2

I am sitting with my father. He is now an old man, a grandfather. His wife, my mother, passed away almost a decade ago and perhaps because of this he is starting to relax enough to open up about things that he never has in the past. Plus, “I have a project,” I tell him. “This is important for my graduate work at school.” You can always get him to agree to something if it’s for school even though now I’m in my late forties going back to school for the third time. My father values education more than anything as he never really had one growing up and struggled as an adult because of it. Whatever combination of reasons, he agrees. “I’m happy to answer anything you want to know. I am an open book, as they say,” he laughs. My face looks at him quizzically and with that family trait of being able to comment a thousand words with a glare. We both know this is a ridiculous statement considering he has enforced a closed book policy around his past over the course of his life. When he left home at sixteen, drunk and on a bicycle, refusing to stand by any longer and watch his father beat his mother, he never kept in touch. He didn’t contact his parents again until I was born, as the story goes.

This is my father’s story. This is my family’s story. Most importantly, this is my retelling of how I see the pieces of the lives that came before me having unfolded - lives that were not my own, but whose suffering and strengths flow through my veins and my daughter’s veins and that will flow through the veins of generations yet to come. As I grapple with the events that took place during my father’s life, I think of how these events forever altered the story of my grandparents’ lives, particularly my grandmother as a young mother. My grandparents were young and in love with two young boys – my father was almost three and his older brother was four and a half, maybe five. My grandmother was barely twenty years old when they were forced into the camp, and the years that followed recounted horrific events: her first child died from starvation and all of my grandmother’s teeth and hair fell out from Typhoid which was rampant in the camp. I ask my father about this time. “Well my mom, you know, Omi, she almost died,” my father says, “and when we got out of the camp for the next ten years or so she never had any teeth.” He laughs. “It’s not funny – she was a beautiful young woman you know with no teeth, but the funny part is that to me it was just normal. And I remember vividly this day when I came home from school and she had received some teeth for the first time and she was smiling and waving to me and I was so scared. It was like Halloween here you know,” he’s laughing. “I had never seen my mother with teeth.”

My father says he has no memory of the four or so years in the camp, which if I calculate is from around age three to seven. “It’s all just black,” he says, “I don’t remember anything from that time,” noting that once every ten years or so he will have a flash of something and collapse on the floor in sobs. My grandfather was recruited to work outside of the camp to fix military machinery, luckily, so pieces of bread and an occasional piece of meat came back with him – enough to keep my grandmother and my father alive, not the case for all.

The stories and perspectives in the region vary, not only around the events of the Nazi invasion of Serbia during World War II, but in general. It was documented that the town of Homolitz – or Omolijca – was bilingual: Serbian or Serbo-Croatian and German. To this day, taking the bus across the border, the sign is displayed with both names. Linguistic research texts of the region speak to this documentation. And, according to townspeople who were old enough to recount the stories of the time, the town was home to Serbs, Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians with different churches, schools, and community centers.

When I ask my father about his first language, the language he spoke at home, he says, “Oh, it was just this funny dialect we spoke at home, kind of like a German from four hundred years ago.” He laughs. He can laugh now at eighty years old. This is the first time we have talked about this. “No one could even understand it anymore, you see.” He drifts away. The conversation likely brings up memories he’s not prepared for. I ask if his parents considered themselves German or Serbian – if he has any recollections of that now, over seventy years ago in the past. Swabian. Danube Swabians was technically the term for the ethnic family line that had been sent out from the Hapsburg Empire hundreds of years prior to expand the monarchy, so to speak. Hundreds of years ago is a really long time. Language changes, reasons for living change, but last names, passed down through patriarchal lineages do not. “My parents were just living their lives,” he says. “No one ever talked about these things, like what you’re asking. Identity. We didn’t have any kind of identity like this. We just spoke this dialect at home – my mom would use words for things that usually had to do with cooking – and then I would go out and play and I would be a regular Serbian kid, you see.”

The intersection of language and culture is something that I have struggled with my entire life, not knowing what my father’s ‘real’ language was and not having any cultural anchor growing up. My sister and I were American, but my father was from Yugoslavia (as it was still referred to when I was growing up). I presented a school project on my ‘family heritage’ on Yugoslavia in third grade with information taken solely from the big Encyclopedia Britannica volumes. ‘Does your family speak Serbo-Croatian?’ friendly parents at the school event asked. I did not know.

I sit with my father aware of the subtle shifts around his tolerance of my questions. I am used to this. As a child he would explode in fits of anger – never physical, but terrifying. I am used to the volatility of his emotions and I gauge my questions appropriately, offering statements of connection, particularly jokes, when things stray too far. I know when to call it a day and pick up questioning another time.

My grandparents were not educated and did not have fine penmanship nor large vocabularies - they were simple people, untied to any sense of national identity. My grandfather grew up as a peasant, herding sheep – sent away often for days as a young boy, alone, to perform this family necessity. My grandmother had been orphaned as a child and the family often joked that she came from gypsy blood. She was an apprentice as a seamstress when the town was seized and now, hearing my father’s answers to things about the camp, I consider that their own difficult childhoods perhaps made it possible for them to survive the hardship of the camp.

But it is this time that has stayed with my father, in his veins, in the fabric of his being. “My parents were really destroyed by what they had gone through in the camp, you know?” He describes photos from the 1950s as trying to put on a sense of normalcy by way of dressing up, but they were completely malnourished still and trying to find a sense of normalcy after being put through hell. He describes his mother as terribly sad and his father as angry, often ironically taking out his rage on the family, having been stripped of his power as a man to take care of them. “Anything forward was simply survival, so you just do as you’re told,” he says. “That’s how life was lived.” He pauses, his mood having shifted. “In the United States, everything is Teddy Bears – a Teddy bear for this, if you’re sad or had a bad day. Nobody ever asked me how I felt or what I thought, or if I was going through a hard time,” he says.