A Note on Ženi Lebl

Ženi Lebl was born in Aleksinac, Serbia on 20 June 1927. In 1933 the family moved to Belgrade, where she completed elementary school and junior high school. At the beginning of WWII, when her mother and grandmother were taken to a concentration camp equipped with gas chambers, Lebl fled to the city of Niš. She changed her name to Jovanka Lazić and came to live with Jelena Glavaski. When they engaged in the printing of Partisan¹ literature, they were imprisoned. Jelena was executed and the teenage Lebl was sent to a labor camp in Germany and then to Berlin, into the hands of the Gestapo. In 1945 she was liberated and subsequently returned to Belgrade where she continued her education. Following graduation from high school, she studied law, journalism, and diplomacy while working as a journalist at the daily paper, Politika. She had secured a good position but incurred jealousy, which led to a colleague reporting her for telling a joke about the “white violet”—a name given to Marshal Tito in popular song. Charged with “libel against the people and the state,” Lebl was imprisoned for two-and-a-half years in a number of women’s hard labor camps, including Goli Otok, considered the cruelest of the camps. There, the exhausted and hungry prisoners moved heavy boulders under a merciless, scorching sun.

Life was not much easier when Ženi Lebl returned home. She dreamed about immigrating to Israel and began the lengthy process of relocation that finally came to a close in 1954. Once in Israel her life started anew, marked by hard work that included learning a new language. In addition to her native Serbian, circumstances had led her to learn French, German, Russian, and English, and now Hebrew. She completed training as an X-Ray technician and worked in a hospital where she later trained others. At that time she also began writing. Armed with talent and dedication, Lebl flourished as a writer. When she met Danilo Kiš, he motivated her to write about her life experiences and to provide first-hand documentation of those turbulent times of war, destruction, atrocities, secret gulags filled with torture and human suffering, and the struggle to survive and leave a meaningful legacy to future generations. In a trilogy of books, Ženi Lebl recorded her personal memories. In Odjednom drukčija, odjednom druga (Suddenly different, suddenly other) she chronicles her life during WWII, 1940–45. Dnevnik jedne Judite (The Diary of a Judith) is about her mother and other women waiting for their husbands to return, and like many Serbian women—Jewish and Gentile—they did so in vain. In the end, they perished.

When an already ill Danilo Kiš visited Israel in the spring of 1989, he interviewed Lebl and Eva Nahir Panić for his film Goli život. Considered the pinnacle of his work, the film reveals the truth about the existence of hard labor camps for women. It was shown on Sarajevo television after Kiš’s death in February 1990. In her book, Ljubičica bela (The White Violet), Lebl recorded her memories of that experience. The book was translated into English, and the Hebrew edition was a best seller.

Plima i slom (High Tide and Crash), published in 1986 and published in Croatian in 1990, documents the history of the Jews of Macedonia from ancient to modern times. It was the first book of a trilogy.

These autobiographical books are deeply moving testimonials and valuable works of art written by a woman who was once the youngest member of SKOJ (the Alliance of Communists of Yugoslavia) and a star journalist of post-war Politika (before her political joke about the “White Violet”). Her historical books and studies are of special significance to the history of Yugoslavia, the Balkans, and the Jews in Belgrade, Dubrovnik, Serbia, and Macedonia. Lebl’s works reach into the very core of Balkan culture and the intertwined roots of Balkan nations.

When she was already close to the end of her fight with a fatal illness Lebl completed her final book, one that discloses the liaisons of Jerusalem’s mufti Hadj-Amin...