"As far as I remember, when I saw that they were separating at the entrance to Auschwitz, it was logical to me that they were separating into those able to work and those unable to work, and that those able to work would be better fed, I had no idea that they would immediately kill those unable to work. When I got to the SS doctor who decided who was healthy and who was not, I just said: 'Ich bin arbeitsfähig!' (I am able to work!); he didn't care. And at the age of 15 and a few months, I was there, on the edge of a knife, whether I was fit to work or not, although there were children my age who were declared fit, like a certain Georges Fenier, who later lived in Paris, then killed himself , like many former inmates.
There was talk about concentration camps and what was happening to Jews all over Europe, but we didn't believe it was true. Back in Auschwitz, when a camp inmate asked me, 'What does that smell like?' replied: 'It's your parents', I believed they were exaggerating. Why do they say such disgusting things, that people are immediately burned? That it was true, I realized a little later. Until then, everything was an interesting adventure, and then the struggle to survive the next five minutes or the next day was more important than everything else", said Ivan Ivanji in a big interview for "Vreme" after the collegium had chosen him as a personality in 2016 year.
From Auschwitz, where he was registered on May 27, 1944, as "fit for work", after a few weeks he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, in whose work commandos he was a slave for the next year, until liberation. The famously cynical inscription "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free), which was the marketing slogan of Auschwitz, has been replaced in Germany by the equally ominous Buchenwald label "Jedem das Seine" (To each his own), written in the style of Weimar Bauhaus Nazis exiled, which adorned the iron gate of the camp on the Ettersberg hill, above the city of Goethe and Schiller. But that is another and long story about which he wrote a novel Wrought iron letters.
That year marked the unusually long life of Ivan Ivanji, but his children and grandchildren were not affected in any way by this early game with death: he never imposed the subject on anyone, he would fall into the abyss he carried inside himself and emerge from it with a new books, starting with the first novel They did not kill the man, which he wrote as a twenty-five-year-old.
Despite the advice of well-intentioned psychiatrists, he never went to therapy, he said that by writing he freed himself from the burden that the camp had placed on his shoulders. He loved to tell stories, even at that age, but he abhorred any pathos, shrugging his shoulders that the audience "expects whining" from authors who survived the Holocaust. They did not hear from him.
photo: a. IvanVISIT TO THE BUCHENWALD CAMP IN 2023 AND THE CAMP NUMBER OF IVAN IVANJI
The witness
But when someone asked him about the camp days and the "time of evil" he witnessed, even though he was tired of talking about it, he readily answered, he considered it his duty to convey what happened, so that it would never happen again, saying the truth and only the truth, but not claiming a monopoly on the whole truth, aware that no one can encompass its entirety.
Although he had an incredible, "elephant" memory, he questioned his every memory, dug through all available documents, eventually filled his library with hundreds of books about concentration camps, forced labor in Hitler's Germany, Nazism, fascism and their prophets. If you asked him about an event from half a century or more ago, he would readily answer what was said by whom on that occasion, what was the weather like, what was eaten and drunk, what were the reactions of those present, who looked at whom grimly or kindly. …
In his words: "I'm tired of writing and talking about the Holocaust, I'm interested in what's happening today." But, I think it's my duty to answer questions, when I'm already alive, and someone always appears to ask questions. I am not shaken when I remember what happened, when I speak and write about the events that I experienced as a boy of fifteen and sixteen. That's not the problem. My eternal dilemma is how to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, in terms of Anglo-Saxon legislation. Nobody knows the whole truth anyway. And my memory is deceptive, few details remained clear, much was lost in the fog of oblivion". His flirtation with the "fog of oblivion" was not taken seriously by those who knew him.
For more than half a century, he kept a diary called "Zbrda-zdola" in which he briefly recorded the most important private and world events so that he could refresh his memory later. It not only says what, for example, Tito said to Schmidt, but also where his daughter travels with the "Lole" ensemble (KUD "Ivo Lola Ribar") or, later, how his grandchildren celebrated his great-grandchildren's birthday.
It already belongs to the period he wrote about in the novel My beautiful life in hell.
He refused to be seen as a Holocaust writer because, really, he wrote anything and everything - from historical novels, to science fiction and crime stories, to children's books. Trilogy about Roman emperors Diocletian, Konstantin i Julian he considered his most important literary legacy.
SURGERY WITH HATE
I never heard him speak hatefully about anyone. He said that the feeling of hatred was unknown to him. He warned after the Second World War that one should not say "Germans" when referring to the Nazis, and later, in Germany and Austria, that they should not say "Serbs" when referring to Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic and their criminal gangs .
He was happy to praise his young colleagues in public, and if he had nothing to praise, he would remain silent. He helped whoever he could and never expected thanks. At the same time, he said that he does not expect anything good from people because that way he cannot be disappointed, but only pleasantly surprised when it turns out that he was wrong.
For us, Ivan Ivanji was a father, grandfather, great-grandfather. We fell into his speech, rolled our eyes when he repeated some story we had heard countless times, impatiently reacted to his speeches, the kind that all older relatives recite to their younger ones. He used to say that he likes to give lectures only because no one interrupts him there. And at countless lectures and meetings, the audience would swallow his every word. He was a gifted speaker and one of those rare people who knew how to change and inspire those who happened to listen to him.
To what extent, it was seen by people's reactions after his death, which came "suddenly" at the age of 96, because somehow he seemed immortal. Sam has repeated countless times that his warranty expired many decades ago.
He was not at all afraid of death, he was afraid of pain and, above all, of physical weakness. Independent, as he had been all his life, the very thought of being dependent on others was a nightmare for him.
photo: private archiveGRADUATE: Ivan Ivanji 1947.
A WORKHOLIC AND AN EPICUREAN
He started living alone at the age of sixteen, right after the camp. He refused to let one of the few relatives who survived Shaw be his guardian, saying that after the Nazis, he had had enough of any guardianship. Apart from the doctor, I never heard that he asked anyone for any help. He was uncomfortable with that, as well as listening to praise at his expense.
His life was filled with work. "You can always work, even when you're sick," he said. "Then you just work a little slower." I remember how, under a kidney attack, he sat down at the writing table to finish something, groaning in pain. The number of his bibliographic units, more than 150, if I am not mistaken, and that without newspaper articles, of which 26 novels, speaks for itself. He wrote in both German and Serbian, as he wanted.
But his life was far from work. On the contrary, he was an Epicurean. He considered every day after his release from the camp a gift to be enjoyed. As a child from a bourgeois family that also had its own governess, which he wrote about in the novel The governess, who was left without parents and childhood overnight, hoarding money, real estate, expensive cars or wardrobe meant nothing to him. He lived with the awareness that everything can disappear in one breath and that you should live for the moment you are in.
He liked to eat and drink well, he spent two months every summer with his family always in the same room with a large terrace and a view of the sea in the hotel "Slavija" on Slovenska beach, but it never occurred to him to buy a house by the sea, which the Yugoslav middle class could afford without major problems by taking out loans. "It is mine to teach you how to live beautifully", he told my sister and me. And what we will do with it is our business.
And as far as crises in life are concerned, you overcome them with the awareness that "you can do what you have to only if you want to". You don't look forward, you don't look back, you survive hour by hour, day by day. That's how he survived the camp.
photo: private archiveVISIT OF TITA SR TO GERMANY 1974: Vili Brant, Ivan Ivanji, Miloš Minić
TITO AND THE PARTY
Ivan Ivanji believed in Yugoslav self-government, in the Yugoslav type of socialism. He loved Tito. I told him that he found in Titus a surrogate for the father he had said goodbye to when he was twelve years old, for paternal authority, to have Water complex, and he accepted it with a smile. He remained a Titoist until the end, without any illusions about all his mistakes and shortcomings of the SFRY, warning that everything should always be viewed in a historical context. He was disgusted by the pernicious nationalism that flooded the now post-Yugoslav area.
When Slobodan Milošević took power in the League of Communists of Serbia in 1987, he returned the party card with the explanation that he had not left the party, but that the party had left itself. Until the end of his life, he adhered to the maxim that a man without principles and character is nobody and nothing, aware that a man with such an attitude is considered a fool in today's Serbia. He was incorruptible.
An individual by nature, he has never been part of any group, clique, faction, or bar association. He found his homeland in Yugoslavia, when it fell apart he remained stateless despite the Serbian and Austrian citizenship he had. "My hometown is Bečkerek, and I'm at home in my apartment in Voždovac," he said. He wrote about that, about identity, in his last novel Loneliness of the minority, which he considered his best literary work.
BALLERINA
photo: private archiveDRAGANA AND IVAN IVANJI: In their apartment in Voždovac
Dragoslava Nikolić was born in a house in Rakovica. Her mother died at the age of twenty-six from tuberculosis. The father, a carpenter, a pre-war communist, joined the First Proletarian Brigade in 1941 and went into the forest. He told the children that he was going to fight for their better future, to be good, and that he would come back when he won. He didn't come back. He was blown up by a shell on Sutjeska. She only found out after the war. She waited for him until then.
During the occupation, her uncle, a surrealist, painter, salon communist, looked after her, her sister and brother. He cooked nettle soup, made snail stew when there was nothing else. In the yard of the small family house, he staged plays for children. She would dance, she danced all the time, jumping to the rhythm of some imaginary music. She never stopped playing.
Radojica Živanović Noe sketched her with a pencil dancing, raising her leg to her head, sleeping. I have a whole series of drawings at home that show her in motion. His self-portraits from that time show him staring blankly at something ominous. Or he was just concerned with his sister's three children in the middle of a world war.
The fight for the liberation of Belgrade began. "The war is over!" Noah exclaimed one day. He said he was going to the center to celebrate, ordered them not to leave the house, said he would come before dark. He never came back. Just like her father never came back. "A stray bullet", it was said later, although there are other versions of the same death. She didn't much care how he died when he didn't come back. All her life she fought against the feeling that the people she loved would not return wherever they went.
She was nine years old when the war in Yugoslavia ended. Many aunts and uncles sold the family house, and put her, her slightly older sister and slightly younger brother in a home for orphans in Zvečanska. She never held it against them. When they started to show concern for the children of the deceased brother, the aunts wanted him to study to become a textile or printing worker. And she wanted to dance, she just wanted to dance.
She enrolled herself in ballet school with the then famous Nina Kirsanova. She almost finished it, not because of the game - she danced like a real little ballerina, her every step and jump filled the room with joy - but because of the piano. The ballet school was mostly attended by girls from bourgeois families who had a piano at home and private music lessons, and she was an orphan from Zvečanska. They called her "kangaroo" because it seemed as if she jumped into another world when she performed grande jeté, to a world where her uncle, father and mother applaud her on the open stage.
On the occasion of my father's death, I am giving this much space to my mother because it would be inappropriate to write about him and not her. Ivan Ivanji fell in love with a ballerina of the Contemporary Theater in Terazije who was six years younger when he was 36 years old. She was his life, he dedicated a novel to her Ballerina and war. They were married for more than half a century. Two people who lost their parents as children, whose graves they did not even know, found in each other what believers find in God.
Ever since she left him on Holy Saturday nine years ago, he diagnosed himself with insanity because he talked to her every day. Every time something nice happened to him, he would feel ashamed that he was still alive and she was gone. The smile was wiped from his face.
Disciplined and responsible as he was, he didn't join her right away because he still hadn't finished all the work. He wrote two books a year in two languages and countless articles for "Vreme".
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.
"Take care of those children," he said. "Their drowning in the sea is as terrible as the suffocation of Jewish children in gas chambers." He was concerned about a world that was once again at a crossroads.
photo: a. IvanTHE BOOK OF MOURNING: The State Hall of the Weimar Assembly
DEATH IN WEIMAR
Dad didn't wait for death, he went to meet it. Like so many times before, we left for Weimar on May 4th. He could no longer travel alone, but he loved it.
While we were in the city of the "brightest and darkest" that Germany has to offer, he blessed the cover of his new book which, like all the previous ones, is published by Laguna under the title Once upon a time in Yugoslavia, had a literary evening in the Weimar theater dedicated to Bauhaus under National Socialism and read from novels Wrought iron letters, opened the Museum of Forced Labor in Nazi Germany in Weimar, gave thirty interviews to the German media.
Then he dined on asparagus and drank white wine in Goethe's favorite tavern "The White Swan", talked about his white swan Dragana, went to Hitler's favorite hotel "Elephant" where he liked to stay despite the Führer, lay down in bed and fell asleep, this time forever, on Victory Day over fascism on May 9, 2024, at the age of 96, in the city to which the Nazis had deported him in spring 80 years ago with the intention of killing him, barely ten kilometers from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Finally he had done all the work.
If he had described the death of one of his heroes like that, I would have told him: "He's overdoing it, dad, that's a bit too symbolic." And that wasn't even all. The Christian holiday of the Ascension, the day when Jesus ascended to heaven, was celebrated, so church bells rang throughout Weimar. A classical music concert was held in the hotel hall, where he often had literary evenings. Two days later, the Book of Mourning was exhibited in the City Assembly.
As if he staged his own death, Ivan Ivanji left on his own terms. Not only did they fail to kill him, but he left behind two children, four grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and a deep furrow in the climate where he lived. Curious to the very end, he wondered what would grow out of it in the end.
photo: Mike SchuckHONORARY CITIZEN: Weimar, 2022
A nice life in hell
Writer, translator and author of "Time" Ivan Ivanji 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...
Among others, he translated into German Kisch and Albahari, from German Brecht, Borchert, Grass, Bell, Encesberger, Jaspers. He translated Hungarian poetry into Serbian.
He worked as a teacher of design geometry, as a journalist, was the artistic director of the Contemporary Theater in Terazije, deputy manager of the National Theater, Tito's translator for German. He was a guest, as he himself said, 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 an honorary citizen of Weimar, holder of the highest state decoration of the province of Thuringia, orders of Germany and Austria. As far as the author of this text is aware, he has never received a single recognition from the SFRY, its successors under various names and the state of Serbia.
He was born in Zrenjanin on January 24, 1929 in a secular Jewish medical family. His parents were killed shortly after the German occupation in 1941. He survived the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Later he wrote about "his beautiful life in hell".
