12/8/2022 0 Comments A serbian film wikiLike most of Belgrade’s Jewish men, he was likely shot by firing squad and buried where he fell in a mass grave in the city. Poland officially approves law that limits Holocaust restitution claims, sparking global Jewish outrage Gabe Friedman August 16, 2021Ī German document reveals my grandfather’s death date: Nov. The sign is now back up, a testament to the perseverance of Belgrade’s small remaining Jewish community. When we visited this historic site it was unmarked, as someone had stolen the commemorative sign. Our guide told us Belgrade’s small Jewish community had raised the funds for a commemorative marker. Without getting out of the car, we saw a few long, low, crumbling buildings and a small, overgrown yard. When my father and I visited Topovske Šupe in May 2017, we could see its entirety from the street. I never got the chance to meet her, as she died at the age of 50. Six years later, in 1948, when my grandmother immigrated with my father and aunt to Israel, a part of her still hoped my grandfather would meet them there. She clung to the hope her husband and other prisoners had been moved to work elsewhere, but never got word of what had happened.īy 1942, Belgrade would be one of the first cities declared by the Nazis to be “judenfrei,” free of Jews. One day in the fall of 1941, she found the gate to Topovske Šupe open and the camp empty. Prisoners were utterly dependent on their families for food, and my grandmother regularly visited to bring my grandfather supplies. Later, she discovered the men were being held at Topovske Šupe, a new concentration camp situated on a former army barracks in Belgrade. The night he didn’t return, my grandmother, pregnant with my aunt, screamed and wailed. Initially, like all Belgrade’s Jewish slave laborers, my grandfather came home to sleep each night. It is one thing to know that Nazis enslaved and murdered your grandfather it is quite another to see the mundane details of his suffering neatly typewritten. ![]() My grandfather dug ditches to restore the city’s destroyed sewer system. Holocaust Memorial Museum, typed in Serbian, with my grandfather’s name, Alexander Brill, and the names of his Jewish neighbors. The following week, Nazis registered Belgrade’s Jewish men and forced them to do hard labor, mainly repairing damage from the bombing. The best way to remember the Holocaust? Preserve our American democracy. My father, who wasn’t yet three years old, remembers sitting in the bomb shelter with other frightened, silent civilians. ![]() My father’s grandfather Heinrich, his namesake, lived in Dorcol and was killed in a direct hit to his building. ![]() Through my father’s memories, I see him as a little boy, holding tight to his mother’s hand, running through the streets to the closest bomb shelter.The Germans deliberately targeted my family’s Jewish neighborhood. War had not been declared, so residents of Belgrade had no reason to suspect imminent danger, until they were awakened early by the sound of Nazi Stuka’s divebombing the city. ![]() On April 6, 1941, the Nazis launched an early morning surprise bombing. The papers never arrived, and then it was too late. In the months before the Nazis invaded, they paid a large sum for false papers to allow my grandfather the chance to hide his Jewish identity and escape. But my grandparents both understood assimilation was no protection. My grandfather considered himself a Serb first, and then a Jew. The author’s grandparents, Regina and Alexander Brill, on their wedding day.
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