TY - JOUR
AU - Mirna, Zakić,
AB - Abstract Drawing on interviews recorded by the Shoah Foundation Institute, this article focuses on the survival of Jewish and half-Jewish children in the German-occupied Serbian Banat between 1941 and 1944. Rather than hide their physical presence or their Jewishness, these children spent the war in an environment well-aware of their identity, yet where people turned a blind eye to their Jewishness, even as the children lived in a state of fear and uncertainty. The survivors’ recollections highlight the pivotal role of parents and parental figures; the interaction of age, gender, class, and ethnicity to enable survival; the children’s own limited yet crucial agency; and the subjects’ awareness of the changes in their memory. Interviewed for the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive in 1998, Holocaust survivor Melanija Marinković described herself toward the end of the interview as a “child of good fortune [dete sreće].”1 She spoke without apparent irony, as she strove to emphasize the concatenation of chance and circumstance that had enabled her survival. Marinković’s teenage years had been spent in German-occupied Serbia, predominantly in the Serbian Banat (the area bordered by the Rivers Tisa and Danube and the Serbian-Romanian border), where the daily business of occupation—and antisemitic policy—had been the purview of the resident ethnic German minority and their collaborationist leadership. Most Jews in occupied Serbia did not survive the war and Nazi occupation. Survivors included a number of children and youths like Marinković. Most of these children lived among people who had known them all their lives and who chose to turn a blind eye to the presence of the few surviving Jews and half-Jews in their midst. The endurance of social networks predating the occupation may have helped shield the children, albeit paradoxically only after most Jews in Serbia and the Banat had been deported to their deaths: the survival of the few happened within the context of the slaughter of the many, and child survivors like Marinković were thus the exception that proved the rule. Sympathy for a single Jewish child by no means precluded collusion in the persecution of the Jews generally. The children’s particular vulnerability may have helped them appear innocuous and, in a sense, beneath their Nazified neighbors’ notice. The fact that many were the offspring of mixed marriages and had at least one parent still with them proved significant, since parents could moderate or manipulate Nazi perceptions and draw upon preexisting social relations in their home towns and neighborhoods to shield the children. The latter had to grow up fast, take on adult roles, and exercise their own limited agency as best they could. At the same time, these child survivors remained acutely aware, both during and after the war, of the precariousness of their position, how unlikely their survival had been as they “hid” in homes and on streets where everyone knew their families. In April 1941, the third reich and its allies Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy partitioned the Kingdom of Yugoslavia into several occupation zones and the new Independent State of Croatia. Serbia and the Serbian Banat2 became a single German occupation zone. In practice, the Serbian Banat was administered by members of its ethnic German minority in collaboration with Reich Germans. The Holocaust in Serbia evolved in parallel with the systematic mass murder of the Soviet Jews in summer and fall of 1941, before the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and the expansion of the Holocaust from the occupied East to all of Europe. The Wehrmacht and their Serbian and local ethnic German collaborators shot most Serbian Jewish men in fall of 1941, nominally as retaliation for activity by the Partisan (communist) and Četnik (royalist-nationalist) resistance movements. Jewish women and children were interned in the concentration camp at Sajmište outside Belgrade in December 1941 and killed by gas van in spring of 1942. Serbia became the second European country after Estonia to be declared ‘free of Jews’ (judenfrei).3 In 1931, there were over 68,000 Yugoslav Jews, representing 0.49 percent of the population. On the eve of the German invasion in 1941, Yugoslav Jews may have numbered more than 71,000–72,000. An estimated 55,000–65,000 perished in the Holocaust—no fewer than 80 percent.4 In Serbia proper (south of the Danube), some 88 percent of all Jews did not survive the war; in the Serbian Banat, as many as 92.8 percent perished.5 Holocaust victims in Serbia included the roughly 4,000 Banat Jews—a small minority in a highly diverse Banat population of Serbs, ethnic Germans, ethnic Hungarians, ethnic Romanians, Roma, ethnic Croats, ethnic Slovaks, and others. Most Banat Jews were deported to Belgrade in August 1941, there to be shot or interned and gassed. Among the survivors were a small number of Jewish women allowed to return to the Banat because they were married to “Aryans,” and a number of children born to Jewish or mixed couples. The following focuses on the narratives of some of these children—related to yet different from narratives of those who had been adults during the occupation—and the subjects’ specific experiences and understanding thereof as Holocaust survivors. These survivors spent the war in an area that, and among people who, remain under-researched in the historiography of the Nazi period, World War II, and the Holocaust. The interviewees’ perspectives on their childhood offer insight into the ways age and social standing influenced Jewish reactions to persecution. They also illuminate the all-encompassing totality of the Nazi assault and its impact on the lives of Jews of every age and social class.6 In all, some 1.1 million Jewish children died during the Holocaust. Some became refugees, or were separated from their families by both perpetrators and well-meaning rescuers. Many children lived, attended classes, played, and died in ghettos, camps, and children’s homes in the occupied East.7 Children were even less likely to survive than adults. Whereas an estimated 10 percent of surviving Polish Jews passed as Aryans, over half of all the children among them survived hidden by or disguised as Gentiles.8 In Western Europe and elsewhere, hiding Jewish children entailed great responsibility for as well as great power over their lives and identities, since most hidden children were separated from their parents and isolated from Jewish family units; many were refugees without ties to the local community.9 Child survivors who became historians have used their memoirs to explore intersections between trauma and memory.10 Scholars have studied the varied physical, psychological, and emotional traumas that Jewish children experienced, the ways in which they dealt with their experiences through games and art,11 and the perception among adult survivors immediately after the war that Jewish children’s suffering had been a heightened and symbolic form of Jewish suffering. Children, some contended, were both the hope and the memory of the Jews and perhaps more authentic witnesses than adults due to the immediacy of their perceptions.12 The experiences addressed here share patterns with other child survivors’ narratives, but they differ in one crucial regard: the survivors from the Serbian Banat, by and large, experienced the war and the Holocaust in the company of at least one parental figure, and did so in a social environment where their Jewishness was well-known yet ignored. The main sources are sixteen interviews with survivors from the Serbian Banat conducted on behalf of the Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. The interviews took place in 1998, in Serbian or Croatian. Fourteen were videotaped in Serbia, the remaining two in Croatia and Bosnia. Seven interviewees were men, nine women. Thirteen (including two pairs of siblings) were half-Jewish, while three (including one pair of siblings) had two Jewish parents. Eleven were born in the Banat, three in Croatia, one in Bosnia, and one in Serbia proper. I use the terms ‘child’ and ‘youth’ interchangeably to signify anyone under the age of 18 in 1941—by war’s end, some of the interviewees were older teenagers or young adults. The oldest interviewee was born in November 1923, the youngest in May 1935. At the time of the German invasion, they were between just shy of 6 and 17 years old; at liberation in October 1944, they were between 9 and just shy of 21 years old. All sixteen spent part or all of the occupation in the Banat, and all but two had lived in the Banat continuously for a period of at least a few years prior to April 1941. Sixteen is a relatively small number of narratives to draw on. The interview format raises the well-known issue of how survivor testimony can fit into a coherent, emotionally involving, detailed, and factually accurate narrative, while appearing as spontaneous remembrance, unmediated by the interviewer’s presence and intervention or pre-interview preparations.13 Nevertheless, these sixteen interviews underline the importance for the construction of Holocaust narratives of individual survivor testimonies about events in a relatively small geographic area, over a relatively short period of time.14 Moreover, the interviews illuminate shared patterns of behavior and common circumstances enabling survival at a time and place when most Jewish children did not survive. Some Jews in Serbia survived by disguising their identity,15 yet only a minority of the interviewees from the Serbian Banat did so. Most spent the war in an environment clearly yet tacitly aware of their Jewishness, often their home environment since infancy. The most striking common patterns were the precariousness of all arrangements aimed at survival and the pivotal role of adult protectors, especially parents, and more precisely mothers or mother figures. Unlike many hidden Jewish children in wartime Europe,16 the Banat children survived as parts of family units, albeit often damaged by the loss of at least one parent, rather than on their own or in the company of strangers. The majority of the sixteen interviewees were the children of mixed marriages, and the surviving parent or parents protected them by emphasizing the Gentile part of the children’s background, relying on the ambiguities of Nazi attitudes to and treatment of “mixed” persons.17 Furthermore, their survival and their memories were shaped by class perceptions, gendered expectations of behavior, and the Banat’s ethnically diverse environment. Above all, these survivors shared the experience of hiding in plain sight, often while residing in their own homes or those of close relatives. The children’s Jewishness was well-known to neighbors and sometimes even the occupation authorities, yet more often than not was ignored, tolerated, or barely concealed. These youths’ survival and the fact that over half of them had been able to remain in or close to their homes throughout the war stemmed from a variety of factors. Occupation officials from the Third Reich lacked the language skills and knowledge of local conditions necessary to identify Jews easily, and were occasionally swayed by personal intervention or bribes proffered by the children’s relatives. The Nazis’ local collaborators, especially the Banat ethnic Germans, knowingly spared, overlooked, or even occasionally helped the hidden children and their family members, reflecting personal or professional connections and positive memories of past interactions. On the other hand, socio-economic differences between middle-class Jews and ethnic German peasants could also have the opposite effect, motivating the latter to persecute or humiliate the former.18 Sheer chance and the unpredictable factor of interpersonal relationships contributed to the uncertainty the children experienced as well as to their survival, and loom large in their narratives. The children’s perspective in the interviews was refracted through nearly fifty-five years of subsequent life experience and changes in memory. The interviewees reveal their childhood selves’ limited understanding, the lingering emotional trauma, the ability to convey striking stories about their experiences and feelings with or without specific factual information.19 Some survivors expressed surprise at being asked to be interviewed at all, or shyness about discussing events and information they deemed trivial or potentially boring, such as favorite childhood pursuits. They reflected on their limited wartime perspective and the gaps in their memory. The stories they told carry a weight of emotional and remembered truth, regardless of their ability to recall specific dates, places, and names. Emotional trauma crystallized painful memories, so that vivid anecdotes and specific incidents stood out in their narratives.20 Their stories made a composite of child survivors’ experiences different from adult survivors’,21 though mediated through adult understanding and reflection. Home Life before the War Before the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, the sixteen interviewees lived in families of good social standing in their ethnically mixed towns and villages, often in relative affluence. The Banat Jews tended to be middle-class and work in trade (often as grain and cattle merchants), manufacturing, and white-collar professions.22 One survivor generalized that “all [Banat Jews] were merchants,”23 while another described them as “intellectuals.”24 Even those who were not rich commanded respect from neighbors and the predominantly peasant population: a Jewish teacher of piano and German and her spouse, an ethnic Hungarian railway engineer, were “madam professor” and “engineer, sir” to the peasants, despite not being wealthy.25 The prevalence of mixed marriages (the law in the interwar period recognized only civil marriages in the Vojvodina region, of which the Serbian Banat formed a part, obviating the need for conversion in mixed marriages26) and the fact that the Banat was home to over a dozen ethnic groups meant multilingualism in the home was common. Often the Jewish parents were Hungarian- and/or German-speaking. Hungarian (or German) was the family language, German was spoken with guests, but the Jewish merchants spoke Serbian with employees and peasants.27 In addition, some of the children attended schools in which the language of instruction was Serbo-Croatian.28 The ability to function in multiple cultures was the norm for the Banat Jews and ensured a degree of social acceptance and business success, as when a Jewish grain merchant made a point of congratulating all neighbors on their respective holidays and having his children participate in Christian neighbors’ slava (family patron saint’s day) and Palm Sunday celebrations.29 In everyday life, ethno-religious distinctions sometimes became blurred. Zoltan Vajs (b. 1926) was enrolled by his Jewish father in Sokol, the Slavophile sports organization, because the elder Vajs was fond of sports and wanted his son to grow up strong and healthy.30 Ida Kockar (b. Nuhanović, 1933)—the daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish mother and a Bosnian Muslim father who considered himself Serbian—and her siblings’ names reflected the multicultural norms and fluidity of their world: Ida, Kemal, Jelisaveta (Elizabeth), and Jolanda.31 Observance of Jewish holidays, keeping kosher, and visits to the synagogue were common but not universal in Jewish homes, including those where the husband was Jewish and the wife was Gentile. Both sets of holidays were celebrated in some mixed marriages.32 The survivors who specifically commented on the role of Judaism in everyday life during their childhood tended to stress that their grandparents’ generation was the most observant, while their parents were more or less observant, assimilated Jews.33 Sometimes Gentile wives maintained their husbands’ Jewish traditions as part and parcel of their household duties.34 For the children, being Jewish primarily meant playtime in the synagogue,35 religious education in towns with a permanently appointed rabbi (in Vršac, Hebrew and Jewish history classes took place in the Orthodox churchyard, since the town lacked a purpose-built synagogue36), or small yet telling cultural differences like having the sandwiches for their school lunches made with goose liver rather than pork—and swapping sandwiches with Gentile children at recess.37 A few survivors were members of Zionist youth organizations, but saw this as an opportunity to socialize with other Jewish youths rather than an expression of political awareness or commitment.38 Several survivors referred to the synagogue as a Jewish “church,” talked of priests and rabbis interchangeably, and likened Passover to a Jewish Easter or saint’s day, suggesting a blurring of ethno-religious distinctions in their self-perception.39 While their accounts differ on how evident antisemitism was in the Banat before April 1941, most survivors concurred that it did not pose a great problem for the region’s Jewish minority.40 The attitudes the children encountered reflected, not so much rabid antisemitism and outright rejection of the Jews, as an awareness of the Jews’ difference, which could tip over into teasing or verbal abuse by peers or teachers.41 Ida Kockar recalled how some people did not like their children playing with the “little kike [čivuče],” but she dismissed this as prejudice that always has existed and always will exist, rather than a direct antecedent of the Holocaust. Kockar’s younger sister Jolanda Milićević (b. Nuhanović, 1935) remembered getting into a fight with another child after she became offended at the notion that she was a “kike” just because she was a Jew.42 Jews sometimes emphasized their difference as a positive quality. When Milana Stajić (b. Šomlo, 1932) started school, her grandmother told her, “Listen, you are a Jew, you have to be the best student,” possibly because Stajić’s paternal grandparents had objected to their son’s marriage to a Serb and wanted to emphasize their granddaughter’s Jewishness.43 Nevertheless, based on anecdotal evidence, antisemitism did seem to have become more noticeable, especially among some Banat ethnic Germans, after the German invasion of Poland in 1939.44 Several survivors remembered their parents’ intense interest in the growing Nazi influence in Europe, encounters with Jewish refugees from the Third Reich, and fears for the future.45 Persecution and Deportation Between April and August 1941, the Jewish children experienced disruptions in their everyday life, such as being banned from school and ostracized by peers.46 Some were interned alongside their Jewish parents in the hastily-improvised concentration camps in the old army barracks in Veliki Bečkerek (postwar Zrenjanin)47 or a grain storage facility in Novi Bečej.48 They witnessed the deprivations and humiliations visited upon their elders by the invading Germans and the local ethnic Germans, who took key positions in the Banat administration under Nazi auspices. Expelled from the economy and impoverished, adult Jews had to clean the streets of their towns—“the point was not to clean, but to humiliate people,” in the words of Aleksandar Greber (b. 1927)49—or pluck grass from the tennis court, in order to show that the once-wealthy Jews who used to play tennis there were no longer people with social and economic standing.50 Adult Jews were vulnerable to robbery, extortion, forced labor, eviction if they rented houses from non-Jews or their homes were requisitioned by the invading Germans, or having their homes searched and property destroyed. They could be arrested and even executed by the occupation authorities and ethnic German collaborators.51 On the night of August 13–14, 1941, Banat Jews were rounded up from their homes in a joint action by Reich German soldiers and ethnic German police. After brief internment in concentration camps in Veliki Bečkerek and Novi Bečej, deportation to Belgrade by river barge ensued on August 18. The Jews from the South Banat towns of Vršac and Pančevo were held in the municipal police building in Pančevo, then taken to Belgrade.52 This calamitous event snatched away Jewish mothers or fathers in the middle of the night, and some children were swept up as well. Melanija Marinković (b. Ormoš, 1927) described how much worse it felt to be watched in silence by neighbors and acquaintances in Vršac, than to be watched by strangers upon arrival in Belgrade.53 Other children were protected by Gentile parents or by ethnic German acquaintances in official positions, allowing them to remain at home. Even so, they witnessed their “hypnotized”54 relatives and acquaintances being herded away. Upon arrival in Belgrade, women and children initially stayed in the homes of Belgrade Jews, while the men were imprisoned at once in the camp at Topovske Šupe and gradually murdered by Wehrmacht firing squads in fall of 1941. Wives and children were able to visit the imprisoned men even after the mass shootings began. Non-Jewish or half-Jewish relatives, spared having to wear the identifying yellow armband, journeyed from the Banat to see parents and spouses. Survivors recalled talking to their fathers through barbed wire,55 risking approach while male relatives performed forced labor outside the camp,56 and smuggling food from the Banat—a journey made more difficult by the destruction of the bridge across the Danube and vulnerability to random searches, harassment, and extortion.57 The fathers seemed to have believed the camp guards’ lies about transfer to the mines in Serbia proper, or they pretended to believe in order to console fearful visitors.58 When the Sajmište camp opened in December 1941, the Jewish women and children resident in or deported to Belgrade received summonses to report there. By that point, the Jewish men were no more. Some of the sixteen survivors in my sample were among the more than 1,000 Jewish children interned at Sajmište,59 most of whom perished by gas van in spring of 1942. Gentile relatives negotiated and paid bribes for some children’s release.60 Other Banat Jews evaded internment: the forty-three Jewish women married to “Aryans,”61 children taken in by non-Jewish relatives,62 or others who “passed” with fake IDs and help by various protectors.63 In one way or another, the sixteen interviewed survivors remained out of immediate danger to their lives after 1941. But they faced other challenges: having to hide in plain sight, in an environment where their names, families, and Jewishness were a matter of common knowledge, or, in some cases, living in alien surroundings under assumed names and among relative strangers. They were in constant danger of encountering hostile acquaintances or having their true identities become public by other means. Among the sixteen, ten spent all or most of the war living in their home towns, with surviving relatives.64 Two of these also hid elsewhere in the Banat—a different town in one case,65 a Serbian acquaintance’s isolated landholding (salaš) in the other.66 Of the remaining six, one joined her Serbian stepmother in a different Banat town.67 One moved with her mother all over the Banat,68 one spent the war hiding with relatives in the Banat and the countryside around her hometown Negotin in central Serbia,69 one was taken in by relatives in the Banat after having been orphaned and spent the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Serbia,70 and a brother and sister lived with their mother under assumed names first in Belgrade, then in the Svilajnac area in eastern Serbia.71 All but two survived alongside at least one biological parent, though most lost extended-family members and even siblings; several had fathers who did not survive Topovske Šupe. Parental Figures and Social Networks Prominent in survivor narratives are the individuals who helped, protected, or turned a crucial blind eye to the young Jews in “judenfrei” Serbia. Parents played an especially large role, not surprising given the survivors’ youth, enforced isolation, and dependence on adults’ physical and emotional support. Whereas in the occupied Soviet territories the treatment of mixed marriages and their offspring was inflected by Nazi anti-Slavism as well as antisemitism, so that Russians or Ukrainians married to Jews were not often able to protect their spouses and children,72 in the occupied Banat self-identified Serbs, ethnic Hungarians, and ethnic Germans were able to extend a degree of protection to Jewish and half-Jewish relatives. Mothers were pivotal. Six of the eleven mixed marriages in the sample had been between Jewish men and Gentile women—the fathers often did not survive, but the mothers went unharmed (as in the occupied Soviet lands, Jewish men married to non-Jewish women were treated as Jews, but Jewish women married to non-Jewish men might be spared73). Of the five Jewish mothers in mixed marriages, all but one returned home from Belgrade and survived the war. Of the three children born to a Jewish mother and a Jewish father, Melanija Marinković lost both parents but was saved by her Serbian stepmother; the mother of Tihomir (Tibor) Ungar and Olga Adam (b. Ungar, 1930 and 1925 respectively) “passed” as an Aryan with her children in Serbia proper. The mothers manipulated Nazi racial categories and gendered perceptions, played on sentimental assumptions about a mother’s bond with her children, and emphasized different ways—ethnic, religious, gendered—in which their children could not be considered Jews and/or merited mercy. Zoltan Vajs’ ethnic German mother brazenly told the German commandant in their village that she had divorced her Jewish spouse, who had died before the war, and that she alone knew who the real father of her children was, making her “clean before Hitler and before God.”74 She thus asserted kinship with the invading Germans, invoked divine justice, implied that she had done the proper Nazi thing in divorcing a Jew, implied also that her children were not Jews at all, and invoked a mother’s special knowledge about and rights over her children. Whether he actually believed her, the commandant struck the children’s names from his list of local Jews. Melanija Marinković was deported to Belgrade alongside her divorced parents (both Jews) in August 1941. Once the opening of the Sajmište camp was announced, Marinković and her mother ran into the girl’s Serbian stepmother while visiting Marinković’s father at Topovske Šupe. The two women agreed to protect the girl. Marinković characterized her stepmother as a handsome, charming, independent-minded woman who begged German officials, caused scenes, and claimed that the girl was an orphan whom she had raised from infancy and had had baptized (not true, but nobody checked); by such means, she secured permission for young Melanija to return to the Banat with her.75 Left to fend for their families, Jewish women across Hitler’s Europe developed the ability to spot more trouble coming and often gauged danger by how their husbands and children fared in everyday encounters with Gentiles.76 Milana Stajić’s Serbian mother may have understood the danger her Jewish spouse was in better than he did, despite his having been arrested and briefly interned. Stajić remembered eavesdropping as her mother shouted at her father one night in Negotin: “If you do not go to the forest [to join the Četnik resistance] or to Master Mita [a Serbian peasant acquaintance] right this minute, I will kill you myself!” Eventually, after a period spent living with relatives in the Banat, young Milana and her sister joined their father hiding among Serbian peasants affiliated with the Četniks.77 Despite this, the option of joining the resistance posed a challenge in the Banat, since the nearest guerrilla units were across the River Tisa in Hungarian-occupied Bačka or the Danube in German-occupied Serbia proper. Zoltan Vajs’ mother dissuaded him from running off to the Partisans out of fear for the rest of the family.78 Mothers resorted to a variety of evasive strategies. The Serbian mother of Romana Rozenberg (b. 1933) moved around the Banat throughout the war, relying on the fact that her illegitimate daughter bore her name of Gedremenc.79 The mother of Vera Pavlović (b. Mekler, 1923) shielded the family from the Germans who barged in to rob their house, serving food and drink as to honored guests and claiming that theirs was a Christian home. If there was any Jew there, she was it, the only one. She reminded the soldiers that their parents probably worried where they were, just as she worried for her sons in German captivity. Having to abase herself was humiliating, but no immediate harm came to the family.80 Fathers too played a part, as ingrained assumptions about gender roles intersected with Nazi racism and misogyny. Some Banat mixed marriages included an ethnic German81—or an ethnic Hungarian who had had himself declared an ethnic German, as did Nikola Poti’s (b. 1931) father.82 These men could call on perceived racial kinship with the invading Reich Germans to protect Jewish spouses or children. Even a close relationship with a Slavic man could protect vulnerable women and children. What helped Olga Adam and Tihomir Ungar survive under assumed names was the fact that their mother had entered into a relationship with a married Serb, who allowed all three to hide out in his Belgrade home, passed on money sent by the Ungars’ relatives, and continued to visit them after they went into hiding in Svilajnac.83 Likewise, the widowed stepmother of Melanija Marinković found a new beau, a Serbian former bank manager, who helped them survive.84 Some non-Jewish parents bribed officials and otherwise successfully stood up for Jewish and “mixed” family members.85 Nikola Poti’s father sold off family possessions for bribe money and secured his wife’s safe return from Belgrade, “but only if he wanted to, I think that’s what they stressed, only if he wanted to [bring her home].”86 Vera Lichtenberg (b. 1925) knew that before his arrest her Jewish father had arranged with the ethnic German in charge to spare Vera from having to wear a yellow armband. She did not know how her father had managed it, though a bribe and the fact that young Vera was a baptized first-degree “Mischling” may have played a role. Lichtenberg senior had to wear the armband and eventually perished at Topovske Šupe.87 Yet Vera Pavlović’s ethnic German father begged the Gestapo in vain for the release of his fully Jewish stepson (his wife’s son from her first marriage), claiming to have raised the youth from infancy and stressing that he, the stepfather, had fought in World War I on the Habsburg side and that his family was of Viennese extraction. The Gestapo agent curtly told the man that he should have thought twice before marrying a Jewess.88 Chance and inconsistency meant the difference between life and death: if Vera Pavlović’s father failed to protect his stepson, Melanija Marinković was saved by her Serbian stepmother. As large a part as parents and stepparents played, survival depended on entire networks of relatives and acquaintances. After his mother’s arrest in Serbia proper, Dragutin Ćuković (b. 1935) was sheltered by an “aunt”—the owner of the inn where he had lived with his mother and likely a member of the resistance—until his grandmother and uncle in the Banat could take him in.89 Ida Kockar, her sister, and her mother were released from Sajmište camp thanks to the intervention of an uncle.90 Egon Najhaus’s (b. 1930) Jewish relatives in Zemun, across the River Sava from Belgrade in territory that fell to the Independent State of Croatia, spent the war passing as Aryans and were able to send messages and money to their Banat family.91 Despite the danger to his own family, Mirko Caran’s (b. 1933) father hid his Jewish wife’s nephew in the family’s temporary apartment in Belgrade until the boy could be smuggled to greater safety in the Hungarian zone of occupation.92 Even more tenuous social ties to people who were not related played a crucial role in children’s survival. Aleksandar Greber credited his Jewish father’s honest business practices, even after the latter’s arrest. An ethnic German peasant came to take Greber and his sister away for deportation in August 1941, but their ethnic Hungarian mother refused unless she could go too. The ensuing standoff ended when the ethnic German recognized the family name and recalled his happy business dealings with Greber senior, and allowed the children to remain with their mother—a life-saving whim. Later in the war, after young Greber contracted scarlet fever, an ethnic Hungarian doctor paid him house calls despite knowing he was half-Jewish. Greber ascribed this piece of good fortune to his mother’s good relations with neighbors and acquaintances of all ethnicities. An ethnic German neighbor taught her young son not to greet Mrs. Greber with “Heil Hitler,” as he had learned in his Nazified kindergarten, but the more neutral “Küss die Hand” (I kiss your hand), and even hid Greber’s sister Alisa in her home before an anticipated police raid.93 The experiences of the Ungar siblings in Belgrade and Svilajnac as well as that of Milana Stajić and her father among the Četniks outside Negotin were exceptional among the sixteen testimonies, as these youths actively had to conceal their Jewishness. The others spent the war among people who knew of their Jewishness. Even Nikola Poti, who lived next door to a dyed-in-the-wool ethnic German Nazi (“he was a dangerous man, when he walked down the street everyone ran, vanished, I mean, everyone hid”), who would terrorize the boy by siccing his dog on him, nevertheless suffered nothing worse than constant anxiety. Poti ascribed this to the fact that Poti’s father had had himself reclassified as an ethnic German, which cast a protective umbrella over the whole family. Also, despite his enthusiasm for the Nazis, the neighbor spoke poor German, and, as a German-language teacher, Poti’s Jewish mother could help him improve.94 Everyday Challenges Though vulnerable, juveniles were unlikely to be targeted in quite the same way as adults, or, indeed, as most Serbian Jews who died in 1941–1942. The children filtered loss and danger through their own limited understanding, grasping the essence even as they failed to comprehend all of the facts. They grappled with adult concerns as best they could.95 Milana Stajić, eight years old in spring of 1941, said about her father’s arrest: “[A] concentration camp did not exist at all in my head or in some general knowledge, all I knew was that he’d been arrested…. ‘Konclager’ did not exist for me as a word, no one knew about it.” Speaking about the postwar years, when her surviving relatives gradually came to grips with their losses and with Jewish losses in general, Stajić added, “Anyway, till then no one believed that someone could kill a child that way! One died from a bomb, one died from a traffic accident, but we did not believe until then that someone could kill children.”96 The children lived in a strange limbo: not really in hiding, yet too fearful to go about their lives freely. Since they stayed out of sight rather than truly hid, every day the children could be heard and seen by people who knew them or knew of them. They relied on the kindness or indifference of acquaintances and relative strangers for survival. The few Jewish wives and children could be overlooked or targeted as circumstances required. Throughout the occupation, the Banat remained stable, economically as well as ideologically valuable to the Nazis (it yielded agricultural surpluses, yet the Nazis envisioned no large-scale population movements or colonization); significantly, it remained relatively resistance-free. Thus the handful of surviving Jews, especially if they did not seem very dangerous due to their youth and/or gender, could be tolerated. The Banat’s ethnic German administrators may have understood that targeting women and children would have caused unnecessary tension, given that so many Jews had non-Jewish (including ethnic German) relatives. A few survivors noted how toward the end of the war, with Germany retreating on multiple fronts, occupation personnel in Serbia and the Banat began again to harass the few remaining Jews, whom they associated with their many enemies, more than they had done since the completion of the Holocaust in Serbia in spring of 1942.97 Nevertheless, the future survivors remained Jews in a German occupation zone, as well as children at the mercy of adults—including ethnic Germans, who demonstrated little mercy during the August 1941 deportation. Like Jewish children elsewhere in Europe who concealed their Jewishness but not their physical presence, the Banat Jews confronted the possibility of exposure or denunciation, the unpredictability of people’s behavior, and the need to adjust and fit in.98 Unlike other Jewish children hidden in plain sight, the sixteen Banat Jewish youths hid alongside family members, often in or near their old homes, rather than with virtual strangers in a new environment. Familiarity bred its own challenges. Everyday life was fraught with uncertainty. Vera Pavlović said: “We lived always in fear.”99 Alisa Reljin (b. Greber, 1928) echoed the sentiment: “We were constantly in a great state of fear.”100 The Jewish women in ‘protected’ marriages had to report regularly to the Gestapo and bring their children along, a nerve-wracking experience.101 The youths had to trust that neighbors would turn a blind eye, former school friends would not hurl antisemitic insults, merchants and administrators would not check ration cards or birth certificates too closely. The children mostly stayed at home rather than venture into the street or go out with friends. Alisa Reljin remembered ruefully that other teenagers went to dances and parties, while she and her brother Aleksandar Greber had to stay indoors, or at most in their own yard behind the traditional tall garden wall. Her brother relied emotionally on a Gentile friend who would visit in the evenings for a chat and a game of chess.102 Gender and age influenced how far from home the youths dared venture. Reljin was younger, slight of build, and a girl, so she went out more than her tall older brother, more easily perceived as a threat. Reljin thought it must have been sheer desperation for company that once lured her brother to the fairground—entertainment for children rather than teenagers—where he nearly got caught up in a police sweep. Eventually her brother spent days hiding in the attic or the outhouse, or helping out on a Serbian acquaintance’s landholding, and only came home to sleep—the family assumed that an older teenage boy (Greber was seventeen by spring of 1944) stood in the gravest danger in the case of a raid. They also placed their faith in the disingenuous ruse that the Serbian family was not hiding a Jew. Aleksandar was there to help out and visit.103 Melanija Marinković found relative safety in her youth, gendered perceptions, and her Serbian stepmother. Yet in the fall of 1943—two months before her sixteenth birthday—the Gestapo sent her to prison in Belgrade (again she reflected on the silence of witnesses: everyone remained “silent as the grave, not a word, they just sit and watch, they know something is up”). In prison, she contemplated possible dispatch to a concentration camp or being murdered. Her stepmother again deployed the full arsenal of pleading, tears, possibly even bribery to get Melanija released. She told the prison commander, who claimed he could not release the Jewish girl when his own children lived in danger of American bombs falling on Germany, that she would pray for his children if he let Melanija go. He relented and even advised that the girl would be safe only if she were married to a Gentile, so the stepmother arranged for her nephew, nine years Melanija’s senior, to marry the girl when she turned sixteen. Ironically, soon after the wedding Marinković was summoned for compulsory labor duty. “Now [the occupation authorities] knew where to put me, in which category,” she explained. She was no longer a ‘hidden’ Jewish girl, but officially a married woman and a Serb—and thus subject to compulsory labor.104 The authorities’ inconsistent attitude manifested itself in all aspects of the children’s lives. Older youths had to wear the yellow armband during the first months of the occupation, unless parents somehow managed to secure a reprieve.105 Vera Pavlović recalled with lingering bitterness how she and her half-Jewish siblings had to wear the armbands, which reduced them to “jüdische Schweine, stinkende Juden,” that means ‘Jewish pigs’ and ‘stinking Jews.’106 Melanija Marinković remembered with some discomfort how she had felt proud and showed off her armband, because at thirteen it marked her as practically a grownup.107 All stopped wearing their armbands once most of the Jews were deported from the Banat, whether (as the survivors speculated) because “half-Jews” were officially permitted to do so, or of their own volition.108 Such a transparent ruse hardly deceived the neighbors. Several survivors explicitly mentioned that neighbors knew who the children were, but pretended to know nothing.109 Yet antisemitism remained, even if modified by neighborliness or protectiveness. When others wished to assert their superior position or wanted to act out power games, the children’s Jewishness provided a target. One of the Greber family’s neighbors invited the son, Aleksandar, over to play, but instructed his own child to start crying at the first little spat, so the father would have an excuse to start asking questions and attempt to blackmail the Grebers; only intervention by a “good [ethnic] German” acquaintance forced him to back down.110 Zoltan Vajs took some pleasure in recalling how he continued to play football with his amateur team throughout the occupation, despite the danger; but if he demonstrated better prowess than the “Aryans,” members of the opposing team sometimes threatened to denounce him. Vajs suspected that this is what led to his denunciation by a Nazified physician in his home village of Debeljača, which required him to hide out in the town of Kovin thirty-five miles away toward war’s end.111 Although the Nazis did not recognize conversion as a way to negate Jewishness, real or fake baptism remained a common way to deflect attention in occupied Serbia. Some interviewees’ parents had them baptized112 or obtained fake baptismal certificates for them.113 Melanija Marinković was baptized before marriage to her stepmother’s Serbian nephew, which required the bribery of a willing Orthodox priest114 as well as the willingness of all participants in the charade to play along. Owning a ration card could help alleviate neighbors’ suspicion since it legitimized a Jew’s presence,115 but renewing ration cards posed its own set of problems since the administrators in charge held to no set criteria. Sometimes officials required birth certificates, but sometimes (fake) baptismal certificates or the word of a non-Jewish relative sufficed. As the war dragged on, people had to renew ration cards in person (to prevent members of the resistance from drawing rations). Even then, because administrators grew more irritable the longer the renewal process dragged on, youths whose names began with a letter at the front of the alphabet could get away with having their baptismal certificates presented by an adult guardian. In 1943, Mrs. Greber managed to renew ration cards without having to present either her two half-Jewish children or even their birth certificates.116 Having or obtaining a name that did not seem Jewish could help. Dragutin Ćuković claimed that his Serbian name and pity over his orphan status had protected him (the adults who sheltered him might have had a different perspective).117 Romana Rozenberg bore her unmarried mother’s name, Gedremenc, during the war (and after the war was baptized as Slobodanka).118 Tibor and Olga Ungar became Tihomir and Olga Urošević in Belgrade, where they posed as ethnic Serbian refugees escaping Ustaša (Croatian fascist) rule in Bosnia. Their mother explained her Hungarian accent by claiming to be from Slovenia, trusting that non-Banat Serbs would not be able to tell the difference.119 Even when Jewish youths were not expelled from public school, attending school was risky,120 and some parents attempted home-schooling.121 Some children enrolled in school with baptismal certificates instead of birth certificates.122 Tihomir Ungar resumed his interrupted education under his assumed name Tihomir Urošević after the family settled in Svilajnac, aided by the fact that wartime Serbia had a large refugee population from other Yugoslav lands and thus that gaps in one’s history raised few eyebrows; Ungar had to start fifth grade in the fall of 1944, at the age of fourteen.123 The children still played—but mostly indoors124 or under exceptional circumstances. Going out for a game of football risked denunciation or arrest.125 Young boys in concentration camps in 1941 later recalled how wonderful it had been to have nothing to do all day except play with the other imprisoned children. “[We had] endless fun. This is a child’s memory,” commented Mirko Caran on his time in the Veliki Bečkerek barracks.126 Some of the older children, especially girls, had a different experience, for not only could they be sent to forced labor, but they could be targeted sexually by the camp guards, and later also by liberating Soviet soldiers.127 Despite the danger, some of the children had to take on adult roles in the absence of one or both parents, or due to reduced material circumstances. Many of the comfortably middle-class families were reduced by antisemitic legislation or the loss of the main breadwinner to making and selling yeast,128 trading clothes, giving piano or German lessons,129 or managing survival on the sole non-Jewish parent’s salary and ration card.130 Children became economic agents in their own right, helping their adult relatives survive. Agency was limited by Jewishness, age, and gender, yet the children’s very vulnerability also allowed them to venture into situations where adults dared not. Alisa Reljin vividly described how, being small and young-looking, she could go where adults feared to show themselves: she was terrified of the crush of people and animals on the narrow bridge across the Begej River in Veliki Bečkerek, but she crossed it to take lunch to her father, who was performing forced labor in spring of 1941. Still she did not dare step off the road because she knew that Jews were banned from sidewalks.131 The much-loved only child of a wealthy merchant family before the war, Melanija Marinković learned to tend a vegetable garden and farm animals. Tihomir and Olga Ungar sold cloth from door to door in Svilajnac. Egon Najhaus helped out in a butcher’s shop and a bakery, fished, and gathered wood, once he took off the yellow armband, protected also by his mother’s ethnic Germanness.132 Children smuggled food to deported relatives in Belgrade and Sajmište. Mirko Caran recalled with wonder his father’s audaciousness in letting the eight-or nine-year-old go on his own—when the father could not obtain a travel permit—to retrieve food and money from relatives across the Sava River, in Zemun. The Caran family (including the Jewish nephew they were hiding) lived in a Belgrade apartment that did not belong to them, tenuously protected by the fact that the father was Serbian. The entire family relied on young Mirko slipping between occupation zones.133 Survivors’ Perceptions of Self and Others The ‘hidden’ Jewish children had reason to mistrust even as they relied on their Gentile surroundings. In view of the ethnic Germans’ collaboration with the Nazis and their participation in the deportation of Banat Jews in 1941, ethnic Germans loomed in survivors’ memories. Some saw ethnic Germans as primary agents of their persecution.134 Since these ethnic Germans were neighbors and sometimes friends, betrayals appeared more treacherous than attacks by “outsiders.” Survivors remembered individual ethnic Germans who guarded and abused Jews in concentration camps,135 stole from and harassed Jews,136 refused to speak to Jewish peers, or insulted them in the street.137 Vera Lichtenberg was assaulted by four ethnic German youths who pushed her to the pavement, demanding to know where her yellow armband was.138 But ethnic Germans also loomed uncomfortably as people who helped. The behavior of ethnic German neighbors could seem even worse than that of the invaders,139 and some survivors struggled to reconcile the reality of their persecution with that of ethnic Germans who saved them from deportation on a whim, or offered a kind word or temporary shelter.140 The role of these “virtuous Germans [čestiti Nemci],”141 who “weren’t all bad ... hand on heart,”142 and the fact that “some of them remained human [bilo je i među njima ljudi],”143 clearly troubled survivors. It served as consolation but also as a reminder that acts of kindness were rarer than acts of cruelty—and that both could come from one and the same person. The Jews’ memories of middle-class prewar lives contrasted with wartime poverty and fear, casting into relief the fact that some of their persecutors were motivated at least in part by social and economic resentment. Several survivors mentioned their families’ interest in books, music, and polite mores and manners, regardless of reduced wartime circumstances.144 They also tended to describe the ethnic Germans who ransacked their homes and robbed them during the deportation as lower-class, of peasant stock, even using eugenically-inflected language to associate class with physical and moral deficiency. Vera Pavlović, who described the non-Nazified ones as “honest Germans,” labeled those who repeatedly harassed her family as “ragged ... primitive, an alcoholic with a huge family” or a “degenerate little guy ... he was small, cretinous, his rifle was longer than he was.”145 Milder in her judgment yet equally class-conscious, Alisa Reljin stressed than the ethnic German who allowed her and her brother to remain at home rather than deporting them because he had known the children’s father, was a “kindly peasant”—kindly, but lower-class nonetheless.146 Dignity could be preserved by seeing one’s persecutors as socially inferior. Class perceptions served also to make the Jewish youths appear relatively harmless. When Reljin’s brother Aleksandar Greber was caught up in a raid, a friend talked the ethnic German police into releasing Greber without checking his papers on the pretext that the latter was the boy’s housekeeper’s son, implying that class rendered Greber hapless, harmless, and under the alleged employer’s protection.147 Those hiding in rural Serbia proper adapted to significant cultural and lifestyle differences. Olga Adam and Tihomir Ungar recalled the mutual shock experienced by them and Serbian peasants from the Svilajnac area over their respective dress, cooking, and living standard. The Ungars were not used to sleeping several to a bed or eating beans as often as the peasants did.148 When their protectors in the Negotin area took Milana Stajić and her sister to the fair dressed in peasant attire, the girls’ “otherness” and town origins remained obvious, though people pretended not to notice.149 Isolation and a sense of their own exceptional fates surfaced also in the survivors’ accounts of other Jews’ behavior and depictions of their own families. Zoltan Vajs claimed as reliable fact that only the poor Jews from his village were killed, while the rich escaped to England or America: the rich left at the first sign of trouble, while his own, ethnically mixed family had to remain.150 Other survivors observed that the Jews had been passive, united in their fatalism. “I’m telling you, it’s terrible how the Jews went so easily to the slaughterhouse!” insisted Alisa Reljin. “Nobody objected, everyone trusted in God! ‘Oh, God will help, God will help!’ I’m getting upset, because that’s really how it was.”151 By contrast, the survivors’ own families seemed exceptional, able to spot trouble coming, despite wrenching memories of parents rendered helpless, degraded by occupation officials, or vanishing forever. Some survivors credited their parents with special savvy; others claimed that even at a young age they had been the “brains” of the family.152 Still, however much the survivors may have wanted to remember their parents and other survivors as clever and capable, they recognized how large a part chance and circumstance had played. By sheer coincidence, the ethnic German who came for Alisa Reljin and her brother had known their father and so decided to spare the children.153 Melanija Marinković insisted that her “destiny” had lain, in part, in the fact that her stepmother had married her father in February 1941—less than two months before the German occupation—thereby gaining the legal right to become young Melanija’s guardian.154 Lasting Trauma Fear and isolation during the war weighed heavy and had long-term consequences. When the Soviets and the Partisans liberated the Banat in October 1944, the Jewish youths needed time to adapt to circumstances that had changed drastically yet again. “We couldn’t get used to being able to move around again,” Alisa Reljin recalled.155 Jolanda Milićević reflected on the multiple meanings of humanity: “We were human [ljudi], we started living like other people [ostali ljudi], we sort of gained some rights, we came out into the world [među ljude, literally ‘among people’].”156 Some survivors suffered long-term physical ailments or psychological problems.157 Above all, survivors retained a sense of having been robbed of their youth. They still had to deal with not knowing what had happened to missing relatives or not being able to grieve properly. Lacking a gravesite to visit, whenever Melanija Marinković came from Pančevo to Belgrade after the war, she would stop on the street corner where she had said goodbye to her mother in December 1941, just before her stepmother got her out of the city.158 Vera Lichtenberg was haunted by her father’s promise, when she visited him at Topovske Šupe, that he would come back, and by the thought of him before a firing squad.159 The survivors’ identities, as reflected in their names, remained complex and burdened with personal and group history. Romana Rozenberg eventually abandoned her baptized name Slobodanka and took her late father’s last name, which she had never borne as a child since her parents had remained unmarried—a fact that had helped save her life.160 Tihomir Ungar reclaimed his father’s family name yet chose to keep his “fake” first name.161 A few survivors learned of relatives’ deaths already during the war,162 but for many the first postwar years meant waiting for news. After years of rumors and hoping against hope that loved ones had survived, emigrated, even lost their memory, once the truth of the losses became clear Mirko Caran’s mother’s black hair soon turned white, while Milana Stajić’s grandmother all but ceased going to the synagogue, for she could not forgive God for the decimation of her family.163 Ida Kockar described scenes of gas chambers and bodies being burned, though the Jews imprisoned at Sajmište were killed by gas van and buried in mass graves: she subconsciously combined her own memories with things later read or heard about Auschwitz and the other death camps.164 Conclusion The experiences of the sixteen survivors interviewed by the Shoah Foundation Institute differed somewhat from those of many other Jewish children during the Holocaust: they survived by hiding, yet not really hiding, often in their own homes and accompanied by at least one parent or other family members. Their Jewishness or “half-Jewishness” was a source of great vulnerability and danger under Nazi occupation, as well as part of what their neighbors knew and could act upon or not. Constant uncertainty, fear, and sense of loss were enduring presences in the children’s lives, as in the lives of all Jews in Hitler’s Europe. The fact that the sixteen from the Banat were young at the time of the Holocaust influenced how they remembered and, over the course of decades, tried to make sense of their experiences—for themselves and for the interviewers. Children at the time, their perceptions of pain, loss, fear, uncertainty, and hostility differed from those of adults. Their stories show us how children coped, grew up fast, and yet remained children during the Holocaust. They emphasize the children’s own limited yet crucial agency, how complex a phenomenon survival was, how very many people it involved—parents, siblings, neighbors, friends, strangers, policemen, officials, resistance members, merchants, peasants—and how every survival meant a unique crucible of chance, circumstance, and coincidence. Mirna Zakić is associate professor of German history at Ohio University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2011. She is the author of “The Price of Belonging to the Volk: Volksdeutsche, Land Redistribution and Aryanization in the Serbian Banat, 1941–1944” (2014); and Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II (2017). Footnotes This article draws in part on material in my Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II (2017), reproduced here by permission of Cambridge University Press. The research was funded by the Graduate College at Ohio University. 1 Melanija Marinković, interview 47113, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute (VHA), accessed November 24, 2015. 2 This study excludes the Romanian Banat to the east. 3 Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), 334–46, 422–23; Walter Manoschek, “‘Gehst mit Juden erschiessen?’ Die Vernichtung der Juden in Serbien,” in Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), 39–56. 4 Jovan Bajford, Staro Sajmište: Mesto sećanja, zaborava i sporenja (Belgrade: Beogradski centar za ljudska prava, 2011), 44; Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 192; Jaša Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945. Žrtve genocida i učesnici NOR (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština Jugoslavije, 1980), 13, 201; Holm Sundhaussen, “Jugoslawien,” in Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991), 311, 330. 5 Romano, Jevreji Jugoslavije, 201. 6 Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), xlv–xlvi. 7 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009), 370–75; Mary J. Gallant, “The Kindertransport: Gender and the Rescue of Jewish Children, 1938–1939,” in Different Horrors/Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 198–217; Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 59–87. 8 Nechama Tec, “Introduction,” in Children during the Holocaust, ed. Patricia Heberer (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), xxv–xxvi; Lenore J. Weitzman, “Living on the Aryan Side in Poland: Gender, Passing, and the Nature of Resistance,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 189–90. 9 Suzanne Vromen, Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 Saul Friedländer, Where Memory Leads: My Life (New York: Other Press, 2016); Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 11 George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Susan K. Leshnoff, “Friedl-Dicker Brandeis, Art of Holocaust Children, and the Progressive Movement in Education,” Visual Arts Research 32, no. 1 (2006): 92–100. 12 Boaz Cohen, “Representing the Experiences of Children in the Holocaust: Children’s Survivor Testimonies Published in Fun Letsten Hurbn, Munich, 1946–49,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 93–94. 13 Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 118–29. 14 Omer Bartov, “Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941–1944,” in Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, ed. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 402, 403. 15 Dwork, Children with a Star, 31–32; Ava Hegedis Kadishson Schieber, “Bond with Rain,” in Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust, ed. Elaine Saphier Fox (Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 202–203. 16 Diane L. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 7–8. 17 Cathy S. Gelbin, “Between Persecution and Complicity: The Life Story of a Former ‘Jewish Mischling,’” in Children of the Holocaust, ed. Andrea Reiter (Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2006), 76–77. 18 For more detail on the ethnic Germans’ collaboration with the Third Reich and its impact on ethnic relations in the Banat, see Mirna Zakić, Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 19 Tec, “Introduction,” xxiv. 20 Bartov, “Communal Genocide,” 401; Dwork, Children with a Star, xl–xli. 21 Dwork, Children with a Star, xxxiii. 22 Aleksandar Greber, interview 48706, VHA, accessed November 24, 2015; Vera Lichtenberg, interview 45056, VHA, accessed November 25, 2015; Marinković interview; Alisa Reljin, interview 46102, VHA, accessed November 25, 2015; Tihomir Ungar, interview 47014, VHA, accessed November 27, 2015. 23 Reljin interview. 24 Lichtenberg interview. 25 Nikola Poti, interview 47282, VHA, accessed November 24, 2015. 26 Freidenreich, Jews of Yugoslavia, 109. 27 Marinković interview. 28 Greber interview; Egon Najhaus, interview 46366, VHA, accessed November 25, 2015; Ungar interview. 29 Olga Adam, interview 45646, VHA, accessed November 27, 2015. 30 Zoltan Vajs, interview 46165, VHA, accessed November 23, 2015. 31 Ida Kockar, interview 46000, VHA, accessed November 26, 2015. 32 Najhaus interview. 33 Greber interview; Marinković interview; Poti interview; Milana Stajić, interview 46169, VHA, accessed November 27, 2015; Ungar interview. 34 Greber interview; Reljin interview. 35 Kockar interview; Poti interview. 36 Marinković interview. 37 Reljin interview. 38 Greber interview; Marinković interview; Reljin interview. 39 Adam interview; Kockar interview; Reljin interview; Stajić interview. 40 Ungar interview; Vajs interview. 41 Poti interview; Ungar interview. 42 Kockar interview; Jolanda Milićević, interview 49210, VHA, accessed November 26, 2015. 43 Stajić interview. On familial tensions regarding mixed marriages, also Poti interview. 44 Greber interview; Marinković interview. 45 Adam interview; Lichtenberg interview; Vajs interview. 46 Vera Pavlović, interview 49127, VHA, accessed November 24, 2015. 47 Mirko Caran, interview 47077, VHA, accessed November 26, 2015. 48 Adam interview; Kockar interview; Ungar interview. 49 Greber interview. 50 Adam interview. 51 Adam interview; Caran interview; Greber interview; Marinković interview; Najhaus interview; Pavlović interview; Reljin interview; Ungar interview. 52 Greber interview; Lichtenberg interview; Pavlović interview; Marinković interview; Reljin interview; Zdenko Levntal, ed., Zločini fašističkih okupatora i njihovih pomagača protiv Jevreja u Jugoslaviji (Belgrade: Savez jevrejskih opština FNR Jugoslavije, 1952), 14. 53 Marinković interview. 54 Greber interview. Also Lichtenberg interview; Poti interview. 55 Adam interview; Marinković interview. 56 Caran interview. 57 Greber interview; Lichtenberg interview; Pavlović interview; Poti interview; Reljin interview. 58 Greber interview; Lichtenberg interview; Marinković interview; Ungar interview. 59 Bajford, Staro Sajmište, 37. 60 Kockar interview; Milićević interview. 61 Pavlović interview; Poti interview; Božidar Ivković, “Uništenje Jevreja i pljačka njihove imovine u Banatu 1941–1944,” in Tokovi revolucije (Belgrade: [n.p.], 1967), 387. 62 Marinković interview. 63 Adam interview; Ungar interview. 64 Caran interview; Greber interview; Kockar interview; Lichtenberg interview; Milićević interview; Najhaus interview; Pavlović interview; Poti interview; Reljin interview; Vajs interview. 65 Vajs interview. 66 Greber interview. 67 Marinković interview. 68 Romana Rozenberg, interview 46175, VHA, accessed November 25, 2015. 69 Stajić interview. 70 Dragutin Ćuković, interview 46173, VHA, accessed November 25, 2015. 71 Adam interview; Ungar interview. 72 Arad, Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 360–68. 73 Ibid., 369–70. 74 Vajs interview. 75 Marinković interview. 76 On Jewish women’s adaptation to altered circumstances, see Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Dalia Ofer, “Gender Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The Case of Warsaw,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 145–57, 162–63. 77 Stajić interview. 78 Vajs interview. 79 Rozenberg interview. 80 Pavlović interview. 81 Najhaus interview; Vajs interview. 82 Poti interview. 83 Adam interview; Ungar interview. 84 Marinković interview. 85 Caran interview; Pavlović interview. 86 Poti interview. 87 Lichtenberg interview. 88 Pavlović interview. 89 Ćuković interview. 90 Kockar interview; Milićević interview. 91 Najhaus interview. 92 Caran interview. 93 Greber interview; Reljin interview. 94 Poti interview. 95 Heberer, Children during the Holocaust, 283–84, 302. 96 Stajić interview. 97 Marinković interview; Reljin interview. 98 Dwork, Children with a Star, 81–89. 99 Pavlović interview. 100 Reljin interview. 101 Pavlović interview. Also Marinković interview; although Marinković’s stepmother was a Serb, she had to report to the Gestapo as well. 102 Greber interview; Reljin interview. 103 Ibid. 104 Marinković interview. 105 Lichtenberg interview. 106 Pavlović interview. 107 Marinković interview. 108 Greber interview; Najhaus interview. 109 Caran interview; Greber interview; Marinković interview; Rozenberg interview. 110 Reljin interview. 111 Vajs interview. 112 Lichtenberg interview. 113 Vajs interview. 114 Marinković interview. 115 Greber interview. 116 Greber interview; Reljin interview. 117 Ćuković interview. 118 Rozenberg interview. 119 Ungar interview. 120 Greber interview; Marinković interview; Najhaus interview. 121 Milićević interview. 122 Vajs interview. 123 Ungar interview. 124 Adam interview; Caran interview. 125 Greber interview; Vajs interview. 126 Caran interview. On playing in the Novi Bečej camp, Ungar interview. 127 Adam interview; Ungar interview. 128 Vajs interview. 129 Marinković interview; Poti interview; Vajs interview. 130 Najhaus interview; Pavlović interview; Poti interview. 131 Reljin interview. 132 Adam interview; Marinković interview; Najhaus interview; Ungar interview. 133 Caran interview. 134 Greber interview. 135 Caran interview; Kockar interview; Ungar interview. 136 Marinković interview; Pavlović interview. 137 Caran interview; Lichtenberg interview; Marinković interview; Pavlović interview. 138 Lichtenberg interview. 139 Greber interview; Marinković interview; Pavlović interview. 140 Greber interview; Reljin interview. 141 Pavlović interview. 142 Marinković interview. 143 Kockar interview. 144 Adam interview; Pavlović interview; Poti interview. 145 Pavlović interview. 146 Reljin interview. 147 Greber interview. 148 Adam interview; Ungar interview. 149 Stajić interview. 150 Vajs interview. 151 Reljin interview. 152 Adam interview. 153 Reljin interview. 154 Marinković interview. 155 Reljin interview. 156 Milićević interview. 157 Kockar interview; Reljin interview. 158 Marinković interview. 159 Lichtenberg interview. 160 Rozenberg interview. 161 Ungar interview. 162 Lichtenberg interview; Marinković interview; Pavlović interview. 163 Caran interview; Stajić interview. 164 Kockar interview; Bajford, Staro Sajmište, 38–41. © 2018 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Hidden in Plain Sight: Jewish Children’s Survival in the Occupied Serbian Banat
JF - Holocaust and Genocide Studies
DO - 10.1093/hgs/dcy059
DA - 2018-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/hidden-in-plain-sight-jewish-children-s-survival-in-the-occupied-Xs1KfiKVHn
SP - 424
VL - 32
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -