In the 80 years since World War II ended, our knowledge of the Holocaust, has been informed in large measure by survivor accounts, especially from the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and Poland, where the Nazis built many of the concentration camps. There has been far less written about the Jews of Eastern Europe, which first-time author Julie Brill, wanted to change with her book “Hidden In Plain Sight: A Family Memoir And The Untold Story Of The Holocaust In Serbia.” Her family, who had been in Belgrade for centuries, was among the few lucky ones: Brill’s father, paternal grandmother and other family members were able to stay alive under German occupation in a city the Nazis declared to be “Judenfrei” (free of Jews) by Spring 1942. And they had done so without the use of deportations or camps, killing 8,000 Jewish men alone in Belgrade, including Brill’s grandfather, before the end of 1941. Once the center of Sephardic civilization, Belgrade today has only 2,000 Jews (before the war, 12,000 Jews had been part of the fabric of the city).
Shani R. Friedman interviewed Brill (a lactation consultant in private practice in Boston) about what it was like to be an investigator, researcher and archivist over the years she spent on the book, discovering new information about her father, their family and about what happened to the Jewish population of Serbia (the former Yugoslavia).
Shani R. Friedman: Like many post-war Jews and non-Jews, you learned about the Holocaust pretty much exclusively from Jews who had been in Poland and Germany during the War, almost all imprisoned in concentration camps. There was little discussion in your Hebrew school or Temple about the Jews of Eastern Europe. Why do you think that was, and more critically, what do you see as the reasons why there is still little scholarship on the subject?
Julie Brill: Historian Timothy Snyder coined the term “Auschwitz Paradox:” Auschwitz was a death camp, but also a series of work camps. Tens of thousands of Jews, mostly in their teens and twenties, survived these camps and went on to tell their stories. But there were actually more Jews murdered outside camps than in. Most Jews in Eastern Europe died close to where they lived. And they were murdered by bullets early in the war before gas chambers were running. We aren’t as familiar with these stories because there were no survivors to tell them. There are over a million victims whose names aren’t even known, because no one survived to report them murdered.
I wrote “Hidden in Plain Sight” because I wanted someone to tell what happened to the Jews of Belgrade. I wrote it over almost eight years, and the whole time I was saying if someone beats me to do this, I’ll quit the project. But you need survivors and descendants and with 90% of Belgrade’s Jews murdered by early 1942, there just aren’t that many of us to get this history out into the world.
SRF: You mentioned archives with a trove of information that aided your research, archives that only became accessible to the public within the last decade. Would you talk more about that.
JB: The Arolosen Archives were started by the Red Cross to help survivors find each other after the war. The documents were only available for that purpose and only became available to researchers in 2007. The records have slowly been digitized and starting in 2019, have been available to the public online. The first resources I found – birth and marriage certificates – came from the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade. I write in the book how amazing it was to receive a chain of birth certificates of family I didn’t know about. The last link in the chain was my father’s birth certificate. He was born in 1938, less than three years before the German occupation. My aunt was born during the occupation and has no birth certificate.
SRF: You wrote that as a child, you knew that something had happened to your father, your grandfather and the extended family during World War II, but is it fair to say it was an amorphous concept for you at the time, despite your father’s boyhood memories? Why do think that was, since your father, unlike many others from his generation, spoke about his experiences?
JB: Like many descendants of Holocaust survivors, I learned about Holocaust history from the inside out. I learned very small and specific things about my father [that happened] during the war, then gradually more about the context. From the time I was little, my father shared what he could remember of the war. His earliest memory is the German bombing of Belgrade in April, 1941 when he wasn’t even three. The memories were like snapshots, very focused and vivid. But I didn’t know the sequence for them, let alone the greater setting.
I knew my grandfather was murdered by the Germans: that we were talking about the Holocaust. But the stories didn’t fit in with what I’d learned about Germany and Poland. In Belgrade there were no cattle cars. The Jewish men were held in a camp in the city and female relatives brought them food. My father told me my grandmother did this for my grandfather. But I struggled to understand because it wasn’t the “right” story.
SRF: Why did you feel that “Yugoslavia was as utterly inaccessible as Mars”, especially with the Internet and the ability to communicate online overseas by the late 1990s?
JB: I grew up in the 1970s and 80s when there were many barriers, including distance, language, Communism, and then in the 1990s, the Balkan Wars. I gave birth to my daughters in 1996 and 1999, so other issues were top of mind. But even if I’d sat down at my desktop to research, what would I have done? Archives weren’t yet digitized and the information that propelled my discoveries wasn’t yet available. Yugoslavia felt unknowable to me. My father told me that his great-grandfather had been the doctor for the king and that seemed like a fairytale
SRF: What suddenly made you want to write – in your 40s – about your father and your family’s story in Belgrade? Was it always a memoir?
JB: I was obsessed with the Holocaust as a pre-teen, reading every book on [it] in my town and temple libraries, and considering which of my friends and neighbors would hide me if necessary, and if my light hair would help me to pass. After that, I tried to put it out of my mind as much as possible, which of course didn’t make it disappear. When my younger daughter started college in 2017, I suddenly had time for passion projects. Initially, I was just researching for myself and my family, but when it became clear that there were few resources in English on the Holocaust in Serbia—at one point I was at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bookstore and saw there were no books under “Y” for Yugoslavia—I knew it had to be a book.
I initially thought I could write just about my family history. But all the early feedback was to make it a memoir so the reader could see these discoveries through my eyes. Of course, how we think about history is shaped by current events. As a Holocaust educator, I think a lot about how and why we tell these painful stories from 80 years ago. We do it because not doing it is unthinkable. And we do it despite the fact that genocides have happened since 1945 and are continuing to happen, in the hopes that we can learn from the past.
SRF: You discovered some long-held family secrets while working on your book: how did you navigate that internally and within your family? What advise would you give to people who decide to look into their family’s pasts and find out something amazing, shocking or both?
JB: What has hit home for me since the book’s release is how many families have secrets and how much we want to be unburdened of them. When we read a memoir, we can feel we know the writer. Because of that, readers have shared with me all sorts of secrets, which has been interesting and unexpected. My experience was primarily one of relief because I think on some level we know that something doesn’t fit or make sense when information is withheld. We want the missing puzzle pieces that make it all make sense.
SRF: What was it like for your father (and all of you) to travel to Belgrade? What sort of Jewish community is there now?
JB: Traveling to Belgrade with my father and my daughters felt like we were returning, although my daughters and I had never been before. At passport control at the airport, the agent said to my dad, “Welcome home.” Across the street from our hotel was a palacinke (crepe) stand. My mother makes them sometimes on a leisurely weekend morning. It was awesome to see them as a featured food in the center of the old city. I felt like my daughters and I looked Serbian, that certain features were reflected in the people we saw, and that also made me feel like we belonged.
There is a small and mighty Jewish community in Belgrade now with one operating synagogue and a Jewish center, both of which we were able to visit. They are in Dorćol, the historic Jewish neighborhood in Belgrade, and both are a few blocks from where my father lived before and after the war.
SRF: Since your book was published, have you heard from other Yugoslavian survivors or their families?
The Jewish community in Serbia has been very supportive and welcoming. I’ve loved connecting with Jews and family from Serbia who all seem amazed to have found someone with a similar background. It’s very likely that some of them are actual cousins and they all feel like family. I also enjoy when a reader reaches out to say their background is completely different, but they could identify with my search or are fascinated by this history that is all new to them.
SRF: What are your plans for the book? Do you have upcoming appearances? Are you going back to Belgrade to talk about it? What’s next for you?
JB: I wrote “Hidden in Plain Sight” so people would know the story of the Jews of Serbia. There has been so much enthusiastic response to the book, and I plan to keep talking about it as long as there’s interest. I’m hoping for a Serbian translation of my memoir and would love to go on book tour in Serbia.
To watch interviews, learn about future appearances and more, go to www.JulieBrill.com.
