Ivan Ivanji - only he never got to grow old

Na commemoration writer, translator and author of "Time" Ivan Ivanji at the Youth Center in Belgrade, his son, colleagues and friends addressed the crowd. Everyone concluded one thing - his death surprised everyone despite his age, because he was tireless until the last hour.

"Here at 'Vremen', Ivan was, as he liked to say, our oldest associate", said the editor of the weekly "Vreme" Filip Švarm at the beginning of the commemoration.

"For me, and I believe for other colleagues, Ivan was an old sage, a reliable source of all knowledge, a man who was history in himself", said Švarm and added that he sometimes believed that if Ivan did not know someone, that does not exist. Sometimes it seemed to him that if Ivan had not heard of an event, that event had not even happened.

"Kindness, humanity, honesty, perseverance, solidarity are by no means empty words when it comes to Ivan." He lived as he spoke and wrote. He wrote the way he spoke", concluded Švarm.

Ivan stays.

"Ivan accomplished more in his life than what normally fits into a human lifetime. This helped him to miss one thing - he did not get to grow old, although he had it at his disposal for more than 95 years. He wrote his prediction in a poem," said lawyer Tibor Varadi.

"I will always live in the spring, even if the centuries pass until I die, I will die at the age of 19 years. I think he stuck to it. He left without stepping out of spring and spring thinking. He left without a hint of abandonment and I think that makes it easier to understand that he is still with us. Ivan is staying," added Varadi.

Last living link

"With his biological death, an entire era ends, and everything that stretches and looms in the time ahead of us, without him somewhere nearby seems even darker and more hopeless than it would otherwise be." The light that Ivan Ivanji radiated for so long and unsparingly, the optimism, vitality and kindness that surrounded him until the very end, all this exists despite or precisely thanks to the fact that he was a witness and a direct victim of perhaps the most terrible period of human history in general," he said. writer Vladimir Arsenijević.

The president of the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence, Sonja Licht, pointed out that Ivan Ivanji was her last living link in the chain that connected her to the Holocaust.

"He said that he is going to Weimar again on May 4, and that he is planning his next trip to the same destination at the end of August." It was obvious that he couldn't wait to see the cover of his new book Once upon a time in Yugoslavia - the confession of a true Yugonostalgic about what was wrong in that restful country of ours," said Licht, recalling her last conversation with Ivan.

He would be embarrassed by so much praise

"I can see my dad sitting here in the audience before my eyes." Of course not in the first row, somewhere in the second, third. And with a smile on his face, he listens curiously to what the people he appreciated and loved say about him, and he's a little shy because he's a little embarrassed that he's being praised so much," said Ivan's son, Andrej Ivanji.

In the name of the family, two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Andrej repeated that the vitality and alertness of Ivan's spirit until the last hour led to the impression that he was eternal, that he was immortal, and because of that, everyone was taken aback by his leaving.

The last days

"We went to Weimar on May 4. He loved to travel, but he could no longer travel alone. I followed him since his Dragana died nine years ago. And there he was on his home turf. Had a literary evening at the Weimar Theater dedicated to the Bauhaus under National Socialism and read from the novel Wrought Iron Letters. We met friends, went to bars."

According to Andrey, his dad took part in the opening of the exhibition on the last day of his life, then he opened the Museum of Forced Labor in Germany, which was previously postponed several times, but Ivan still waited for it.

"While we were there, the cover of his latest book arrived by email Once upon a time in Yugoslavia. He was satisfied and happy," recalls Andrej.

Then they went to Goethe's favorite tavern, "The White Swan", where he dined on asparagus and drank white wine. In the end, they went to Hitler's favorite hotel where, despite himself, he liked to stay.

"He fell asleep." Not even ten kilometers from the camp that largely marked his truly unusually long life. In Hitler's so-called hotel, and in spite of Hitler, it will now be called the hotel where Ivan Ivanyu died, on Victory Day, with the finished novel. And to make the excessive symbolism even greater, May 9 is a Christian holiday when Jesus goes to heaven, so church bells were ringing all over Weimar," said Andrej.

And it doesn't end there, he adds that in the hall of the hotel where Ivan very often had literary evenings, at the moment when the coffin was being brought out, there was a concert of classical music.

"If he himself had described the death of one of his heroes like that, I would have told him that he was exaggerating, brother, it doesn't really work that way in real life," Andrej Ivanji concluded.

"A beautiful life in hell"

Writer, translator and author of "Time" Ivan Ivanji he died on May 9 at the age of 96.

He wrote 26 novels, some originally in Serbian, some in German, three collections of short stories, three books of poetry, he wrote plays, children's books, memoirs, essays...

He worked as a teacher of design geometry, as a journalist, was the artistic director of the Contemporary Theater in Belgrade, deputy manager of the National Theater, and Tito's translator for German.

He was a guest, as he said himself, in diplomacy as an attaché for culture and press at the Yugoslav embassy in Bonn from 1974 to 1978. Until the collapse of the SFRY, he was the general secretary of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia.

He was born in Zrenjanin in a Jewish medical family. His parents were killed shortly after the German occupation in 1941. He survived the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He later wrote of "his beautiful life in hell."

His life ended where he was deported from Novi Sad as a Jew 80 years ago to die - in Weimar, only ten kilometers from his former camp, in Hitler's favorite hotel, on Victory Day over fascism.

He said he was was given as a gift every day after the camp, that he felt victorious just by staying alive.

As one of the last living witnesses of the "time of evil", he considered it his duty to constantly warn of the dangers of forgetting, of the return of nationalism, racism and modern dictators, of the death of refugee children fleeing wars and poverty in a world that is once again on milestones.

He said that we must never come to terms with the conditions in which we live.