They did not kill the man

I'm tired of writing about the holocaust, I'm interested in what's happening today. But, I think it is my duty to answer questions, when I was already alive sixty-nine years ago, and someone always appears to ask questions. I am not shaken when I remember what happened, when I speak and write about the events that I experienced as a boy of fifteen and sixteen. That's not the problem. My eternal dilemma is how to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, in terms of Anglo-Saxon legislation. Nobody knows the whole truth anyway. And my memory is deceptive, few details remain clear, much is lost in the fog of oblivion.

The German name of the Polish city of Oświęcim - Auschwitz - has become synonymous with Nazi evil. To such an extent that on one occasion US President Barack Obama forgot that his grandfather-uncle "liberated Auschwitz" and was one of the liberators of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Auschwitz is a term that denotes the Holocaust, which includes the entire "evil empire" created by dozens of concentration camps, but also mass murders in the Warsaw Ghetto, in other places in Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The name of that camp for people on other continents who don't know the details, and probably don't even care much, is a symbol for both Jasenovac and the Staro sajmište camp...

On the occasion of January 27, 1945, when the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, the United Nations declared Holocaust Day. This year, too, wreaths were laid at appropriate places, solemn speeches were held, and many televisions in a large number of countries broadcast documentaries and feature films on the subject of the Nazi reign of terror.

POLITICAL, A JEW: I was on the spot, there is no doubt that I was in Auschwitz, although I don't have the number on my upper arm that was tattooed on the prisoners of that camp, according to the principle by which cattle are branded. Instead, I have an official document issued to me by the "International Service" - International tracing service - located in the German town of Arolsen, which is in charge of collecting and issuing documentation and has the largest database of all concentration camps in Germany and countries that were under German occupation. The document concerning me was sent to me at my request on the 15th of March 1979. According to him, on April 27, 1944, Ivan Ivanji was arrested in Novi Sad. The "reason for the arrest" was written as "political, Jewish", so it is confirmed that the person in question was "transferred to the conc. Camp Auschwitz May 27, 1944" by "order of the Main Security Service of the Reich - Auf Anodrdnung des Reichsicherheitshauptamtes". Between that April 27 and May 27, I was in the camps in Subotica and Baja under Hungarian command.

Some information on that document is incorrect. It says that I was born on May 31, 1927, and not, as I was, on January 24, 1929. If someone wanted to find out something about me based only on that document, they would conclude that I am two years older than I am - among other things, this is precisely why I never completely trust so-called "documents". As for the year of birth, I must have lied, claimed that I was older, so that I wouldn't be "selected", but why did I put the day and month of my father's birth instead of the day and month of my birth? I have no idea. I don't remember at all.

ON THE TRAIN TO AUSCHWITZ: The selection was called a check of the labor capacity of the inmates: the unfit were killed, the fit were used for the needs of the Reich. It sounds very simple, but it is almost unimaginable from the point of view of a man who sits in an armchair in front of a computer and writes down that he himself went through selection in Auschwitz.

When talking, writing or filming documentaries and feature films about Auschwitz, the motif of the long composition of freight cars approaching the characteristic gate with the inscription "Work sets you free" is often repeated - Arbeit macht frei. As a "passenger" of that train, of course I did not have that perspective, I only saw the gate and the sign in the cinema a few years after the war. I huddled between the other arrested Jews after two or three days of driving - I don't remember how long - I was happy when the train started to slow down and finally stopped. It was evening, dark, but the scene was brightly lit by numerous spotlights. Just like in the movie.

Only fifteen years and four months old then, I thought it was a good thing to be alone on that train. My parents disappeared from my life already in 1941, and my sister, aunt and grandmother were arrested after me in Subotica and transported to the Bergen-Belsen camp and also survived. All the other "passengers" in my train car were mostly family people who suffered even more, because their children suffered, because of the care of their neighbors, because my peers saw their fathers and mothers deprived of any dignity. I don't remember being hungry anymore and how it was bothering me to defecate. Forgetting knows how to be merciful, I forgot many probably very terrible, painful, tragic moments.

HERE'S TO YOU PARENTS: As for getting out of the train onto the platform, which in literature and movies is called the "ramp", I can confirm that there was a lot of shouting, crying, wailing, for the first time people in zebra uniforms appeared in my field of vision, who roared and tried to create some sort of order, threw the elderly and helpless out of the wagons along with their luggage, and a few armed SS men were also walking through the crowd.

I don't remember wolves appearing regularly in movies. But I remember that they put us in a column. I noticed that they were separating people at the head of the column. I was wise enough to conclude that they were separating the able-bodied from the unfit. I thought that those able to work would do better, because they would get more to eat and their lives would be more "interesting". It's a word of honor that I didn't make that up afterwards, but I really thought it at the time. The term "interesting" was present in my mind all the time I spent in the camp.

When I came before the uniformed figure who made the life and death decision - which I did not know at the time - I said as loudly as I could in German: "I am fit for work!" The completely disinterested SS doctor-officer barely looked at me and waved. where should i go And again I thought that it was better that I was alone, I didn't go through the horror of separating families, children from their parents, the old from the young. I saw what was happening, but I was not shaken, today perhaps I should be ashamed that at that moment no one else was interested in me but myself.

Furthermore, memory is like a mosaic from which most of the tiles have fallen, leaving only a few parts that can be discerned.

A strange smoke covered the sky. I ask one of these in zebra uniforms what is that? The answer is: "It's your parents who have already been burned!" I thought how evil the camp inmates are becoming, scaring us with such horrors. I don't remember when I realized they were telling the truth.

The first night they put us in a shack with waves, and water taps above them like in cheap bathrooms. I don't remember when before that someone came to whisper something about the gas chambers, but I scanned the rough wooden walls and noticed the cracks. I managed to stand next to one of the larger cracks in the foolish hope that I would be able to breathe through it even if they released the poison gas. However, that shack was really a bathroom, they didn't know where to put us that night, I guess the train arrived too early or too late, so we met the dawn of April 28th alive. Of course I didn't know what the date was then.

I don't remember being hungry until we were fed for the first time. They poured some sort of horse beet soup into red tin bowls. I remembered the strange taste.

In Auschwitz, I heard for the first time that many people spoke Yiddish to each other. Until then, I didn't even know that language existed. I didn't like him, somehow I associated him with being in the camp. It wasn't until many years later that I would come to love his melody, understand that strange combination of old German and Hebrew, and often play Yiddish songs on YouTube.

SUBSTITUTION OF VICTIMS: In the document mentioned at the beginning of the text in the heading "Movement" it is written: "6. In June 1944, he was transferred to the concentration camp in Buchenwald, prisoner number 58.116". I remembered that number well, I used it later as a code wherever I needed it.

From the smaller camps, which did not have their own gas chamber, they were transported to the large ones, which had "killing machines". That happened to me too. On September 24, 1944, I was returned from the work commando Magdeburg to the Buchenwald central camp with the order to be sent back to Auschwitz to the gas chamber, but the registry office in Buchenwald replaced my number with someone else, who went to my death instead.

Communists sat in the office, among them the famous Spanish-French writer Jorge Semprun. He wrote about such actions in his novel A dead man with my name – German title Der Tote mit meinem Namen, French Le Mort qu'il faut. The principle was to rescue communists and socialists in the first place, young people with a chance of survival in the second place, and instead of them seriously ill prisoners whose days were probably numbered were put "in death transports". Terrible moral decisions.

I wrote about it in two of my novels, They did not kill the man i The Ash Man of Buchenwald - in the second I mention Semprun by calling him by his real name - but the readers may have thought that it was a literary exaggeration, a fiction. However, all that is the truth, nothing but the truth, but since I don't know who made the exchange and who I was replaced with, who was sent to Auschwitz instead of me in September 1944, it is certainly not the whole truth. In today's Buchenwald Memorial Center, I searched for it with the help of the officials there and the director, Professor Volkhard Knigge, but we found nothing. The proof that someone else was sent to the gas chamber instead of me is that I am alive, that I am writing these words for Vreme. About "victim exchange" in German Offertausch - there is extensive literature and the question arises who gave the right to decide the fate of other people to the people from the clerk's office, the prisoners entrusted by the SS with that job, is there a moral justification for such a thing in those circumstances? Or not.

I somehow go to Buchenwald every year, I feel an obligation to respond to the call to tell the truth as one of the increasingly rare witnesses, former camp inmates, lest some people imagine the unimaginable. On one occasion I told Professor Knigge that I felt like I was sentenced to Buchenwald for life.

FULL FRIDGE: Feature films can bear witness to tragic, true events more poignantly than the stories of those of us who, I guess I can use that phrase, "fallen to death with a shovel". How can we compete with them with dry words, printed on patient paper? There are a lot of films on the subject that misuse historical events in kitsch, melodramatic ways, but also really great works like Schindler's List, Pianist, Life is Beautiful or the lesser-known film by Kosta Gavras based on Rolf Hohut's play Governor. Movies seem more convincing than narration. Their frames even cover my personal memory. How can I talk about the approach of the train to Auschwitz, the crowd on the platform, the children in front of the gas chamber, the SS man injecting gas through the shaft into the gas chamber, without letting the words be covered by moving color images? Who should compete with Steven Spielberg or Roman Polanski? Polanski hid in Poland as a child during the war, but Spielberg was born after the war. The best novel in our language on the subject of the Holocaust, Ruth Tannenbaum, was written by Miljenko Jergović, born in 1966, who has no family ties to the subject of his book. Maybe only that generation can really accept it.

I wrote anyway and I still don't stop writing. An important topic, so it forced itself on me. It's just that I wouldn't like to be remembered as a "Holocaust writer", but rather as a writer of historical novels or crime stories such as Stalin's saber or Death on Dragon Rock, or a science fiction novel In the end, the word remains. However, if Freud's teachings are to be believed, and I am inclined to do so, perhaps writing has kept me from going crazy even in the middle of my ninth decade of life. I read that in Israel, almost everyone who is still alive today and passed through the death camps needs psychiatric help. It's not for me. They tell me that my only relapse from the camp is that I'm afraid of going hungry and I make sure my fridge is full of good food.

I'm watching a program the other night History channel footage of the mass murder of Jews in the Ukrainian Babi Yar, so the commentator, in order to explain to today's American viewers the extent of the horror, stated that three times as many people were killed in that way in one day than on September 11 in question in New York. That made me angry and offended. Until recently, I was inclined to say that from Cain, who killed his brother Abel, to the present day, there have been countless mass murders, but that Germany under Hitler holds the Guinness record. In summary it is still true, but if we take the number of dead in one day, or even a moment, we have to explain to the American citizens that the USA under Truman in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed several hundred times more innocent civilians than Al Qaeda did by destroying skyscrapers on the island of Manhattan.

THEN AND NOW: Auschwitzphoto: ap

LIBERATORS: General Dwight Eisenhower in Buchenwald in April 1945. photo: wikipedia.org

NOT TO FORGET: Knesset delegation at the commemoration of the liberation of AuschwitzPhoto: ap