by Shmuel David
I continued to sit beside her, knowing I would not be returning to Commander Andorfer’s office. It was only when I looked out the window and saw a line of people walking from the pavilions to the kitchen that I realized it was time for the evening meal. I told Hilda I was going to get her something to eat, and she responded that she had no appetite and feared she’d just vomit it up again. I persuaded her to try even some dry bread in her mouth. I covered her up to her emaciated neck with the stained blanket and told her I would try and find something for her to eat and went outside, a lump rising in my throat as I took in for the first time that I was about to lose my good friend, the only one left to me here in the camp.
April 20
The camp is emptying fast. Every day, sometimes twice a day, the monstrous Saurer goes on its way with another cargo of women and children. Getz and Majer stand at the rear opening to the truck, checking the names of those getting in. Majer gives candies to the children to sweeten the journey. Commander Andorfer, his eternal stick under his armpit, marches up and down, making sure that everything is going as planned. I follow those departing with a pang. I’d realized by then that I couldn’t change the minds of the people who remained, all of whom believed the truck would take them to a better place.
Once all the prisoners are in the truck, Getz and Majer close the door with a loud screech, get into the driver’s cabin, and start to move slowly toward the camp gate. Shortly afterward, an accompanying vehicle sets out, a small military truck with a driver and a soldier in front, and behind, two armed soldiers and five prisoners from the men’s block. No one asks why an accompanying vehicle is necessary or what role the prisoners play.
The two nurses, the pharmacist, and I were informed that we would not be leaving in a hurry. The same went for the kitchen staff and other services. We were being left for last.
I parted from Louisa two days ago. She came to tell me she was leaving the camp the following day. I didn’t want to arouse her anxiety, and we talked of other things. She seemed indifferent to her fate, praising me for my brave decision to leave Commander Andorfer’s comfortable office to be among friends. She spoke a lot about her longing for Emil, not knowing what had happened to him, hoping he wasn’t suffering too much.
She’d heard from the children while in Belgrade. They feel well and are living on an Akiba Movement kibbutz in the center of the country. I told her I’d written to Hanne and wanted to know if he’d received the letter. She said she had no contact with him or Pauli; better they don’t know what is happening to us here. I asked if he was working in agriculture as he’d dreamed of doing when we were in Kladovo.
Louisa suddenly remembered her daughter Klarie, and her eyes filled with tears. I went to hug her. She said I reminded her of her Klarie, and ever since our first encounter on the Tzar Nikolai, she’d seen me as a beloved daughter.
Before we parted, she also said goodbye to Hilda, whom she’d occasionally nursed after we moved her to the infirmary.
***
A week has passed since Hilda Dajč left us. Her last days were difficult. I hope that after a certain point, at least, she stopped suffering. The last time I asked to weigh her, she weighed thirty-four kilograms. She died of exhaustion. I tried but failed to persuade her to eat. Toward the end, she refused to drink. The doctor said it was malnutrition linked to depression. Every day, more of her hair fell out and her skin became flaky. She could no longer get out of bed, and I had to help her to the toilet. It was hard to rouse her, and when she spoke, it was only about her friends Nada and Marianna, and she asked when she’d be able to go and visit them. Two days before her death, she said she was ashamed to go out and meet Marianna in the state she was in, and asked me to wash her and dress her in pretty clothes that would hide how pale and thin she was. On the last day, I sat beside her all day, holding her frail hand. She no longer spoke, just stared vacantly at the ceiling.
Later on, I could no longer bear it and left the room. When the pharmacist told me she’d died, I thought, she’s been released from her suffering. I asked other friends to remove her body to the Turkish Pavilion, a job I’d done so often with Hilda.
The day after Louisa’s visit to the infirmary, I went to part from her for the last time. She stood there with the whole group getting into the Saurer polizei that would take them to their destination. We fell into each other’s arms and I let my tears flow down my cheeks. Afterward, when she’d gotten into the truck, I waved my hand in farewell and turned back to the infirmary.
* * *
29Aleksa Šantić (1868–1924) was a Bosnian poet from Serbia, beloved throughout Yugoslavia.
30Jennie Lebel (1928–2009) was a journalist from Belgrade.
31Nada, Marianna, and Hilda founded Aleksa Šantić’s Literary Society.
Belgrade–New York, April 2002
After Alan returned to New York, he was once again busy with his daily routine. But the photographs of the Sajmište camp and his experiences reading Inge’s journal gave him no rest. At home with his wife and daughters, at work, and primarily on the long train ride to work, the pictures constantly rose in his mind.
When he finished reading the journal, Barbara had to bring him back to reality. She reminded him that he still hadn’t seen Hilda Dajč’s letters, four letters that tell the heroic story of a young girl who’d sacrificed her life to take care of her people who were suffering in the camp. Barbara suggested he postpone reading the letters until the next day. And he promised himself that if he did write the book, he would make a place for her.
Barbara suggested he rest at the hotel that evening because it was late and this had been a difficult experience for him. The next day, he could return and read the letters and even go and see Sajmište if he wanted to.
The following day, after a quick breakfast at the hotel, he hurried off to meet Barbara at the museum. She was already waiting for him beside a large man with a graying black beard. He was wearing a photographer’s vest with many pockets, a big black bag on his shoulder. Barbara introduced him. “This is Peter, a professional photographer and site guide from Belgrade. He will take you through Sajmište.”
Peter turned out to be well versed in the history of Belgrade’s Jews. His father, a Jew living in Vienna, separated from his Christian mother, raised him, and made sure he studied at good schools in Belgrade and then in Vienna. Peter knew Sajmište camp very well. He showed Alan the pavilions that still stood in silent witness of the inferno.
“That’s the Turkish Pavilion,” Peter pointed it out and they went inside. “And this is where the showers were.”
Afterward, they passed by a large building with a square chimney. Peter pointed at it and said that this was the hospital with fifty crowded beds for patients before they were transferred by ambulance to the other side of the Sava River.
Peter knew Hilda’s story and could speak of her trips by ambulance to meetings at the café adjacent to the hospital. He promised they’d go past the Jewish hospital on Visokog Stevana Street on their way back to the museum. Next to the hospital building, he pointed out a large block.
“That’s the American Pavilion,” he said. “Or, as it is called here, Block 14.” Alan felt a strong shiver as they entered the pavilion and he saw the huge spaces.
“Wooden bunks were crowded in here; several hundred women lived in this building together.”
Despite it being a pleasant spring day, Alan felt the cold wind blowing through Block 14, through broken windows, which had been fixed in the meantime, and he could almost see Inge sitting on a thin layer of straw on her bunk, writing in her journal.
When he returned with Peter to the museum, the three of them went out to lunch together at a nearby restaurant. Barbara told them she’d been able to discover details about Hilda’s two friends, Nada and Marianna. Both were still alive and living in Belgrade.
“Marianna Petrovich is eig
hty-three today. Her name is Marianna Kasanin, and she lives at Number Four Šmogorska Street. When we get back to the office, we can call her,” promised Barbara.
Peter took him to visit Marianna. She’d just returned from the hospital, after breaking her left hip when she fell in the shower. She lived on the third floor in a building without an elevator. Now, she was confined to her home but received them with a wide smile, and suggested they help themselves to the cake her son had brought her yesterday. He was a man of about sixty and was helping her at the moment. Alan was surprised to hear that she had not set foot outside Yugoslavian borders since the war. Marianna distinctly remembered the secret meetings with Hilda at the café next to the Jewish hospital on Visokog Stevana Street. She clearly recalled waiting for the messenger from the hospital who would ask her to come at once to the café where Hilda was waiting, while German soldiers marched beneath her window. She remembered how Hilda’s physical and psychological state deteriorated from visit to visit. At the last meeting, she already feared for her life and spoke about how she hated being near screeching women, how all they cared about was the taste of the first piece of meat in their mouths after they left the hell of the camp.
***
That evening, Alan flew back to New York. The visit to Belgrade, particularly the journal he’d found there, had greatly moved him. He knew now what he’d do when he got home. Although he did need to calm down first, get back into the routine of family and work, but it was now clear to him that he would write a book about the Kladovo Affair and dedicate it to his father. He suddenly felt all the weight of his lengthy estrangement from his father, and a profound sense of what he’d missed rose up in him. Why had he waited until his father was on his deathbed to find out what had happened to the love of his life?
As the plane circled over New York and he saw the skyscrapers on the skyline of Manhattan, he recalled his promise to Nina. The very next day, he would call the travel agent and book four tickets to Israel. He would also ask his sister Bracha to book them into a B&B on the moshav for a few days. He’d take both his daughters and Rachel to see the house he’d grown up in, the house his father had lived in for most of his days in Israel, most of his life in fact, after leaving the comfort and abundance of Belgrade to spend a year and a half with his parents and his brother as refugees on the Danube, on their way to Eretz Israel.
He thought to himself that maybe, as a result of this visit, he, too, would start thinking about returning to Israel, leaving behind all the comfort and abundance of America.
They at least deserve what he had received. Maybe he’d even start looking for a job on this visit to Israel. Although working in Israel felt odd to him. But he had to take the first step. After all, he’d promised Nina. And as she liked to remind him, promises are made to be kept.
The voice of the flight attendant informing them that they’d shortly be landing in New York recalls him to reality. The temperature in New York is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, and a fine rain is falling. Not yet summer.
Epilogue
Hanne David, known as Shlomo in Israel, fulfilled his dream of working the land in Eretz Israel and maintained this ideal to the end of his life. He was able to establish an agricultural farm on a moshav in the Galilee, work there, and raise a family who were his pride and joy.
The freedom train with its shuttered windows that set out from the Sabac railway station that morning in the middle of March 1941 arrived in Atlit after a journey of almost two weeks, during which they’d stopped in Constantinople for three days.
Hanne/Shlomo stayed a few days in Atlit before going as part of Aliyat Yeladim to an Akiba training spot in Hadera. There, he met Lotte Hertz (Varda today), born in a small village near Köln in Germany. After Kristallnacht, when she was fourteen, Lotte was sent alone to Eretz Israel on an Aliyat Yeladim transport. She met young Shlomo from Atlit in the Hadera group that was organizing to join Kibbutz Beit Yehoshua. They fell in love and married there in 1945, living and working on Kibbutz Beit Yehoshua until 1949. The founders of the kibbutz were Akiba activists. In 1949, the couple moved to Bustan Hagalil, a moshav in the north. Varda was a nurse by profession and known to be devoted. She was much loved on the moshav. She worked there as a nurse until her retirement. The couple had three children.
Inge (Henny) Müller, born in Germany, was Hanne’s girlfriend during the group’s long wait at Kladovo. She died at Sajmište in May 1942, on one of the Saurer polizei (“soul destroying”) death journeys. She worked devotedly at the infirmary in the camp until her last hours and never believed that the journey would take her anywhere good.
Pauli David, later Abraham, arrived in Atlit on the freedom train from Sabac with his brother, Hanne. From there, he went to a training spot in Hadera. He was sent by the Akiba Movement to work as a counselor in town. At this time, he met his future wife, Esther, born in Vienna. The couple lived on Kibbutz Beit Yehoshua until 1949, when they moved to the Agricultural High School in Pardes Hanna. Faithful to his path as an educator and counselor of coming generations, Abraham devoted thirty-two years to this institution in the field of counseling, teaching, and education. In time, he completed his academic studies in Torah teaching and became a teacher of Torah at the same school.
Louisa David (Alkalay family) escaped with her husband Emil from Sabac to Belgrade at the end of the summer of 1941. When they were caught trying to cross the border into Hungary, she was taken with all the other women from Belgrade and its surroundings to Sajmište, where she died on one of the Saurer polizei death journeys, between March and May 1942.
Emil David, together with other Jewish prisoners held at Topovske Šupe, was taken to the killing fields not far from Belgrade. From this internment camp and from Seniak, near Sabac, the Kladovo group was held as hostages for retributions carried out by the Germans in response to their people being killed by Serbian Partisans. He was murdered by firing squad as he stood, bound, at the edge of a ditch, guarded by the SS.
Yost Pomerantz died with his mother, Elisheva, at Sajmište on one of the Saurer polizei death journeys between March and May 1942. They were on the march to Sajmište in the framework of the women’s march. Max Pomerantz, his father, was murdered by firing squad at the death ditches, together with the rest of the Jewish men and gypsies held at the Seniak camp near Sabac.
Hilda Dajč was born in Vienna, raised and educated in Belgrade. She died at Sajmište, apparently at the end of April 1942. It isn’t clear whether she died from exhaustion and malnutrition or in the Saurer polizei. She sacrificed her life to help others.
Jacob (Ya’akov) Langnese was born in Berlin in 1923, son of a religious Jewish family with six children, all of whom were murdered in the Holocaust. Jacob joined the transport as part of the BAHAD Movement, a religious youth movement once known as Hechalutz Hamizrachi. He, too, reached Atlit on the freedom train from Sabac in April 1941. From Atlit, he went to Mikveh, Israel, where he joined the army and served in the air force until he retired. In 1953, he married Emma Shimoni, and the couple had four children.
Shimon Spitzer, known as Sime, tried passionately to save the group. But his efforts paled in the face of historical events, natural disasters, and human frailty. He was cruelly murdered by a Gestapo doctor at the Banjica camp near Belgrade.
Naftali Bata Gedalja was born in Yugoslavia in 1906. He was active in community committees before the transport. He served as commander of the transport on the ships and then in Kladovo, where he alternated with his replacement, Elli Haimbach. He played a most significant role in the leadership of the transport. He was appointed by Sime Spitzer, and they worked closely together.
After the failure of the transport, he remained in Yugoslavia, helping Jews make Aliyah to Israel both from Yugoslavia and neighboring countries. He himself made Aliyah only in 1951, when he realized that his mission was complete. He came with his second wife and her mother (his first wife perished at Sajmište), and settled in the
neighborhood of Kyriat Yovel, Jerusalem. He worked as a clerk in the Bureau of Statistics for the Ministry of Trade and Industry until his retirement. At the same time, he published articles about the Kladovo Affair and other issues related to Yugoslavian Jewry. One of these articles was titled “Two Princes and a Queen,” which inspired the title of this book.
Naftali Bata Gedalja died in 1989. To commemorate his work, there is a Square in his name in the Hagiva Hatzarfatit neighborhood of Jerusalem.
The Darien. In the framework of Sime Spitzer’s efforts to find a ship that would wait for the Kladovo group on the Black Sea and take them to Eretz Israel, a Mossad agent, Shmarya Tsameret, found the Darien in May 1940, at the Port of Piraeus. Italy entered the war in June that year, effectively putting a spoke in the wheel, and fearing the predictable fate of passenger ships sailing the Mediterranean, the heads of the Mossad postponed the voyage.
At the end of June, the heads of the Mossad and the Hagana, among them Eliyahu Golomb and David Hacohen, decided to hand over the Darien to their allies (David Hacohen and Yehuda Arazi), who cooperated with the British. The reason given by Chaim Weizmann at the time was that joint espionage actions with the British would enable the promotion of other actions against the British, such as Aliyah Bet.
It was only in September that the Mossad again turned their attention to the Aliyah of the Kladovo refugees, but by then conditions had changed for the worst. You could say that removing the Darien from the jurisdiction of Mossad activists and Aliyah Bet, and placing it under the jurisdiction of the group cooperating with the British, prevented the Aliyah of the Kladovo group in the summer of 1940.