| Writing - Division II Earlier this month the world witnessed one of the most horrifying war crimes in recent history. Over the course of nine days, thousands of Bosniak Muslim men near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica were rounded up, detained, and executed by the Serbian army. The death toll has not yet been tallied, but estimates are in the region of eight thousand victims—eight thousand lives, snuffed out with cold-blooded efficiency. Faced with such a fact, something in us seems to rebel in disbelief. How can this be? How can anything so awful, so ruthless, be true? And then, the most disturbing question of all: How can people do such things? This is a personal question for me, because for the last half-century I have been haunted by the memory of another genocide, one carried out on a far grander scale. My name is Jakov Obrenovic. I was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on April 6, 1931. Ten years later, to the day, after two years of war and weeks of turmoil in Serbia, Nazi Germany invaded. Yugoslavia, unable to resist the advancing armies, collapsed like a house of cards, and the Axis powers assumed immediate control. A puppet government was set up, and quickly instituted policies favorable to the Nazi puppeteers—policies that would lay the foundation for the extension of the Holocaust to Serbia. I remember the day my mother told me that, because her family was Jewish, I had to wear a yellow armband when I went out. The idea was utterly foreign to me. Anti-Semitism in Belgrade was negligible before the war, and the history of the Jewish people in Serbia had been tranquil to a degree unheard of elsewhere in Europe. So why did I have to mark myself as an outsider? My mother had no answer to satisfy my ten-year-old naïveté. She could only tell me that times were changing, and that the road ahead would test our endurance as never before. Fifty-four years later, I remember vividly the single tear welling in her left eye as she spoke. Indeed, we were to be tested. Within a few months, my father and my mother and I were transported to the Banjica concentration camp near Belgrade. I could attempt to tell of the horrors of the camp—but to what use? The degradation, the shame, the miseries we suffered at Banjica defy description. What I can tell is that within two years there I was an orphan. My father was a proud Serbian patriot, and he would talk of one day escaping the camp to join the Chetniks, the faction resisting the Nazis. It never happened; his health deteriorated, and he died of yellow fever in January of 1942, a week after my mother succumbed to the same disease, which had ravaged the population of Banjica throughout the winter. I will never forget the last words he said to me: "Jakov, may your generation avoid the mistakes of ours." Forced then by hardship and solitude into a resilient independence, I survived the fever and the camp until I was transferred to Auschwitz. Through luck and determination, I survived that too—barely—until the joyous day the Red Army seized the camp and emancipated the remaining inmates. My father, ever the patriot, had inculcated in me a distrust of the Communists, but the identity of my liberators was in those initial dreamlike moments a nonissue. I was free! I soon learned, however, that freedom could not exorcise the demons that haunted me. From the first night I woke in terror from a nightmare of Banjica, I knew I had no future in Serbia. The knowledge was finalized when the numbers came out: not only my parents, but hundreds of thousands of my countrymen were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. To live with those memories, in the land of the genocide of my people—my two peoples really, the Serbs and the Jews—was unthinkable. I could not leave yet. After all, when Berlin fell, I was not a month past my fourteenth birthday. So I returned to Belgrade to live with my only remaining relatives, my father’s sister and her husband, but always with the intention of emigrating. And so on my eighteenth birthday, having taught myself intermediate English with the help of American magazines, I boarded a plane and left Belgrade behind for New York City. There, my life was renewed. I found an apartment in Brooklyn and a job as a clerk in the offices of the New York Times. My English improved with daily use, and after two years an editor told me he had become convinced of my skill with the language. I began the next month as a journalist of international affairs. For all the horrors we witnessed, those of us who had grown up during the war were an idealistic generation. (Recall the mantra of the postwar years: "never again.") And so, I could not resist the appealing thought that my reporting could help change the world for the better. But in time, the world disabused me of that notion, and I became a cynic. Can you blame me? I saw Korea torn apart by war; I saw the world reach the brink of Armageddon over Cuba in ’62; I saw Vietnamese villages razed to the ground; I saw the Khmer Rouge butcher countless Cambodians. This is the journey that now, at long last, has called me home. I am writing this on a plane overlooking the Atlantic, completing the circuit of a trip started long ago; I am returning from New York to Belgrade. It will be the first time I have set foot in Serbia in nearly fifty years. For three years now the former Yugoslavia has been theater to the bitterest ethnic and religious wars, as Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks struggle for control of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ethnic cleansing practiced by partisans of these factions threatens to escalate into genocide; in Srebrenica, it has already done so. My father’s warning has gone unheeded by the very nation he loved so much. What is it that makes such horrors possible? Let me simplify, particularize the question. What made the Holocaust possible? Well, much has been made of the economic theories. In the wake of the Great Depression, Germans were desperate for change, and that desperation allowed Hitler to come into power. But economic downturn has rarely caused genocide elsewhere, and these hypotheses, at best, only explain the Nazi Party’s rise to power, not the aftermath. To understand the Holocaust, we would do well to look again at the yellow armbands that so perplexed me as a child. These bands represent the great project undertaken by the Nazi propaganda machine: the dehumanization of the Jews, the Slavs, and all those deemed "impure" by the party. Before genocide could take place, it was necessary to sever the condemned from the chain of human solidarity, to mark them as the "other," sub-humans; the armbands did this. Then, and only then, could whole nations be led as Germany was into barbarism and murder. This is what happened half a century ago, and what is happening now in my former homeland. The flames of ethnic and sectarian loyalty have been stoked to murderous intensity. Observant readers will have noticed that earlier I called my father not a "nationalist" but a "patriot." This choice of words was deliberate. The word "nationalism," to my ears, means something more than love for one’s country and people. Nationalism, at its worst, is the tendency to draw a bright line between the in-group and the out-group, the pure and the impure, the elect and the condemned. It is this tendency, in the end, that makes genocide possible. If one’s enemies are in the out-group, if they are beyond the range of empathy, then anything is possible. Their homes may be burnt, their possessions may be stolen, their children may be killed. I am not quite an old man—sixty-four this last April, and healthy—but I am weary with what I have seen in my years. Yet even I am not immune to all hope. Human nature is a struggle between darkness and light. The twentieth century saw its fair share of darkness, but we stand now on the cusp of a new millennium. In the years to come, let us declare that in our deepest selves we are not Germans, not Jews, not Serbs nor Croats nor Bosniaks. We may be these things, but we are first and foremost human beings, equal in dignity and rights. Let us assert once and for all the light within us, and close off forever the ancient road from prejudice to genocide.
Jakov Obrenovic |