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ŠABAC, Serbia (JTA) — Recently, in the Serbian town of Šabac, Borka Marinković, 69, sat around a table with half a dozen teachers, none of them Jewish, and talked about her complicated life as the daughter of survivors of the ‘Holocaust.
Marinković’s mother was interned in a concentration camp on the Croatian island of Rab, but in 1943 partisans rescued her and she joined the resistance as a cryptographer. She then meets Marinković’s father, a Yugoslav partisan.
Three years later, after the war ended, they married and started a family, but they rarely spoke of the horrors they had endured. It was only at the age of 15 that Marinković, née Salcberger – whose first name means “fighter” – learned that she was Jewish.
“In 1983, I married a Serb and happily took his last name. Somehow it helped me assimilate into the new society,” Marinković said. “But the ethnic wars of the 1990s made me relive the Holocaust, and at one point in my life I felt ashamed for having kept my Jewish identity a secret. »
Marinković, who told her story calmly but brought her entire audience to tears, eventually wrote a book about the tortured experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors like her.
“This is the first time I have spoken with teachers,” Marinković told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency through a translator after her story, which was followed by a breakout session in which educators discussed how to use storytelling in the classroom. “I get emotional when I talk about my parents, but I think this message is very important for future generations. »
Marinković and two other second-generation survivors were attending a seminar with 30 Serbian teachers at the Sloboda Hotel in Šabac (pronounced SHA-betz), a town on the Sava River whose small Jewish community was decimated during the war. The hotel is just two blocks from a National Bank branch where, in August 1941, the Nazis hanged ten prominent Šabac Jews from utility poles.
The event was organized by The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust and Human Rights Studies (TOLI) — a New York-based nonprofit organization that provides Holocaust education programs to teachers in the United States and Europe — in collaboration with local partner Terraforming, a Serbian civil society organization which teaches about the Holocaust and combats anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
Svetlana Maksimovic, 43, an English teacher at the seminary in the southern Serbian town of Prokulje, said “Serbs don’t know about the Holocaust.”
“Even the most educated Serbs don’t know much about it,” said Maksimovic, a Serbian Orthodox woman who visited Israel last summer. “I think the fact that this subject is now taught in schools is a big step for the Serbian education system.”
Serbian teachers participating in the TOLI seminar on Holocaust education, accompanied by three daughters of Holocaust survivors, gather in front of the recently restored synagogue in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)
Oana Bajka, TOLI’s associate director of international programs, said the August 21-24 event marked the 54th such seminar for TOLI and the third such seminar in Serbia; the previous two, in 2021 and 2022, took place in Novi Sad, about an hour by bus north of Šabac. TOLI now operates in 11 countries across Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain and Ukraine.
“In every country, teachers understand the responsibilities of their governments during the Holocaust,” said Bajka, who joined TOLI in 2019 and works in an office in Timasoara, Romania. “This is one of our biggest challenges, as governments often find it difficult to recognize their collaboration with Nazi Germany.”
Often, Bajka says, people tend to identify with their country’s good deeds while overlooking the crimes. For example, she said, “in Bulgaria there is a lot of talk about saving Bulgarian Jews, and not so much about Bulgaria’s role in the deportation of Jews from Thrace and Macedonia.”
Under the presidency of Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia – like Poland, Hungary and more recently Slovakia – has shifted politically to the far right in recent years. Local fascist and neo-Nazi groups are motivated by traditional anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Anger over the 2008 declaration of independence of predominantly Albanian-speaking Kosovo – which most Serbs view as an integral part of their country – has also fueled the rise of intense nationalism in the country of 7.1 million. inhabitants, including around 3,000 Jews.
Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, head of the educational department at the Jewish Museum of Galicia in Krakow, Poland, makes this point during a TOLI educational seminar on the Holocaust in August 2023 in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)
Anti-Semitism and Holocaust discourse are also problems elsewhere in the Balkans and parts of Eastern Europe. Last year, the Romanian nationalist AUR party issued a statement calling Holocaust education – which had just been made compulsory in Romanian high schools – a “minor subject”. His comments were condemned by David Saranga, then Israeli ambassador to Romania. But on August 28, Saranga’s successor, Reuven Azar, met the president of the AURGeorge Simion, after the latter admitted that Romania was indeed responsible for the murder of Jews on the territory it held during World War II.
Natalija Perišić, a resident of Šabac, decided to act on this issue after reading the book “Sophie’s Choice”. Author William Styron based Sophie on Hungarian Holocaust survivor Olga Lengyel, whose 1946 book, “Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz,” was one of the first accounts published on the Nazi genocide.
Perišić claims that the murder of six million Jews is of particular significance in Serbia, which contributed to the July 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War. 2013, Tomislav Nikolić, then Serbian president, apologized for the “crime” of Srebrenica but refused to call it a genocide.
“We consider ourselves a nation composed of a people opposed to fascism and we like to think of Serbian courage,” Perišić said. “But I don’t think we’ve learned any lessons from the 1990s.”
Belgrade educator Alexander Todosijevic, president of the Association of History Teachers of Serbia, said the program was particularly timely, given the pressure teachers now face over how they present history. history.
“It is very important that Serbian teachers know about the Holocaust and are motivated to teach it,” he said, adding that the seminar, which offered teaching approaches, had become popular in Serbia. More than 150 teachers applied to participate this year alone.
RELATED: The Jewish community of a Serbian town barely survived the Holocaust. Now it might disappear.
TOLI also takes seminar participants to sites “related to Jewish heritage and local history,” Bajka said. On the program this year, a scientific presentation on the unfortunate Transport Kladovo – a secret effort to help 1,051 Jewish refugees flee Nazi-occupied Europe via the Danube and the Black Sea to then-Palestine. The efforts ended in failure when their chartered ship ran aground at Šabac and the Nazis killed almost everyone on board or in the Sajmište concentration camp near Belgrade.
The teachers visited the burned remains of a mill that had temporarily housed around 500 refugees from the Kladovo transport, as well as a small synagogue where Jews from Šabac prayed.
Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, who heads the education department at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland, said these teachers were “on the front lines.”
“They have direct contact with young people and we must support them,” she said. “Local leaders or NGOs don’t have this kind of contact. And if teachers are incompetent or don’t know much, they will never risk interacting with students on such a difficult subject.”
Suzkiewicz, 38, is not Jewish, but she can identify with the Holocaust because her grandmother was a forced laborer in Germany. In Poland, where 90% of the country’s 3 million Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps, “historical facts are putting us in the spotlight, and that is something we will never escape,” he said. she declared.
“We cannot separate Jewish stories from Polish stories. At one point I felt robbed because I hadn’t been taught much about Jews at school and was therefore not properly prepared for my visit to Auschwitz,” she said. declared. “For many, the Holocaust is very distant. But the atrocities are not that far away and when the war in Ukraine broke out, they understood that Auschwitz could happen again.”
A memorial in the courtyard of the synagogue in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, lists the names of Jewish partisans killed while fighting the Nazis during World War II. (Larry Luxner)
Local partner of TOLI in Serbia, Terraforming, was founded in 2008 by Miško Stanišić. A non-Jew born and raised in Sarajevo, Stanišić fled in 1992 during intense fighting between Serbs and Bosniaks, taking refuge in the Netherlands and then Sweden. He now lives in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city which was once home to a large Jewish community.
“I believe the majority population should be responsible for protecting the minority and giving voice to those who are weak,” he said.
Terraforming also produced a series of educational Holocaust graphic novels based on biographies, Stanišić said.
“It’s not just stories, but also combined educational materials including primary sources, maps and historical photos. Everything is digital,” he said. “We target young people aged 10 to young adults. There obviously aren’t enough visual resources to tell these stories. »
There are also not many eyewitnesses left of the Holocaust in Serbia. In fact, Stanišić said, “just a handful, maybe 10 survivors, all over 90 years old. This is why we invite the second generation.
Maksimovic, Prokulje’s English teacher, became fascinated with the Holocaust after reading “The Letters of Hilda Dajč.” Aleksandr Zograf’s graphic novel is based on the memories of a Jewish architecture student who volunteered to work as a nurse in the Nazi concentration camp Staro Sajmište and was later gassed there – along with 6,000 other women , children and elderly men – in the spring of 1942.
“His letters really moved me. I compare her to Anne Frank,” Maksimovic said. “We have also had wars here and we know what genocide means. It is very important to address this topic from a young age, so that it does not happen again more. And there is a way to teach this to children, without horror, in a way that they understand.
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