Accident of Fate: A Personal Account, 1938–1945

20. Departure

FI 178 20 DEPARTURE I celebrated my twentieth birthday on 23 January 1945—a day that turned out to be one of the most dramatic in my life. I was in particularly high spirits, having recently heard that the Allies were inally going to evacuate about one hundred non-Yugoslav Jewish refugees from my area to liberated southern Italy, and that my uncles and I were going to be included in the group. Walking through the countryside on a dirt road a few kilometres from the animal hospital, elated at the prospect of soon taking one step closer to the free world, I became aware of the approaching buzz of a low-lying aircraft. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that a small plane was bearing down upon me. I quickly recognized it as a German Fieseler Storch or “Stork,” so named because of its ixed landing gear, which jutted out like the legs of a stork about to land. The plane’s ability to ly so low that it could practically skim the ground made it particularly appropriate for attacks on infantry, which the pilot could strafe with the craft’s powerful machine gun. The Storch was already so near that I could discern the pilot’s silhouette outlined in the cockpit. Instinctively, I dived under a thick clump of bushes. The planelewoverme,itsmachinegunblazing.AssoonasIheardtheengine receding into the distance, I peered cautiously out of the bushes, only to see that the plane was banking sharply and coming back. I looked around and noticed that on both sides of the dirt road there were steep embankments , forming deep ditches illed with dense vegetation. The plane was now coming at me from the side, at 90 degrees to the road. I gathered my energy, raced across the road as fast as I could, and rolled down into the ditch. In a hail of machine gun bullets, the plane passed over my head, no more than 10 metres above ground. I hoped that perhaps now the pilot 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 178 7A 179 20 DEPARTURE would move on, seeking more promising targets, but instead he veered around and came roaring back, iring continuously from the machine gun. As he approached, I raced across the road again, rolled to the bottom of the ditch on the other side and hugged the ground as closely as possible. Bullets whistled through the air around me—all missing me, fortunately. Evidently, the pilot had it in for me because he refused to give up. He came back repeatedly, trying to surprise me by approaching at diferent speeds and at a variety of angles, his machine gun never ceasing to spit out a hail of deadly bullets. Incredibly, he missed me every time, wasting an enormous quantity of ammunition in the process. The last of the seven or eight swoops was particularly low and the iring particularly intense, after which he simply disappeared over the horizon, believing, perhaps, that he had inished me of. But I was unharmed, apart from a few scratches from the thorny bushes. My twentieth birthday party came to an end, and I was very happy to have survived it. When I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s ilm North by Northwest in 1959, I could scarcely believe my eyes. The scene in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop-duster through an Iowa cornield bore an uncanny and frightening similarity to what I had experienced in Yugoslavia less than ifteen years earlier. To this day, whenever ◂ A German Fieseler Storch, the type of aircraft that attacked me on my 20th birthday 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 179 FI 180 20 DEPARTURE that ilm is shown on television, I remain riveted to the screen, still unnerved by the fact that Hitchcock could have independently conceived a scene that so resembles what happened to me—although in my case, the episode did not end with the plane crashing in lames. The negotiations to obtain permission for us to leave Yugoslavia had been long and arduous. Ever since the Italian capitulation in September 1943, several hundred Jewish former inmates of the camp on Rab had been stranded with the Partisans. Representatives of the refugees had tried repeatedly to organize an evacuation to liberated southern Italy, but although the Partisans were willing, the Allies were not interested , replying that the empty space in...