I was born 89 years
ago in Sarajevo, a peaceful, co-existing multicultural
town in Bosnia. I bore witness as the religious and
national hatreds began rising with the rise of Hitler in
Europe. This is where I was first called a Kike by a
Muslim boy, my erstwhile closest buddy. Sarajevo
became a stage for not just one, but multiple
genocides.
My town got torn
and eventually consumed when Hitler invaded Yugoslavia:
ethnic strife grew and ultimately culminated in a
genocidal bloodbath. The Yugoslav Jewish Community, while
not the only target, became its major victim, virtually
annihilated during WWII. The great majority of us were
descendants of Sephardic Jews who escaped the Spanish
Inquisition - natives of the Balkans for the last
400 years, keeping their religious traditions and the old
Castilian language, Ladino.
The homegrown
Quisling concentration camps in various parts of
Yugoslavia were brutal, bloody and so inhumane that their
bestiality is said to have astonished the German
themselves.
The first gassing
of Jews in Europe took place in custom made Cyclone
transport trucks between Belgrade and the Zemun Airport.
My grandmother, aunt, and the girlfriend of my college
roommate were among those chosen to make Belgrade the
first Judenrein city.
Yet, most of those
of us who lived to see the end of the war weren't
survivors of death camps and gas chambers, but went
through the horrors of the war on the periphery of
the Holocaust.
Many had escaped to
Italy, and spent the war years as civilian internees of
war or some other rubric of the Geneva Convention.
I got the chance to
escape and come back to my country in 1944 to join the
war and chase the Jaeger Division out of
Dalmatia.
I have described
all that and more in a memoir I recently published:
The
Last Exile --The tapestry of a
life.
(<TheLastExileBook.com>)
.