Countless times I have described that morning, one of the defining moments of my life, when I was first threatened with death.
A very cold day dawned, January 20, 1942. I glumly wrapped myself in scarves, went to school with my uncle's brothers, but in front of the house we came across a large poster in Hungarian, Serbian and German: "Raid..." We flew over the explanation : there are suspicious persons and large quantities of weapons in the city, no one is allowed to leave their apartment, windows must be closed, it is forbidden to look at the street. No school! I was not interested in anything else then.
I had a half-fake baptism certificate issued to me by the Zrenjanin Reformed priest Zoltan Sabo, professor Bogdan ฤipliฤ enrolled me in the Novi Sad Hungarian High School as if I had attended it the previous school year, I thought I was perfectly safe - a pure Hungarian, at least on paper. I spoke Hungarian as well as Serbian and German.
My uncle married ล vabica in the early 1920s and, at the insistence of her parents, converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Baฤka was under Hungarian occupation. Strina came to pick me up in Zrenjanin and took me to safer Novi Sad. My native Banat was directly under the German military administration, being a Jew there became a deadly disease to which my parents also succumbed.
During the raid, not a single suspicious person, not a single communist or sympathizer of the Communist Party was arrested. I don't think the gendarmes even tried to find any of them, because they would have defended themselves and there would certainly have been a fight. The raid as a police action was the pretext for the looting and mass killing of innocent people that began the next day, January 21, 1942. These people enjoyed killing. People? Maxim Gorky is wrong, the man does not sound proud.
While the savage killing was going on a few hundred meters from my uncle's apartment in a building about fifty meters away from Banovina, we secretly listened to jazz on the radio in the evening and at exactly ten o'clock the German love song Lily Marlene.
It was never known exactly how many people were killed the next day, because entire families were liquidated, so no trace of them was left. It starts from 4.500 mostly Serbs, Jews and Roma, 1.246 persons have been established by name.
The killing was stopped on orders from Budapest on January 24, my thirteenth birthday. According to the old Jewish law, I was able to celebrate a bar mitzvah, then from the Jewish point of view I had come of age.
When we returned to school, there were no more Jewish friends. All Hungarian high school students demonstratively started speaking Serbian.
In the summer of 1942, we again swam and went wild on the Strand, where a few months earlier people stood in line to be killed and pushed under the ice into the Danube. Spring rains and winds washed away the sand. We did not think of the dead, we were a merciless war generation. We often gathered at our friend Piลกte Selesi's place, his father was a butcher, there were always fresh blood sausages, livers, and cracklings.
I kept coming back to Raid in my novels. In "The Last Move", the husband, the head of the family, went to the partisans, returned as a colonel to see where his wife and mother were dragged to their deaths. On the street, a former colleague naively, having no idea what was happening, asks him "How is your beautiful wife?", and he beats him up and risks losing his rank. Afterwards, he says that it's lucky he didn't have a gun with him, because he would have killed everyone alive on the street. In the novel "Loneliness of the Minority", I describe the raid from the point of view of my hero, a Hungarian, who wonders to what extent he is guilty as a Hungarian, although subjectively, neither he nor his father were guilty of anything.
It's true, and I remember it clearly, that I did returning from the camp as a sixteen-year-old I felt like a winner, I didn't have my uncle or aunt as guardians, but I refused, and that was what they offered me, to be an observer at the trial of the murderers from Novi Sad, to watch their execution. I didn't feel the need to sanctify myself, but many did. Some culprits were killed, but also many innocent Germans and Hungarians. Selesi Sr. was also killed, whose liver, blood sausage and cracklings I enjoyed eating after the Raid.
In Novi Sad, a monument with the inscription "To all the innocent victims of 1944/45" was ordered. Some honorable anti-fascist organizations are protesting, saying that they will not allow such a facility to rehabilitate criminals. I don't agree with them. The text emphasizes that it is meant to innocent victims. I am convinced that we should also remember the events after the victory that we should not be proud of, because that is the only way we gain the right to remember our dead with a pure heart and condemn the bloodthirsty.
Nothing happened to me during the Raid eighty years ago. A new threat of death awaited me two years later in Auschwitz. Today, before my 93rd birthday, I calmly look back on everything that happened to me, which I called "My Beautiful Life in Hell" in one of my novels.
Read daily news, analysis, commentary and interviews at www.vreme.com
