Welcome to 1941: "We love being neutral"
First welcome New Year who i remember A few weeks before my twelfth birthday, I could not have guessed that it would be not only the first, but also the last New Year's memory of my father and mother. But why didn't my father know or at least have an inkling that it might be the last New Year's Eve we spend together? Or did he organize that evening in such an unusual way?
Memory is a perishable commodity. Before that winter of 1940/41. I don't remember New Year's Eve. I remember that "Saint Nicholas" used to come to our apartment with gifts, in which I recognized early on the seller from the coffee and chocolate shop Julius meinl in Veliko Bečkerek. On December 24th, the Christmas tree was decorated in our living room, and on January 6th and 7th, I celebrated Christmas according to Orthodox customs at my neighbor's house. All the families I knew celebrated, or visited each other for all the holidays, with the Serbs and for the Slavs, meaning, of course, both Christmases and New Years. I will realize that the idyll was false shortly after the arrival of 1941.
Father decided to spend the first part of the evening alone with my sister and me. I was delighted. I don't know where mom and the governess went during that time. The governess was treated as a member of the family, and later, when they, her employers, were arrested, she was the lover of a Gestapo officer. How did that young woman feel, who claimed to be of Austrian, noble origin, as a "personnel" of Jewish, provincial doctors?
Dad was forty-two years old. And at home he was always fully dressed, with shoes, in a suit with a waistcoat, tie or colorful bow tie, I don't remember ever seeing him with slippers on his feet.
That evening, December 31, 1940, we played rummy. We were also trying to pour lead. We heated it until it became liquid, then suddenly poured it into cold water. According to the ancient Scandinavian custom, the future would be interpreted by the shapes of the figures that would be created in this way. We never managed to come up with any recognizable shapes. The lead in the water was breaking up into tiny pieces. We found that they look like spheres. We did not think to interpret them as shot or bullets. At some point, mom appeared in a long, evening dress. Dad put on a tuxedo and tied a black bow tie. My sister and I were put to bed. They left. My guess is that they were drinking champagne somewhere as befits members of their class on New Year's Eve. I don't believe they discussed the possibility of it being the last reception together, but I can't rule it out either. They must have been happy. Or they pretended to be cheerful.
Did none of them really suspect that January 1, 1941 was hinting at... What? To the melody of the Bećača people, they sang: "Alai volen that we are neutral." My father also sang that song. Unlike me, he had a beautiful voice.
They told me that my grandfather - my father's father - sang even more beautifully. He celebrated his 74th birthday a few weeks later, on February 23. By the way, he said it was his last. My father, a doctor like him, rebelled, retorted that he was healthy, that he would live for a long time. Grandfather and grandmother killed themselves two months later, on April 23, after the Germans marched into my native Zrenjanin. The last time the father contacted him was on September 26 of the same year from the Topovska šupa camp in Belgrade with a note that he sent to his brother. Mama in March of the following year as a correspondent of the Red Cross from the Staro sajmište camp.
The arrival of 1942: Three brothers and a ducat
I live with my uncle in Novi Sad. Hungarian occupation. I attend a Hungarian high school. My two uncles, Echik and Saša, and I sleep, study and play in the same room, the eldest uncle's son, Feri, has his own little room behind the kitchen. I wasn't particularly unhappy. I didn't know where my parents were, what happened to them. I did not know that my father had already been shot, my mother in the Staro sajmište concentration camp, which the Germans called Judenlager Semlin. I had no idea there were concentration camps.
For Christmas, my uncle put up a tree. We lit real candles in Zrenjanin, he had electric ones. He was a modern electrician for that time, he sold and installed neon lights, which was a rarity at the time. I preferred to sleep in the same room with my brothers, than before, in "my house", with my sister and the governess.
Before midnight on December 31, 1941, my aunt was making doughnuts. An old custom. In one, he said, there is a baked ducat, whoever comes across it, it is his. Feri found him. At the time, I didn't think about whether all that with the ducat was set up. Uncle, aunt, their three sons and me. Idyll again. Again false, because after the war I will be convinced that in 1944 my uncle betrayed me and that I will end up in my camps because of that - Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and his commandos.
In the summer of 1941, I used to go to the Danube pier in Novi Sad where ships from Belgrade arrived. I have no idea why I thought I could meet my parents, that they would arrive by boat, that I would surprise them and make them happy by waiting for them with a small bouquet of field flowers that I picked along the way. A few dusty flowers and grasses. But they will know everything when they see me. We never talked about love. Fortunately, I didn't learn that until today. I love you, I love you, I love you sounds like too cheap, perishable phrase to me. A few girls got mad at me for that.
I waited in vain at the Novi Sad pier. My parents never arrived. Today, I think that at the age of twelve and a half I was smart enough to sense that it would never come. I watched the people getting off the ship. I had no other work that summer. Just to wait. I don't remember if every night I was particularly sad or particularly disappointed that they hadn't arrived yet. I would throw flowers. Why didn't I wear it to my aunt? She would be delighted. But those dusty field flowers just weren't meant for her. To give it to her would be infidelity. That's how I felt. Then. Today I don't really understand why.
The Novi Sad raid began three weeks after the arrival of 1942.
Eve of 1945: Vashke escapes from death row
Doctor Charles Odick, head of the health department of the Niederorschel concentration camp Buchenwald, invited twenty of us to the festive reception. I was the youngest. The place of reception was two rooms of the camp infirmary, in the third, which was a kind of hospital room with twelve beds, people died during that night as well as every day and every night before and after. Some inmates received standard packages through the Red Cross, but Odik received special shipments. His brother was a French air force general, but since the Odick family was in a family feud with the De Gaulle family, he fought directly under American command. That is why Odik enjoyed special treatment. He saved for months to treat us. He prepared a real feast. Who were we? Another camp doctor, Dr. Neufeld, medical assistant Bertrand, Adler, who would become famous as a poet and sociologist after the war, three Russians, the capo of our camp, Herman, a young Hungarian composer. Alcohol also came from somewhere.
WHO WILL SURVIVE: New Years in concentration camps
I arrived in Niederorschel from Buchenwald with ulcers on my feet. For several days, I was not allowed to report to the infirmary, because in some camps, for the slightest illness, one went straight to the gas chamber. When I finally dared to leave, Doctor Odik not only cured me with black, smelly ointments, but continued to spare me.
In January 2002, the mayor of Niederorschel invited three of us former camp inmates, who were still alive, to the opening of the monument at the site of our camp. The other two were not at Odik's New Year's party, we did not know each other then. They are both a year younger than me. One of them is an orthodox rabbi in Israel, the other is called Hertz, which is pronounced Ertz in French. He is still today the president of the international committee of former prisoners of Buchenwald. He was in the camp together with his father, who died in the camp infirmary. Maybe just as we were celebrating New Year's Eve in 1945.
Odik, my protector, showed me in that clinic how, an hour or two before death, lice escape from the body of the dying person, crawling on the gray blanket like busy, nervous white dots. Maybe he was showing me that on Bertrand's dad. I observed the unusual phenomenon with curiosity, but with a cold heart. In the room between the room with the beds and the surgery itself, we played chess. The figures were sculpted from leftover bread, we didn't have black paint, but the ones that will be opposed to the white, in this case yellowish figures, like the camp bread, were painted with a blue pencil. Most of the inmates were terribly hungry, but we had enough bread to sculpt chess pieces.
Only nineteen prisoners died in Niederorschel. It is probably the German concentration camp with the fewest deaths.
As part of the celebration in honor of the newly erected monument in 2002, we held speeches in the solemn hall of the school in Niederorschel. A small orchestra, a choir of schoolgirls and students. On the table, as if on an altar, many beautiful flowers. Then a student began to read the names of the nineteen camp inmates who died in that place. Name by name, after each one, a student from the choir would step forward and put a pebble next to the flowers. They strictly adhered to the precisely directed ceremony. They were neatly combed, wore impeccably ironed white shirts or blouses. Nice kids. The ceremony was supposed to move us, touch our hearts. She succeeded in that.
But one chubby, red-cheeked boy found it all quite comical. He was about fifteen years old, about the same age as me, when I was there, in the camp. His round face turned into a grimace, he tried terribly hard not to burst out laughing. I understood him very well. It's all so late, incomprehensible boring, pointless. Above all, I watched him win that little battle with himself. A light shadow of remorse for almost spoiling the ceremony seemed to pass over his face. Laughter is often contagious. If he laughed out loud, the others would start laughing too. If I'm right, if everything we did, which they thought they should do in our honor, he considered funny, but he managed to overcome himself, he understood best what was happening, he felt the moment more strongly than his colleagues, who without thinking, without a trace of emotion, pronounced other people's names and surnames to them and laid stone by stone next to the flowers on the table.
I don't know... What do I know what a German child feels when sixty or seventy years after what happened they force him to actively participate in such ceremonies? Perhaps the same as I felt when they brought me to the Svetosava ball of my high school for the first time: adults are doing something, I'm important, because I'm there, and basically I don't think.
We knew, we were sure that during the year that was starting, fascism would be defeated, we just didn't know which of us would see victory and freedom.
Welcome to 1946: Alive and Free
Exactly seventy years ago, the first New Year's Eve after leaving the camp, the first time in freedom, and I don't remember what I did at all. I was very likely in the Cultural and Artistic Society "Đorđe Zličić" in Novi Sad - we called it Kumdruđozli - I was a member of its management board, but I didn't remember anything. Obviously, every day I was so aware that I was alive, free and independent, that there was no ceremony that would have any significance for me.
Welcome 1948: "Blood is my light and my darkness"
I managed to encourage my third, then final year of the architecture course at the Construction Secondary Technical School in Novi Sad to organize a reception for the whole school ourselves. The most important thing was to assemble a small orchestra for the dance. Fortunately, we had a great jazz pianist in our class, his last name was Chanji, I forgot his first name, because we all called him Kiki. As for the game music, I left the details up to him. Moms sent Russian salad, sandwiches, cakes. However, it was customary to perform something serious, politically appropriate, before going to the table and the fun. I didn't just want to phrase it, but to be original in that respect as well. I decided to dramatize the poem "The Pit" by Ivan Goran Kovačić for the celebration of the new year, 1948.
Today, it seems to me that it is a proof of what that time was like, but also what was happening inside me, a nineteen-year-old, that I chose the lines of a poem that I still remember by heart for a cheerful New Year's Eve: "Blood is my light and my darkness, / they dug a blessed night for me / with a happy sight from the eye sockets..."
Today I don't understand my endless enthusiasm for Ivan Goran Kovačić at the time, of course it's shocking, the young Croatian poet describes how he stood up to slaughter the Serbs, only to be slaughtered by the Chetniks in almost the same way a year later, but, frankly, that's not good poetry.
I still have a printed brochure, a notebook of 52 pages in small format, on it is the seal of the "Design Institute of Vojvodina", which I guess means that I stole it from the library of that institution or, in the best case, borrowed it and "forgot" to return it. There was recorded the division into roles "Martyr, First Mate, Second Mate, Executioner, Commentator", and the names of my actors, all written in fading pencil. There are also notes in the German language on the margins, because I will also translate "Jama" into that language, in Belgrade I showed the translation to Ot Bihalji Merin, who after that started recommending me everywhere, so I became the secretary of the general secretary of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia Čedomir Minderović, which interrupted my "building and architectural career". It seems to me that the continuation of my life in peace began on that New Year's Eve thanks to the dramatization and translation of the partisan poem "The Pit".
I was coming to the reception on the well-lit Futoška Street. It didn't occur to me then that less than four years ago, in April 1944, two Hungarian policemen with rifles on their shoulders were taken to the camp. Today, I also remember that detail when I think about the victorious step I took when I went to the first performance that I conceived, inspired, and directed.
The reception went very well. As a drink, eggnog was in vogue, but none of us got too drunk. We didn't even know that drugs existed, what we read about opium in books was on the level of dragons from fairy tales, at best, Moby Dick.
The year has begun in which I will graduate, get appointed as a teacher at the High Technical School in Belgrade, and we will all be hit by the news about the curse of Yugoslavia and the KPJ pronounced by the Informbiro, which will put us, Skojevians, in front of the question whether we are for Stalin or for Tito.
Welcome to 1954: The Anatomy of a Morality
I had the flu, a temperature close to 38 degrees, but I couldn't imagine staying home that night. I drank a cup of hot milk, and I hate milk and have never voluntarily drunk it before or since, so I walked to the Red Cross theater where the celebration was going on. Hall nicely decorated, food and drinks in abundance. I was no longer the playwright of that theater, I wasn't really anything there. Everyone was "numbered" in pairs. I felt like an intruder and soon headed through New Year's Eve to the celebration in the editorial office of "Youth" on the fifth floor of the building in Svetozara Markovića Street. Walking like that, I noticed to my amazement that all the symptoms of the flu had disappeared. For the reception in the newsroom, I knew it would be boring, in fact, almost all colleagues came only for a short time to say goodbye, they intended to meet somewhere else at midnight. I decided to go to the Writers' Club. Actually, the place had to be reserved in advance, but I knew I would manage somehow.
The streets of Belgrade were not yet lit up like years, decades later, there were no Christmas trees at every step, but Santa Claus came to both children and adults. It was important to create a variant for the Christian celebration of Christmas with the "communist" celebration of the New Year, and the "lucky circumstance" was that it was right in the middle between the Western and Orthodox Christmas.
NEW CLASS: Peko Dapčević
The Club of Writers was expected to be crowded, but I found an empty chair at Zoran Mišić's table, who was sitting with two very beautiful girls. Zoran, a sickly man, not at all cinematically handsome, was always with beautiful girls.
I noticed Milovan Đilas and Peka Dapčević with their wives in the corner. I knew Pekina Milena, born Vrsajkov, well from Novi Sad, because one of her older sisters went to the Secondary Technical School. A year and a half before that New Year, I watched in Dubrovnik the filming of the film in which she played, and the quiet but ultimately successful courtship of Peko Dapčević, whom Đilas indirectly recognized in his story "Anatomy of a Morality" in the January issue of the magazine "Nova Misao" describes in these words: "...handsome, mature and distinct masculine and strong beauty, and above all he was followed by a legend."
Of course, I don't know what they were talking about, but I have a hunch, probably about that "Anatomy" in which, let me remind you, the author mocks the false morality of the "new class" of that time - he has not yet publicly used those words - he talks about how "the top " furiously received the connection of the national hero with a young opera singer from the province. It was a transparent trick. Baby's oldest sister was indeed an opera singer, but it was clear to everyone who Djilas was referring to. To everyone? Much later, Jovanka Broz would tell Blaža Mandić that Đilas was thinking of her, but I think she was among the women who gossiped and refused to accept a woman too young to be a partisan into their company. Beba later acted in films as a partisan.
Although in the fall of 1953 he wrote seventeen theoretical articles in the party newspaper "Borba" that represented an attempt to re-compose the ideology of the Communist Party, the public scandal only broke out after the publication of "Anatomy of a Morality". The view of the married couple Đilas and Dapčević on New Year's Eve in 1954 is for me an illustration of the beginning of the "Đilas Affair".
The arrival of 1995: Civil, naturally while the war rages
If I do not describe how from 1955 to 1995, that is, about forty times, I welcomed the new year, it does not mean that I did not celebrate them. I did, sometimes in restaurants like the one in the "Metropol" hotel or in "Dva jelena", more often at my house with friends, or with other families, but I can't tell anything significant about it, I didn't remember anything in particular.
Our third reception in Vienna. Dragana broke her arm on Catholic Christmas in 1992. In the evening before the wedding, we just walked around the area for the first time after the accident. My daughter Nadja, her husband Mikica, their children, my grandchildren, Ana and Vladimir, arrived by train on December 24. In my "business diary" I recorded: "Drank French champagne, watched a bit of television, I played with Dragan, Nađa and Ana, civil, naturally..."
That welcome has remained characteristic of me for 23 years of living in Vienna. We did not yet know how long the wars in Yugoslavia would last.
Welcoming 2001: Waltz in Vienna
As a child, even before the great war, I began to understand that there is death. I cried because I was going to die, and I had no idea that war, camps, and actual death were threatening. I started counting. It is not impossible that I will live to be two thousand years old, I will be seventy-one. One can imagine that, but it was on a knife's edge when I passed Dr. Mengele or one of his colleagues in Auschwitz. I also experienced the year 2000 and its end in Vienna. The emphasis is on the statement: I experienced.
LET EVERYTHING BE A WALTZ: New Year's celebration in Vienna
I was still walking well, there were days when I didn't have any pain, we went to the center, walked for hours from square to square, it was called the "Sylvester's path", every hundred, two hundred meters different music was playing, the newspapers wrote afterwards that the center of Vienna turned into the largest ballroom in the world. We also played the waltz. I never knew how to dance well, I was always ashamed in public not to dance next to my wife, a ballerina, but in that crowd in the middle of the crowd there was no problem.
Dragana and I each ate three oysters in front of the famous shop Meinl am Graben, drank champagne and a little after midnight in Kärntner Strasse changed shillings because, due to the changeover to the euro, the exchange offices were open all night. It was a happy first New Year in the new millennium, and our last New Year's Eve in public.
Even then, the warranty period expired for me, but some machines and devices last even after that.
