WINDSOR-HEIGHTS HERALD FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 2010

HIGHTSTOWN: Yugoslav exile spins historical tapestry with memoir
Thursday, January 14, 2010 6:50 PM EST
By Matt Chiappardi, Staff Writer

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HIGHTSTOWN — Jasha Levi was covering the United Nations in New York for a Yugoslav news agency when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to quell a spontaneous revolution in 1956.

As he wrote in his recently published memoir, Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia already had been expelled from Cominform — the Soviet-dominated alliance of Communist parties in Eastern Europe — eight years prior. But Tito did nothing to intervene in the 17-day battle that left more than 3,200 people dead.

During those 17 days, the now 88-year-old made the painful decision he wasn’t going to return to his native Yugoslavia.

”I knew then we would never become a democratic society,” the Ashton Lane resident said during an interview late last week. “It was a sudden decision. I had no money and no job.”

Word of his desertion quickly spread back to Yugoslavia, and Mr. Levi soon found out all of his belongings had been pilfered and distributed to other former co-workers.
The situation made him furious, he said, but the disillusion over his home country’s inaction ran much deeper than knee-jerk emotions.

”I lost my religion,” Mr. Levi said, not referring to his Jewish heritage, but to the belief Leninist Communism would be the ideology that delivers social justice.

”Looking back, this was so naive,” Mr. Levi said. “Between the two wars (World War I and II), young Jews didn’t have a choice. There was anti-Semitism no matter where you went. We had no hope in government. We would look to the Soviet Union as our redeemer.”

Already disappointed in Josef Stalin’s and Nikita Krushchev’s Soviet Union and estranged from his Yugoslav homeland, Mr. Levi only had his monthly pay and what few belongings he’d brought to the United States. He had to find a job and quickly.

Through connections he had made with the U.N.’s International Labor Association, he wound up working as an electrician’s apprentice on some Wall Street construction projects.

That’s only one of the stories that make up Mr. Levi’s fascinating life, which he chronicles in his memoirs, “The Last Exile: Tapestry of a Life.” He self-published the book through Amazon.com and Booksurge.com this past October after having it on the drawing board for more than 50 years.

He begins a local speaking tour about his book at the Princeton Senior Resource Center on Feb. 10.

He also was interned in Treviso, Italy, at the height of World War II and started a school for many of his fellow prisoners’ children. When Benito Mussolini fell in 1943, he and others simply walked out of the village where he was interned.

”When we heard the Allies invaded Italy, we decided to pack and go,” Mr. Levi said. “Nobody stopped us. In moments like that, you are taking you life into your own hands.”

One year later, he was back in Yugoslavia, and after some brief training from the British military, he was building bridges for Allied tanks to cross difficult terrain. Soon after, he was fighting Nazis himself as a member of the Allied forces.

Jump ahead to the 1960s, and Mr. Levi could tell you about how he started working for In Touch Network, a New York City agency that records and broadcasts newspapers for the blind and eventually became the organization’s executive director.

Along the way, he spent some time as a draftsman, then sold toys at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York.

As a student in the 1940s in Yugoslavia, he was part of a movement that resisted German occupation after the Nazis attacked Belgrade in 1941. As a reporter, he covered the Paris Peace Conference of 1946 and later the Korean peace talks in 1951.

In fact, finding a way to draw together all these disparate, yet historic, tales was what kept his book in limbo since 1957.

”I was writing it and stopping, then revising it and changing it,” Mr. Levi said. “At one point, I approached it as a fictionalized novel. I tried to approach it as a reporter would. There were so many voices that I had to put together that eventually I gave up.”
Over the years, the friends Mr. Levi would make kept asking him to recount his experiences, and, through some prodding, he started working on the book again a few years ago. By October 2009, it was finally done.

”For some reason, all of my friends were fascinated by the stories I had to tell,” Mr. Levi said. “They said to me, ‘Why don’t you finish writing your book? You’ve been working on it for such a long time.’”

The book opens, not with Mr. Levi’s birth in Sarajevo in 1921, but illustrates how his family has been in that region since the 15th century.

He grew up there, and as a young man, Mr. Levi studied architecture 120 miles away at the University of Belgrade.

”I wanted to study Sanskrit,” he said. “In my heart, I wanted to be a writer or a poet. My father told me, ‘You’ll end up selling frankfurters in Geneva if you become a writer.’”

He was only two years into his studies when the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia.

”We became noncitizens when the Germans entered,” he said. “I had to flee, but I came to be arrested.”

At first, he said, he was forced to cut stones and do roadwork in Sarajevo, but Mr. Levi was lucky enough to be captured before the concentration camps opened.

He was transferred to Italy and held in civilian internment for two years.

”It was a beautiful hamlet of 600 souls where rich tourists would go, but we were not allowed to move outside the confines of the village,” Mr. Levi said.

When he finally returned to Yugoslavia, he landed a series of jobs as a newspaper reporter and editor before he was forced to take refuge in the United States in the mid-1950s.

He moved to New Jersey in 1987, first settling in Plainsboro before moving to the borough in December.

In all this time, through all his experiences, Mr. Levi never had the opportunity to return to Yugoslavia even after the Eastern Bloc fell and most nations in the region turned to democracy.

Yugoslavia ceased to exist in 1992, and the region spent much of the 1990s embroiled in bloody ethnic warfare.

”It’s just incredible,” Mr. Levi said. “It was the destruction of such a beautiful country. It’s still beautiful, but now it’s in pieces.”

Mr. Levi still hasn’t decided if he’ll travel back to Sarajevo, which is now in Bosnia. Belgrade, where he attended the university, is now in Serbia, a different country altogether. And the Balkan wars that followed Yugoslavia’s collapse have left relations among the six nations that resulted from Yugoslavia’s fracture relatively tense.

Mr. Levi speaks with pride about having been born in a culture that once encompassed several religions, languages and even alphabets. And he sounds a bit heartbroken when discussing the result of the breakup.

”In Yugoslavia, sometimes on two sides of mountains, there can be two different languages,” he said. “Serbian is written in Cyrillic, Croatian in Latin. Now they don’t even talk to each other. I suppose the saying we have in Yugoslavia is true. If you don’t have an enemy, your mother will give birth to one.”

Mr. Levi said he has no preconceptions about what he believes readers will take away from his book.

”People my age will certainly remember the times we went through,” he said. “Others can look at it for the politics in there. Some may look at it philosophically.”
Or it may even be something more basic.

”I have a feeling everyone who reads it will have find something of themselves in it.”

mchiappardi

@centraljersey.com

ON THE CHRISTMAS BOMBER

ON THE CHRISTMAS BOMBER

He knew he can do better than his father.

I did, too.

I was Jewish.

He was Moslem.

I know where he is coming from as if he were myself.

His family’s well-being was an affront to the poverty of multitudes. The unjust world must be destroyed and he will be part of the struggle.

.

Young and searching for meaning of life,

Compassionate.

Critical of hypocrisy and corruption in society,

Determined to make a difference,

Living on two parallel and totally separate tracks. One is in the open, guided by his hormones and physical self-awareness, and the other secret, known only to him and a special group of brothers in clandestine quest to change the world.

Fighting the demon of non-manly fear inside him, he forces himself to face sacrifice: arrest, torture, even the unthinkable.

Poetic thought of death is the ultimate romance, too.

The bigger the obstacles, the bigger his determination.

Jesus was a rebel against society of philistines and so is he.

Mohammed preached a just and pure world and so does he.

The quest is sacred and it is not for sale.

The Jewish youth was forced to cry out and once thought that it can conquer the oppression by assassinating hostile politicians.

The Muslim world is being heard because it believes that their oppressors are abroad.

A shoe bomber or an underwear bomber, even the 9/11 bombers - they are all just a nano-flash of impotent rage.

But are we real enemies of each other or just humans following a similar ethos but on different paths?

I don’t know, but I posit that the West will not win by ignoring and even tolerating the conditions which breed the terrorists in the Muslim world. I know it isn’t because of the Jews who have been scapegoated for ever and for everything.

Terrorists can cause havoc individually or in small groups of suicides, but they are in reality small fry, weak and impotent. Instead of getting together en masse to change their own oppressive regimes, as Western youth has done in many a revolution, they resort to their cabals of individual kamikazes. They act big, but in effect only annoy the real or perceived backers of these regimes by acts of individual, self-destructing terror in the West.

My own small and by its very nature anecdotal experience makes me say that we are trying to solve the problem the wrong way - by throwing our money at it, thinking that gold can buy out inconvenient beliefs.

When, after a convulsing and painful decision to abandon the political religion of my youth, I decided not to return to Yugoslavia, it wasn’t because I was attracted by what I saw in the West, but because Tito crushed my ideals by reneging on his promise of democracy.

We had rallied around him in 1948 when he made clear to Stalin that the Yugoslavs will put up a fight if the Soviets try to invade. But now (in 1956) he was refusing to support the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet invasion of Budapest.

I stayed in New York, in need of money, job, dignity.

Along came a Yugoslav representing the CIA. It happens that the man was a slimy individual to whom I took an instant dislike. But to make things worse, he offered to pay me if I agreed to follow a cockamamie political scheme, which would put me to the left of Tito and so, presumably, start a contest for his demise not seemingly of Western origin.

I flatly rejected him and explained this refusal to cooperate to another CIA man, American, well educated, who tried to understand what I stood for, which at the time was even for me hard to find out. I knew only what I was against.

In our many meetings and discussions, his questions boiled down to how I think the US can best counter the Soviet Union? What was my assessment of the East-West conflict?

I remember telling him that the US can not win by buying people.

“Look at me,” I said, “I jumped ship out of my free will, because of ideas in my head, and I am being invited to become a stooge on a payroll”!

The decision not to return home was on impulse, sudden, a decision for which I had not prepared. It came out of my heart. I had no money, no job, just the dignity of doing what was right.

The offer to now buy me seemed only natural to the man the CIA hired to do its Yugoslav thinking. It was utterly offensive to me.

My best advice to the good CIA cop was to compare the Kremlin with the Vatican, both with massive following and unyielding dogmas. People find solace in certainty, I said, in assurances that their dogma is the Right Way. The belief makes the pain of living recede into the background. It is the psychology of mass behavior.

Attract people with the American ideals, I suggested. Don’t turn away people like Sukarno of Indonesia, who grew up on the milk of the Declaration of Independence, but became an inconvenience for the State Department. Or Lumumba, who looked at American struggle for independence as a model for his Congo and meant it.

Why does Washington go around deposing leaders who would be the Washingtons of their countries, liberators of their people?

Why not try living up to the American ideals by deeds, not empty words. Lead by example if still true to them, still remember how your country came about to be.

The Church has abandoned the teaching of Jesus, and gluttony is only the smallest of its sins. The political West promotes idols that reside not among the Founding Fathers but in Wall Street. What is one to expect?

But back to Jews and Moslems, East and West, real or imagined enemies.

So many years later, I have no answers.

The world finally gave the Jews a country to shut them up, but the interests of the new state is colliding with those of its neighbors.

What is the West end up doing about the false prophets of Islam? Try this: the corrupt regimes of the Moslem world must go before the storm dies down.

Until then, there will be young people doing stupid heroics.

Some comments on the memoir

“. . . compelling autobiography . . . started reading last night and stayed up way past my bedtime. Your story, actually stories, have me in awe, and enthralled. JS”

“. . . much enjoyed reading your book, The Last Exile. You’ve had a remarkable life and you’ve rendered it in vivid, interesting detail. I enjoyed the stories about your escapades as a young boy. And, it was fascinating and poignant to read about life in a time gone by. I was touched by your stories of life during World War II. . . Hope your book is getting a good reception. I enjoyed (it) so much I plan to buy several copies as gifts durinh the holiday season. AS”

“I read the Coda first as it contained two folks whom I know. Anxious to meet many others but L. won the toss so he reads first! P.”

War College Seminar November 7, 2009

An address to the FALL IN convention

“Beginning of the End” - 65^th Anniversary, 1944 Campaigns

Presented by Jasha M. Levi

Eisenhower Inn and Convention Center

November 7, 2009,

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

My name is Jasha Levi.

I have an accent which I’ve never lost, couldn’t lose it if I tried. That happens to people born in Sarajevo, a place with a strong tradition of language, history, and literature.

I’ve lived to remember World War II, and, like so many of you, I’m proud to have served.

I was born in Bosnia, barely a mile and seven years before from where the first shot of World War I was fired. Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, was a schoolmate of my father, and Princip got blamed for starting the war.

The Black Hand, a secret organization of Serbian patriots, was behind the assassination, but my father was not part of it. We were Jews, and in the Empire Jews had enough troubles without messing in other ethnic politics.

In 1914 my father and his older brother were conscripted into the Imperial Army. I was told that the brother was driven to suicide by anti-Semitic harassment from his Hungarian superior officer. I was also told that my father contracted tuberculosis on the Russian Front and was returned home to Sarajevo in 1916.

From my earliest youth, my father would tell me how “his” war was to be the last one ever. My generation believed that.

But we would learn, along with millions of others, that it was not to be.

Or, as an old Yugoslav proverb has it: If you don’t have an enemy, your mother will give birth to one. The fratricidal history of the Balkans is witness to the truth of this saying.

With Hitler’s rise to power, war loomed in Europe once more. After the Yugoslav government in Belgrade signed a pact of friendship and cooperation with the Nazis, I joined the vast student movement that would overthrow that government.

So, when Hitler attacked our country in 1941 for breaking the pact it had previously signed with him, even if I shared a bit of the blame for bringing Yugoslavia into the Second World War, I was proud to be a patriot.

Unlike my father’s generation, we were not conscripted into that war. Fearful that the Yugoslav military was unprepared, I and masses of other young patriots besieged army headquarters begging to join up. We were turned away, and within ten days the Axis invaders rolled over Yugoslavia.

Eager to join a resistance movement, we approached the anti-fascist underground, to be turned away again. Its leaders, taking orders from Moscow, claimed it was “too early” for armed resistance. In fact, they were simply dragging their feet as long as Stalin and Hitler were on good terms under the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of friendship and cooperation.

But with the discovery of Operation Barbarossa —Hitler’s blueprint for an all-out attack on the Soviet Union—the non-aggression pact fell apart. At that, the call for partisan uprising spread over Europe like wildfire.

By the time Stalin joined the Allies and allowed resistance in Europe, Sarajevo was firmly occupied by the S.S. and their local satraps, who were joyfully introducing Nuremberg laws and issuing yellow Stars of David to Jews, rounding us up for forced labor. Their next move was to be the death camps of Jasenovac, Stara Gradiška, and other human slaughterhouses in Croatia.

My family, descendants of Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition, had lived in Sarajevo since the 15^th century. We young ones respected our elders’ religion but saw ourselves as Yugoslavs first. To escape extermination for being Jews, as many of us as could fled south, to the relative safety of Split, on the Dalmatian Coast.

In this beautiful region which Hitler had “donated” to Mussolini, the fascists targeted not just Jews, but all patriots and resisters. We young refugees joined that resistance. Mussolini’s Black Shirts’ answer was to expel anyone not native to Dalmatia.

We were rounded up and transported to exile in Italy, labeled “civilian internees of war” under the Geneva Convention. My parents, I, and some 60 other civilian Yugoslav Jews—men, women, and children—would spend the next two years about 30 miles north of Venice in the province of Treviso, confined to the picturesque town of Asolo.

We already knew that Italians, as soldiers fighting outside their own country, were fierce, fearful and thus fearsome. We soon learned, to our gratitude, that at home they were the gentlest, most peaceful, most humane people on earth.

In 1943, the Allies landed in southern Italy and began to fight their way north, only to be stopped cold at Cassino. To this day, as many of you probably know, blame is still passed back and forth over the flawless naval landing, followed by a supposedly misguided stall on the ground.

When Mussolini fell from power, the new government of General Badoglio was ready to surrender, so Hitler, to avoid losing his fiefdom, sent German reinforcements streaming down from the Austrian border.

At news of that we fled again, leaving Asolo on a bumpy trek south in hopes we could meet the Allies. We first took refuge in Venice, but it became too dangerous after I barely escaped betrayal by a collaborator, so we moved on.

Relentless bombardment by Allied aircraft would soon cut off Rome from the north, ending Germany’s ability send troops and supplies south by rail. We welcomed the powerful rumble of the massive American aircraft, sure their bombs couldn’t touch us. They were meant for the enemy!

In fact, we were in the midst of things when the railways were finally disrupted. Our train from Venice for Rome was stopped at Chiusi, and we had to blend into the Italian multitudes desperate to reach Rome by other means. By November we made it to Rome, but it would still take months of fierce fighting before the Allies finally made it too.

So there I was, 23 years old, a fugitive Jew, Italian-looking, military age, carrying the forged papers of a fifth-year medical student. This precious document was supposed to exempt me from service in the newly formed Republican Army, were I to be caught in one of the myriad street raids by the Black Shirts and the S.S.

During those months I went from bar to bar all over Rome, doing my best to earn a living by selling an eggnog concoction I’d invented. It was mainly white wine, which was plentiful and inexpensive, mixed with scarce egg yolks, and pricier, even scarcer brandy. It had a brief shelf life, but it tasted so good it never lasted long enough to spoil.

As I walked, I would stop at telephone booths to phone my fiancée Slava and lean in what piazzas and streets raiding parties were rounding up young men for military service or forced labor. A vast network of female underground workers kept tabs on the fascist militia and German MPs, and Slava called them every half hour for updates to keep me in the clear. A nerve-wracking time.

This gathering’s theme year, 1944, started for me in Rome, on the roof of an apartment in Via Corso Trieste. We watched the sky lit up from the front some 15 miles to the south, along the heavily reinforced Gustav Line between Anzio and Cassino. It was a permanent, all-night curtain of exploding German anti-aircraft fire, Allied carpet bombing, and 70-pound steel shells traveling at 3000 feet per second from five U.S. destroyers.

By day, the Liberators—as we called the Flying Fortresses—dominated Roman skies in nonstop attacks on spider nests of railroads at Tiburtina and other stations around the city. Not a single bomb was dropped on Rome itself.

By January 22^nd, the sky was also exploding from guns at a new Allied beachhead at Anzio. The battle continued until March, when General Mark Clark broke through the German lines, and the defenders of Anzio joined forces with the rest of the Allied front for a triumphal march northward.

***

It was only later that I learned about the Ardeatina Cave massacre on the outskirts of Rome, which also took place in March of 1944, after an underground fighter threw a bomb on marching Nazis, killing 33. For retaliation and execution, the Nazis followed their rule of picking up 10 locals for every German killed.

Of the 335 prisoners they brought in—five more than the rule required—most were random hostages from raids, some war prisoners, captured fugitive Italian officers, and common criminals. Seventy-five were Roman Jews, corralled from homes in the Trastevere Ghetto.

After the German officers squabbled over the incorrect number assembled, General Kappler gave the order to go ahead and kill them all, sending the volunteer executioners cases of French cognac to ease their nerves.

The prisoners were then marched in groups of five into the abandoned caves and shot in the back of the head. The killing took all day; postwar autopsies revealed that some prisoners were still alive when Kappler called it a day and gave the order to dynamite the entrances and and seal the cave.

Stuck in Rome for the duration and desperate to find someone sympathetic to our plight, day after day we visited the Vatican, then swarming with escaped Allied POWs and dignitaries from all over Europe. At last we found a Croatian priest who provided my last false papers identifying me as Giaccomo Brunjonić, an exchange student from Croatia. The visa’s expiration date was July 24, 1944. Mark Clark’s troops marched into Rome ten days before my last false identify would have expired.

***

The year before, the Allies had recognized Tito’s partisan army and government, and he began sending women and children from refugee camps in the Yugoslav mountains, as well as wounded and war-damaged soldiers, to a camp near Bari, Italy, for shelter and recovery. A military training center for the newly professional Yugoslav army was set up inland in Gravina, with British instructors in charge.

My fellow internee Slava and I became the first couple to be married in liberated Rome’s dusty, spider-web-draped Trastevere synagogue. Four days later, I took my protesting bride on a fresh-air honeymoon on wooden benches in the back of an Army Lend-Lease Mack truck from Rome to Gravina.

There I was assigned to translate British engineering manuals on setting up and defusing bombs. I was also assigned to learn all about and work on assembling Bailey bridges. My bride was sent to women’s barracks teaming with battle-hardened veterans of partisan warfare from the mountains.

Separated from Slava, my training in Gravina lasted hardly a month.

We were young, recklessly ignorant of fear, without a worry for the future.

***

The Bailey bridges were ingenious contraptions, and putting them together was like handling huge Erector sets. The idea was to assemble all the components of the pivoting bridge on one side of a ravine, then push it, face up, until its own weight dropped it down to the other side. It was then ready to have wooden planks placed atop it so our tanks could ford the breach.

The fascinating origin of the Bailey bridge is described in Wikipedia. Donald Bailey was a civil servant in the British War Office who tinkered with model bridges as a hobby. He presented one such model to his chiefs, who saw merit in the design. The consequent Bailey bridge was used to span Mother Siller’s Channel, which cuts through Stanpit Marsh, and still remains there as a functioning bridge.

After successful development and testing, the bridge was put into service by the Corps of Royal Engineers and first used in Italy in 1943. By 1944 a number of bridges were ready for D-Day, when production was accelerated. The U.S. also licensed the design and started rapid construction for their own use. Bailey was later knighted for his invention, which continues to be widely produced and used today.

A large part of what made Bailey bridges unique and successful is their modular design, plus the fact that they can be assembled with little or no heavy equipment. Most military bridge designs had previously required cranes to lift and then lower the preassembled bridge.

The Bailey parts, made of standard steel alloys, were simple enough that parts made at different factories were completely interchangeable. A small number of men could carry each individual part, enabling army engineers to work more easily and quickly to prepare the way for troops and matériel advancing behind them.

Finally, the modular design allowed engineers to make each bridge as long and as strong as needed, doubling or tripling up on the supportive side panels or the roadbed sections.

Each unit constructed in this fashion creates a single section of bridge 10 ft or 3 m long, with a roadbed 12 ft or 4 m wide. After one section is complete, typically it is pushed forward over rollers on the bridgehead, and another section is built behind it. The two are then connected by means of pins pounded into holes in the corners of the panels.

A useful feature of the Bailey bridge is its ability to be “launched” from one side of a gap. In this system, the frontmost portion of the bridge is angled up with wedges into a launching nose, and most of the bridge is left without the roadbed and ribands. The bridge is placed on rollers and simply placed across the gap, using manpower or a truck or tracked vehicle, at which point the roller is removed and the roadbed installed, along with any additional panels and transoms that might be needed.

A testimony to its usefulness came from Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who wrote in 1947, “Bailey bridging made an immense contribution towards ending World War II. As far as my own operations were concerned, with the Eighth Army in Italy and with the Twenty-First Army Group in North West Europe, I could never have maintained the speed and tempo of forward movement without large supplies of Bailey bridging.”

***

In training to put up the bridge, we had no idea about all this history. What concerned us was how fast we could assemble it. The best stopwatch reading we achieved in Gravina was 15 minutes, 34 seconds. Later, in the battle for Drniš, we would knock off 9 minutes—a real feat with the Germans emptying their guns at us, and our hands tied up with building the bridge.

As Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his wife Julia from the Battle of Palo Alto, quoted by William Styron in “The Suicide Run,” Five Tales from the Marine Corps,

“There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one, but I find they have less horror when among them than in anticipation.”

My buddies and I always seemed to receive the anticipated flak while crawling to line the completed bridge with planks, so that our tanks could go on the attack.

***

And so began our Dalmatian Campaign 1944. Our goal was to enter Trieste, long a bone of contention with Italy. We were being sent to face one of the 40 German divisions bogged down in Yugoslavia by Tito’s Partisans: the new Jäger Division, formerly Infanterie-Division, known for its many fierce offensives against the Partisans in Bosnia in 1943, and now redeployed to the Dalmatian coast to guard against possible Allied landings. (In the end game, after we chased them out of Dalmatia, the Jägers fought the last days of the war on the Eastern Front and surrendered to British forces in Austria in 1945).

Now, if I may, I’d like to read to you my account of those days from my memoir, The Last Exile: Tapestry of a Life. The book, which I’ll gladly sign, is available here at the conference, and also at www.booksurge.com, Amazon, and soon, I hope, in bookstores. More copies can be ordered directly from me, and I’ll gladly sign those as well. This is what I wrote:

The exquisite island of Vis sits by itself, surrounded by Adriatic waters, the farthest island west from the Dalmatian coast. The ancient seat of Croat kings, known for its hearty vines and fishing flotilla of native design, it was a potential target for the German fleet patrolling the seas between Italy and the coast of occupied Yugoslavia.

Nevertheless, in 1944, Tito had chosen the place as a secret, if vulnerable, hideout for his government. Although the island’s antiaircraft sirens wailed nonstop, the Axis must have laid low to evade the heavy presence of Allied aircraft patrolling the sensitive Adriatic war zone, for neither the Luftwaffe nor the enemy fleet ever attacked the place while on patrol from their base in Venice.

It was the middle of an August night in Gravina when we were awakened in our quarters and given our orders. We were to embark for Vis in a trabakula, a shallow-draft Adriatic diesel fishing boat that would soon ride even lower with all the people and cargo on board. In the dark of a moonless night on the Italian side, we loaded it with a heavy steel Bailey bridge assembly, explosives, detonators, minesweepers, wooden planks, and finally ourselves. We sailed with a flotilla of landing craft, and a good number of coastal flat-bottoms came to greet and guide us from open sea to shore in Vis.

We spent the day in a hidden bay, then sailed the next night to Donja Brela on the coast of Dalmatia, northwest of the better-known resort of Makarska.

I was back in my country, continuing where I was interrupted three years before. We disembarked with all our freight around three in the morning, loaded it on trucks, and began the chase ahead of our tanks. The Germans, under attack by partisan units come down from the hinterlands, were already retreating and heading north. The next day our regular army units also made contact and set off in hot pursuit of the enemy.

The coast of Dalmatia had once been a strip of beautiful beaches backed by dense forests until Venice, which ruled the whole area except for the free and autonomous Republic of Dubrovnik, cut its timber to build a mighty naval fleet. Denuded of its forests, the coastal hinterland deteriorated to karst, a harsh stony landscape over which the battle would be joined.

The Germans were limping ahead of us in full retreat, miserable-looking, relying on mules and donkeys for transport and to carry their supplies. A far cry from the highly polished, shower-equipped Mercedes trucks they’d rolled into Sarajevo in 1941. Deprived of their toys, some of them were still fanatic enough about their ‘master race’ to jump from bridges to their deaths screaming ‘Heil Hitlerl!’ rather than be taken prisoner by the inferior Slavs. From the moment we landed in their wake in Donja Brela and started chasing them, they had been disintegrating.

Our Engineering Brigade preceded the tanks, throwing Bailey bridges over small rivers and ravines, while the Germans practiced target shooting at us. We struggled to improve our record time from training camp as we assembled the steel skeleton of the bridge across the breach and topped it with wooden planks. Under fire, we did it in six minutes, but it still felt like an eternity waiting for a bullet to hit you as you crawled ahead. One bullet did come my way but missed my body, putting two holes in and out of the right sleeve of my green, Royal-issue Burberry, stiff with dirt. Luck under fear.

We were on the offensive, with the Germans in retreat, until a combined force of Nazis, Ustaše, and Četniks stopped us in Drniš and gave us a fight for almost a week. This was in the area known as Krajina (“the land at the end”), which Maria Theresia had populated with Serbs to defend Vienna from the Turkish onslaught. Many years later, in 1992, the local Serbs here would declare independence from Croatia after it seceded from Yugoslavia, and in the campaign that ensued, their men, women, and children were ethnically cleansed without mercy.

Now we were receiving heavy fire from all over. Ustaše antitank cannons greeted us from the bell tower of the Roman Catholic church. Local Serbian-Orthodox Četnici joined with their Nazi patrons and their Croat enemies to battle Tito, newly teamed up with the Allies. With their collaborators, the Germans made their last stand before they retreated all the way to Trieste and Austria.

Our division must have lost a dozen tanks, their crews meeting a horrible fiery death. As engineers, we were better off, for although snipers shot at us as we built bridges for the tanks in the open, their fire could kill but wouldn’t incinerate us. At night we slept under artillery shelling in the Drniš school that we’d taken over, but I was so tired that the noise never woke me.

During that campaign I had to remove our brigade’s young mascot from guard duty after he took to shooting prisoners he was supposed to escort to HQ. In tatters, they still kept their ‘Aryan’ airs of superiority, and the boy couldn’t help but show them who had the upper hand now. He had witnessed two years before the murder of his parents in his village home, and he couldn’t forget. We couldn’t forget or forgive the murderous bastards either, but we needed to extract intelligence from prisoners and keep them alive for information of where to hit them and for exchanges of prisoners.

Just after the battle for Drniš, Slava came to visit. She worked in the makeshift federal offices in Trogir, and wore a beautiful new uniform, made of silky-looking American Air Force material. Skirt instead of trousers. Freshly pressed. What a treat at the front! Herself, first of all—my own bride!

It wasn’t a conjugal visit, however. In Marshal Tito’s army, with one exception for its Supreme Commander, sex, even consensual, was frowned upon, forbidden. Rape, on or off the front, was punished by death. Fraternizing was subject to harsh discipline. Slava and I simply ignored the subject.

I was thrilled to show her off to my comrades. She brought us fresh boiled eggs, cheese, figs—welcome fare after a year of morning teas smelling of the previous night’s pea soup and split peas tasting of tea. She’d landed a job in Trogir with the new republican government collecting economic statistics on Yugoslavia.

A C o m b a t C a s u a l t y

I didn’t know who or where I was. My head was afire, and I had to escape. A bucket of water stood next to my bed, and I dunked my head in it.

A scolding voice asked, ‘What are you doing?’ A nurse came into focus. She pulled my head out of the water.

‘Where are they?’

‘Must be in Trst by now.’

Trieste—our objective, but I hadn’t made it.

I sank into the fire again. When the room came floating back, the nurse was joined by a doctor, our Italian prisoner of war. He spoke to me.

‘Only a few recover from typhoid fever,’ he said. ‘But you wouldn’t give up on rejoining them. I suppose that’s what kept you alive.’

He told me I was one of the casualties of the Dalmatian campaign, now in the civilian hospital in Šibenik commandeered by Tito’s army. Very slowly, I began to remember our advance up from Drniš. I knew I’d been resisting someone pulling me by the arm, unwilling to leave the truck’s passenger seat. Delirious and weak, I had to give up.

And now this.

‘How long ago?’

‘About a month.’

As my memory returned, I recalled that I’d slept through the artillery barrage at the Drniš school we took over, but I had no idea what happened to me after that. After a while I remembered Slava’s visit. She might have been the carrier of the fever, but I didn’t care. It was a cherished memory. I was alive, that was what counted.

Quite soon I was eating my way out of the typhoid. A gallon jar of peanut butter sat on the hospital’s mess table, but no one else would touch this newfangled food. I was digging it out with a soup spoon and had almost emptied the jar when the town erupted in gunfire.

GERMANY HAD SURRENDERED!

The war in Europe had ended, but British Field Marshal Montgomery threatened Tito with full-scale battle if he attempted to enter Trieste, which Yugoslavia, an ally and victor, and the defeated Italy both claimed.

Still recovering, I was furious.

I was furious at the Allies for favoring an enemy over an ally, and in particular I was mad at Field Marshal Montgomery: Monty had threatened Tito with a major battle if he attempted to take Trieste by force. (The imperial tyrant had threatened Ike as well on one occasion).

I later wrote a book entitled About Trieste: A History of the Territorial Dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia, and in numerous newspaper columns I castigated the “perfidious Lion” for discounting the blood of its ally and abandoning those who contributed so much to the victory over the Axis. This did not endear me to the British government.

In 1948, the Trieste question gave way to the fight with Stalin, and my columns concentrated on that danger. If anything, my pen was now even sharper.

But the British Lion never forgets.

So, in 1949, when the Belgrade Press Club was invited to London as guests of His Majesty the King, I was pointedly disinvited, even though I was the club’s president. The letter informing me of the ban said that I was free to come for a visit at any time, but not as a guest of His Majesty’s Government.

Still, my affection for both the brave British and Russian peoples, if not for all their governments, remained intact. The savior of Europe, the United States of America, couldn’t have had better allies, then or ever.

Ode to Asolo

As I look back at my life, this is the place: Asolo

We were confined to this village, but to what a place!

I was 19 and in love.

I was torn away from my country, sent by a foreign force out of a war I wanted to rejoin and eventually did.

I ran a school for interned children, got BBC news from our British landlady, Mrs. Malipiero, wife of the renown composer.

Read Dos Passos and Steinbeck in Italian.

Played soccer with Armenian monks.

Wrote political manifestos in bottles, burying them in the fields.

The interlude was pure youthful romance in midst of a most cruel war.

Nothing since matched its impact.

about krpara

K-r-p-a-r-a.

It is a most distant memory of my childhood in Sarajevo, a difficult word for other than Serbo-Croatian speakers to pronounce. (The use of the very word "Serbo-Croatian" forces me to stop and explain it. Seems that only Jews of the former Yugoslavia are still calling their mother tongue by its former Serbo-Croatian name).

So, before I had even started, I already find myself in an aside, explaining the tongue I grew up with: I expect to receive some murderous comments about it if any contemporary ex-Yugoslavs come across this blog. Because, the only politically correct names for my mother tongue are now split like Yugoslavia itself, into Croat, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, all in fact dialects of the same south slav language, but now replete with archived archaic words, new coinages, inventions to make the "etniciticies" distinct from each-other. To tell the biased truth, the Croats started the game way before the split - they didn't like being part and parcel of the group of their Slavic bretheren with less than millenium of civilisation behind them. Ask Miroslav Krleza, one of their own tribe, a Yugoslav literary giant.

For most of my current 86 years, I have been attempting to write about my life, givig up on the project a decade ago. As a reporter and columnist, I had a superior command of the rich Serbo-Croatian vocabulary. (No place for false modesty here). But I came to the conclusion that I will never make a decent novel out of my colorful life in turbulent and dangerous times. There was something lacking in the way of my recounting it. (I did better when speaking about it to whoever was interested. I certainly was very much so.

Among those encouraging me was Susan Schiff, who visited us yesterdaywith Bill, her husband, and this time suggested I start writing a blog. Now you know where this coming from. I shrugged it off.

Then, in the middle of night, another friend, Phyllis Spiegel, asked me by e-mail if I had read an aritcle about Sarajevo in the newest (Dec. 3, 2007) issue of The New Yorker. She had just finished it and found it fascinating. Must be about the times of my youth in Sarajevo. What did I think of it?

The Book of Exodus by Geraldine Brooks (an excerpt from her forthcoming "People of the Book"), relates the story of the rescue of the Sarajevo Haggadah from the German general who came to conficate it in the Sarajevo Museum in early 1942. The Haggadah, a beautifull illustrated work, was smuggled out of Spain, through Portugal and Venice, and eventually landed in Sarajevo, where own of many impoverished Jews sold it to the Museum.

Dervis Korkut, an Islamic scholar and the librarian of the Museum, smuggled the Haggadah out the Nazis' reach. He was an elegant man, in a three piece suit and a fez, which reminded me my own Sephardic grandfather, descendant of exiles of the Spanish Inquisition, who also dressed in the Turkish fashion of the Bosnian past.

There is a mention in the chronicle of Mira Papo, a member of the Jewish Socialist Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hazair, preoaring to emigrate to Israel as pioneers. For a time, I also was a member, until, sorry to say, the management told me to sever my friendship with non-Jews. Among the other members was Dado Elazar, later the Chief of Staff ot the Israli Army during the Yom Kipur War.

According to the author, Mira ended up with the Tito's partisans, but was later left with other young Jews alone in a field above Sarajevo and told to return, as the group wasn't deemed tough enough for to endure the underground hardships. My recollection, as a then member of the Youth Communist League, is different.

First, in 1939, as a University of Belgrade student, I participated in the peaceful overthrow of the government which had signed a treaty, aligning Yugoslavia with Germany. The demonstrations and our slogans -- Better War then Treaty (Pact), and Army With The People -were precursors of similar overthrows of post-WWII governments all across Eastern Europe, and as unforgetable.

When in April 1941, in retaliation, Germany declared war on Yugoslavia, we dispersed to our home towns, where we besieged Army garrisons, asking to be recruited for the war. The corrupted army leadership didn't have arms nor amunitions and we were refused.

As soon as The Germans invaded Sarajevo, many of my schoolmates, now Ustashe and Moslem fashists, in tow, were bragging all over how they'll by coming soon to arrest the Jewish, Serbian and scum. At a meeting of the underground forces was called on the Poligon, an expanse of fields on mountain slopes above town . The meeting was momentuous, as it told us that there wasn't going to be any unprising aginst the Nazis, because the reactionery centers of the world were now in London and Paris, not in Berlin and Rome. The Stalin-Hitler (Molotov-Riebentrop) nom-aggression pact had just been concluded. We were left to field for ourselves, not because we were too young and not tough enough for battle, but because the battle was called off.

Mira Papo was probably one of us.




Anyway, krpara was how we called the tight little ball made of rags (krpe) we used to kick around the streets before we grew up old enough to be given our own real soccer ball.