3

It is two in the morning, and the dogs in the town square outside my hotel window won’t stop barking. The Hotel Grand Hedonist is quite assuming and tall for this town and has the usual thick-framed heavy large windows I remember from when I spent time in Germany with my aunts and uncles, but most of the buildings we saw coming into town are of a different aesthetic – less modern, more cement. A lot more cement.

There are many stray dogs here in the Pančevo town square, day and night; seemingly the same square where my father says he played soccer as a child. He alludes to areas of town in his fragmented memory of time and place. My sister, in preparation for this trip, researched as much as she could from the few geographic points she extracted from these recent conversations.

It is late and I lie awake thinking of all the connections that have been lost, and what little connections might exist, much like I imagine it feels to lose all photographs and possessions in a house fire. I switch on the side table lamp, the dogs still barking. I review the links to the Google map locations we will attempt to explore: Church of Saint Anne, the Catholic Church our grandparents possibly attended where our father might have been an altar boy; the blue house at Žarka Zrenjanina 68 which might have been the house where my father lived after the camp (or was it before?); Mašinski Centar, the elementary school my father might have attended; and Kozačenko, the car repair shop that our grandfather might have once worked in, which is across from the blue house with the number 68. My father has dimly recounted these memories that seem like anchor points in his time in Pančevo after he survived the camp – the camp he and his brother and mother were forced into, hopefully to starve to death, after they refused to join up with the Nazi occupiers that came to town in 1944.

It is strange to see these locations on Google maps. The car repair shop has 64 reviews and a star rating of 4.6 so it must be a decent place to take your car. I think of these things from my own modern frames and consider how much time has passed and what the streets and townspeople might have looked like then. My sister has also bookmarked four different cemeteries or areas of probable mass graves – only a few locations to mark where it is said that an estimated 50,000 ethnic Germans died in the region during WWII. These are eerie visuals to pull up late at night in the hotel room. The dogs’ yapping and howling grows less frequent.

In the morning, after a breakfast of sausages and coffee, my sister and I spend time walking through the places on the map, blindly photographing possible artifacts and structures of the past. It’s an odd feeling to spend time examining an old heavy iron gate that might have one my father swung open as a child… or that might be just some gate. Passersby examine us with furrowed brows and glares as if we may have just transported down here from some other planet. These are not tourist places. We might share the same cheekbones and furrowed brows that connect us to this part of the world, but we don’t look exactly local and we don’t speak the language. They watch us stare at a seemingly abandoned house with the number 68 and track the mechanic shop across the street trying to determine if these structures were standing here in the late 1940s or if they had been built since.

We text our father photos and panoramic videos but he doesn’t respond. We want some affirmation we are barking up the right tree, that where we are standing is ground where he once stood, but there is no response. We go in search of other locations and engage in stilted conversations with elderly people who may have a clue for us. Google translate helps but only so much, and the juxtaposition of this new technology alongside this sixty-year-old story feels strange.

We gingerly call our father from Serbia the next day, as it is his birthday. He is eighty-one. He was supposed to be here. He sounds confused that we didn’t find a deserted, bombed out site – the one etched in his mind – and he is seemingly in awe that there is some cultural activity and even a Chinese restaurant in Pančevo. “Well I would not have imagined that,” he says. We try to reassure him that people are nice and it’s a jovial place with families and activity. We tell him we are going to try to find a bus to Homolitz tomorrow and my sister says she’s trying to see how to locate the yellow chapel in the cemetery where the mass grave should be, and that she needs to do some inquiring with the hotel staff.

Our father grows quiet as the conversation continues, distant. It’s hard for me to tell if he’s distracted or sad or just put down the phone. I have only rarely seen him sad, not even when my mom passed away; during that time I only saw him angry, not sad – he hides most things behind anger. When the conflict in Yugoslavia erupted in 1991, I was in high school, and I remember him standing furious in front of the TV with tears in his eyes. That was the only time I really saw my father cry. “It just never ends,” I remember him sharing a private, angry moment with the TV. “It’s the same shit all over again.”

“Dad, are you there?”

He says he has to go; he has work to do.