Another slow news day. Even the protests have stopped due to ice, cold and boredom. That leaves me bored at home, with 2 hours to go before a handball game I should go to. Our paper is, it seems, small enough that it doesn’t have a sports photographer. It has one other dude and me doing whatever is necessary. It is also small enough that we don’t have a photo editor. But I’m not going to start ranting about that (today. some other time when I’m angrier). Instead, I’m going to look back several weeks, to January 21st.
Since I started working for the paper, I’ve been to, on average, 2-3 assignments a day. Not a lot, I admit, but it’s been a slow couple of months in an otherwise small and deadened town. And, out of all those assignments… well, the first one was significant - on my first day on the job, I got to go to the regional parliament and take photos of the president of the parliament sign a hugely important document for the region, that was a big deal. But, since then, there have been a lot of PR events, some sports (and I hate sports. at least sports photography isn’t as horrible as actually watching or playing them), a lot of sitting around in parliaments. On January 21st, though, I only had one assignment. I had to be at the monument to the victims of fascism and document the memorial service there.
January 21st, 1942, was a cold, cold day in Vojvodina. So cold, in fact, that the Danube was covered with a thick layer of ice. Vojvodina, the northern province of Serbia, was under occupation by the Axis forces since 1942. It would stay occupied until 1944. Novi Sad, and everything north of it were under Hungarian control and, on January 20th 1942, the Hungarian forces were ordered to start a raid. The raid lasted for 3 days and ultimately lead to the arrests and deaths of more than 4,211 people. Most of the victims of the raid were of Jewish, Roma or Serbian ethnicity.
The victims were rounded up by the occupation forces, arrested and then held until they could all be taken to the bank of Danube. They were then shot or just thrown onto the ice that has been weakened and broken by their executioners. Most of the victims drowned in the icy waters, while the survivors, those who managed to survive the cold and the abuse, were then shot while trying to reach the safety of the river bank.
This is an event that still weighs heavily on the older people of Novi Sad. And, since the end of the war, January 21st was always marked with a memorial service for all the victims of fascism. It is a day of calm and mourning for those of us old enough to remember the old memorials, with thousands of people lining up to honor the dead. Now, though, the memorial is but a shadow of what it once was. The memorial of 2010 was marked by extreme colds and a low headcount among the mourners. Just a few church officials from all denominations (orthodox priests, a few rabbis and a few catholic priests), several city officials and a few handfuls of observers and mourners.
To make things more bleak, almost all of the mourners were old, oh so old. These were the people who still remember those hard days, who came there with tears in their eyes, to not only honor the victims of fascism and the raid, but to say another goodbye to their loved ones, to people they lost during the war. So what happens once these people die? What happens once nobody remembers the first-hand horrors of the war? I’ve only been writing this for a short while, but I’ve already twice had to mention the same thing - people here are not only uninformed about current events and history - they seem like they could care less. This is especially true for the younger generations, the kids who don’t really remember the nineties, for whom it was just a period where school breaks happened a bit more often.
And the whole rant above leads me to this amazing guy I’ve met in Norway, Bjørn Ennes. Bjørn works for a Norwegian NGO called neveragain.no. They are dedicated to preserving first-hand recollections of the second world war. Working mostly as documentary filmmakers, they travel around Europe and film interviews with the survivors of WWII, trying to preserve their experiences for the next generations, in an attempt to prevent such atrocities from ever happening again. Sadly, it seems most of their site isn’t translated to English yet, but the videos (with English subtitles and transcripts) should be available to everyone.
