the new place everyone was talking about.
One day, when looking for Commander Andorfer, who had an important call to take, I found him standing smoking in their company, next to the Saurer. One of them was leaning with his back to the wheel, the other leaning against the side of the vehicle. Now here they were, in front of me. When I asked Getz how he’d gotten the blister, he hesitated. I didn’t understand why it was hard for him to tell me if boiling water had splashed on him as he made coffee or tea or whether he’d touched some hot instrument. When I insisted, he said he’d been hurt by the exhaust fumes of the Saurer, the chimney-like pipe that rose behind the driver’s seat. I didn’t ask how he’d gotten his hand near the exhaust pipe, only explained there might be danger of infection.
After I finished taking care of him, Majer asked me if I had any pills for his headache.
“I’ve had very bad headaches recently,” he said. “It happens every time I’m on my way back to camp.”
I asked him if he’d suffered from headaches in the past, and when he said he hadn’t, I suggested he come to see the doctor the next day.
“No,” he said. “I don’t have a single free moment during the day. I’m very busy.”
I asked him if he traveled with the cabin windows open.
“Of course not,” he responded. “How can anyone travel with windows open in this cold?”
I suggested that if he left a window slightly open, his headaches might disappear. But nonetheless, I gave in and handed him several dipyrone pills from the medicine cabinet. They both thanked me and went heavily on their way.
I seem to be the only one who doesn’t believe the story that Commander Andorfer is spreading around the camp. The other women are all praying their turn will come. It isn’t surprising; it’s impossible to imagine worse conditions than the ones we live in. Although I have better conditions now, I don’t believe there is anything baser than inhumanity. Hunger and cold turn people into animals, make them think only of food and a corner where they will suffer less from wind and frost.
Every day, I type up a notice formulated by Commander Andorfer, with a new list of prisoners and explicit instructions for reporting, including permission to take personal belongings, primarily hygiene items, and some warm clothes, to pack them into a small bundle that won’t take up unnecessary space on the truck. Commander Andorfer even made sure to emphasize the travel time—three hours and forty minutes—so they’d know what to expect.
Every morning, I see the women standing in line, each with a small, well-packed bundle in her hands, waiting at the English Pavilion to get onto the Saurer. Getz and Majer stand next to the driver’s cabin, with a morning coffee in one hand and a cigarette between their teeth, watching the women standing patiently waiting for the signal to be given. Then one of them walks toward the rear of the vehicle and, with a loud grinding of hinges, opens the rear doors and pulls down the folding steps to make it easier for older women and small children to get into the passenger cabin.
To sweeten the journey for small children, Getz and Majer walk along the line handing out candies to children. On Sunday, when there wasn’t a transport, I saw them walking through the camp and handing out candies to children, probably to gain their favor. Maybe they felt the children were afraid of them, although they don’t look any more frightening than any other German soldier. The opposite. They’re two round people with good, smiling faces. The way they passed among the young children who were playing in the pavilion yards, handing out candies and stroking their heads, reminded me of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. But there was no pipe here to attract victims, except for the candies from the hands of Getz and Majer, who tried very hard to appear as kind uncles.
April 6
A few days ago, I returned to Block 14. The final days were unbearable. I ran away from Commander Andorfer’s office when I was absolutely sure that the formidable Saurer polizei was nothing but a “souls killer.” I heard the policewomen from Banat talking about it among themselves one day. I tried to talk to the young women in Pavilion 14, some of whom had been on the transport from Vienna—they were already assimilated with the Serbo-Croatian women who’d been brought here—no one wanted to listen to such a possibility. They’re all waiting for their turn to get out of this hell.
But I didn’t leave, only because I realized that Commander Andorfer had managed to create a false impression of going toward freedom, when in fact he was carrying out systematic murder. I knew I couldn’t spend even one more day in his presence, knowing what he was doing every day. What also persuaded me to return to Block 14 was Hilda’s state. She was sinking rapidly and no longer able to work at the infirmary. One day, I found her lying ex
hausted on her bunk, smelling of vomit. I took her wrist and barely found a pulse. I brought her a glass of water and managed to get a few words out of her. All she said was that nothing mattered anymore. She had nothing to live for. She’d parted from her family the day before, and Max, her little brother, promised to wait for her in the new camp. Her father and mother seemed to accept their fate. They no longer cared where they were taken. They quietly packed their things in a small bundle and waited for the following day.
I went to the infirmary and asked the nurse if we could take a stretcher to Block 14. Together, we brought Hilda to the hospital adjoining the infirmary.
I sat beside her and put my hand on her forehead. She was burning. I brought more water and a cloth and tried to cool her face. She recovered somewhat and told me she probably wouldn’t come back to nurse and that in the present state of things she preferred death to life. She hadn’t anyone to live for, and living just for herself had never been a sufficiently important goal. The world of art, poetry, and literature that had once been worth living for had exploded in front of her eyes.
I raised her head a little so she could sip some water, and she continued.
“What’s left of that beautiful world?” she asked faintly. “What’s left of this world that only gets more brutal? There is no value to life, the sublime, beauty. Maybe that’s what the world is like. Maybe I and others like me have been naive, because what is happening here exposes all its ugliness,” she said, after sipping more water. “Not only the murderers, us too, the victims, we’ve become animals. There is nothing to distinguish between us and a herd of calves in a pen.” Tears fell from her eyes, “I wanted a different world. I strove to heal the world through literature, poetry, philosophy. That’s why we founded the Aleksa Šantić Literary Society. The three of us31 burned with desire for a better world, but we were naive. We didn’t see the deterioration of the world or where it was headed.”