DEPORTATION OF THE JEWS OF BAČKA IN 1944 LIBRARY SPECIAL EDITIONS Editor-in-Chief Nebojša Kuzmanović, PhD © Copyright: 2021, Archives of Vojvodina DEPORTATION OF THE JEWS OF BAČKA IN 1944 Edited by Aleksandar Bursać Vladimir Todorović Petar Đurđev Novi Sad - Ramat Gan 2021. CONTENT The Importance of Research and Documentation of the Bačka Community – a Case Study (Zehavit Gross) . 7 Good and Evil (Isaac Asiel) . 19 Never again (Yahel Vilan) . 21 About the Book (Dan Oryan) . 23 Foreword (Aleksandar Nikolić) . 24 Introduction (Petar Đurđev) . 28 Victims of the Deportation of the Jews of Bačka in 1944 . 62 Clarification Vladimir( Todorović) . 62 List of Victims . 65 Material about the Deportation of the Jews of Bačka in 1944 in the Archives of Vojvodina fonds F. 183, Commission for Investigation of Crimes Com- mitted by the Occupiers and Their Collaborators in Vojvodina – Novi Sad (1944–1948), 1941–1950 (Aleksandar Bursać). 257 Documents of Occupational Authorities . 267 Survivors Testimonies . 274 Afterword: Remembering the holocaust (Nebojša Kuzmanović) . 413 5 Prof. Zehavit Gross, Chairholder, UNESCO Chair for Values Education, Tol- erance & Peace and the Sal van Gelder Center for Holocaust Reaserch & Instruction, School of education, Bar Ilan, Israel THE IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION OF THE BAČKA COMMUNITY – A CASE STUDY Introduction – The Holocaust as an unprecedented event in human history The atrocities of the Holocaust are among the most devastating in human history. The aim of the Nazi ideology was to completely destroy the Jewish civilization. Following their military conquests, they systematically turned various locations in Europe into mass murder and killing sites, while other sites where Jews were incarcerated became huge experimental laboratories to test the limits of human endurance, both physically and psychologically. The Nazis set new levels of human evil, especially through their implementation of industrialized murder (Gross, 2011). This led to the systematic genocide of the Jewish people through unprecedented methods and efficiency. The war against the Jews, carried out so effectively during the Holocaust, led to Hitler and the Nazis prioritizing the destruction of European Jewry over other aspects of the Second World War. This was because it stemmed from pure ideological motives of racism, in the belief that the world should be cleansed and purified from the Jews who were perceived by the Nazis – due to their race and for no other apparent reason – as a menace and a threat to human civilization. In effect, the Holocaust was an unprecedented attempt to alter human civilization while completely obliterating the legacy of humanism and enlightenment. The term Holocaust was given to the annihilation of European Jewry and the genocide against Jews in all areas controlled by the Nazis and their allies during World War II (1939-1945). Before the Holocaust, Europe was the largest Jewish center in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many Jewish cultural, ideological and social movements flourished there, such as Hasidism, the Musar movement, Haskalah (Enlightenment), Zionism and the Jewish Labor Bund. Many yeshivas were founded there, along with Jewish schools of various religious ideological philosophies (Gross, 2010). All of these were completely destroyed during the Holocaust. World War II was fought mainly on European soil, and to a lesser extent in North Africa and Asia. As a result, most of the Jews who were murdered and the communities that were lost were considered part of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. However, there were Sephardi Jews in Yugoslovia, which included Serbia and Croatia, with 66,000 of the 80,000 7 Jews in Yugoslavia being murder (Birri-Tomovska, 2012). In the Balkans, especially in Thrace, Macedonia and Greece, including Salonika, Jews were also annihilated, with 98% of the Jews living in these areas being murdered (Matkovski, 1982). The Sephardi Jews in North Africa suffered from the Nazi conquest, especially in Tunisia where concentration camps were established, but most were not deported to the death camps of Europe. Rommel’s drive through North Africa was stopped at el-Alamien before the German army could advance further into Egypt and occupy the Arab countries, whereby the Mizrachi Jews escaped the Nazi destruction, as did the Jews of the Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) in Mandate Palestine. One of the Jewish centers in Europe was the Jewish community in Bačka, which had a vibrant Jewish life with a strong Jewish community and active Jewish institutions that created a Jewish culture which had its own unique features, drawn from the characteristics of that part of the Southeastern Europe,including its prayer style and other special cultural traditions, but also had characteristics similar to those of Jewish institutions in other parts of the world. Following the imposition of direct Nazi control of the Horthy government in Hungary and the German forces entry into Hungary in March 1944, including the territories annexed by it, among which was Bačka Jews across the country were hounded into ghettos. From May, onward, many were deported largely to Auschwitz-Birkenau whereby the majority were sent directly to the gas chambers. Within two months almost half a million Hungarian Jewish were murdered. This was the fate of the Jewish community of Bačka: the Jews were deported and the majority were murdered with its members annihilated. The purpose of this impressive book, entitledDeportation of Jews of Bačka in 1944, edited by Aleksandar Bursać, Vladimir Todorović, and Petar Đurđev, is to describe and analyze the extermination of the Jewish community in Bačka through accurate historical documentation. Daniel Goldhagen (1996) argues that the Holocaust was the greatest and unprecedented genocide of the twentieth century due to the embedded hatred of Jews in the German people and them having the means to carry out this genocide. The Holocaust is more than just a major historical landmark. Its unprecedented character enables us to construe the past in a different light and also helps shape our perception of seminal developments in our own time. The importance of the book and the case of the Bačka community This is an important book which makes a key contribution to Holocaust scholarship for three reasons: 1. Issues of historical and cultural justice; 2. Epistemological reasons; and 3. Cultural-educational reasons, which I will expand and elaborate on below. 8 Reasons of historical and cultural justice Until the current study, the story of the deportation and annihilation of the Bačka community was lost from the pantheon of collective memory of the Holocaust. Even though I am familiar with all aspects of the Holocaust in the various communities I do not remember ever hearing the name Bačka, nor did I hear a word about its connection with the Holocaust. A search of the available databases via google yields limited general basic information about the place, but until the publication of this book there was no in-depth study that could serve as the basis for what is known in research circles as systematic scholarship of memory. I have no doubt that the reason for Bačka’s omission from the pantheon of collective memory of the Holocaust stems from socio- political reasons. Theories dealing with social justice are based on the theory of John Rawls (1971). Rawls, a 20th century American philosopher, established the demand for fairness and justice in social infrastructure structures (Rawls, 2001) and I would like to extend the definition to cultural structures as well. Theories of justice claim that all human beings are equal and that everyone has equal human and civil rights and is therefore entitled to have equal access to the world’s resources and economic, social or environmental abundance. In this context, I will extend the definition to cultural abundance as well. Rawls (1971) demanded that there be an orderly and transparent system that would manage the social, economic and political institutions in such a manner as to enable an equitable distribution of the word’s economic, social and cultural resources. Unfortunately, in the field of Holocaust research, documentary injustice is evident, since some places, mainly in Poland, have received extensive and detailed documentation, and considerable financial resources and human capital have been invested in them, while other places in Europe, such as Transnistria and the Balkans, have been less extensively documented and, consequently, we have relatively sparse information about them. The budgetary difficulties faced by the Bačka Holocaust documentation project attest to this lack of fair distributive justice in the Holocaust remembrance commemoration project and needs to be addressed by the key institutions and granting bodies involved in this field. This book is intended to address this specific gap and provide cultural justice to this culturally rich and important community of Bačka in the Balkans that was destroyed and was unable to recover from the Holocaust to this day. Thus, this book is not only a significant intellectual contribution but also addresses an important omission and provides historical cultural justice to the community and especially enlightening our scholarship of an area that has been neglected and has not yet received the attention that it deserves. Thus, in practice, the book returns the Jews of Bačka in particular, and the Jews of Serbia and the former Yugoslavia in general, to the pantheon of collective memory of the Holocaust and gives them a place of honor in its commemoration. 9 The epistemological aspect: history versus memory The exclusion of Bačka’s memory from the pantheon of memory is puzzling and particularly striking in view of the fact that most of its residents were deported and murdered mainly in Auschwitz, although they were also dispersed to other death camps. Their exclusion from the collective memory of Auschwitz is also thought-provoking and will require in-depth research that goes beyond the boundaries of this study.