Accident of Fate: A Personal Account, 1938–1945

11. Lika

FI 120 11 LIKA As soon as they deposited us on the mainland, the Partisans advised us to distance ourselves from the coast as soon as possible. They suggested we make our way some 100 kilometres inland, to a hilly area called the Kordun. In the ongoing ighting, some areas often changed hands between the Partisans and the Germans or Ustashe, but the Kordun was considered more or less irmly in Partisan hands. Moreover, food was not in such short supply there as on the coast. There were six of us: my uncles Ferdinand, Robert, and Julius, my aunt Camilla and her husband Oskar, and me. We decided that our best bet was to join up with the Levingers, a large family of Croatian Jews with whom we had become friendly in the camp on Rab. As we were foreigners, we felt that we stood a better chance of facing what lay ahead if we joined forces with them. The extended Levinger family consisted of two brothers in their forties, their wives and children, and an assortment of other relatives. Apart from their general warmth and liveliness, they had the striking characteristic of all being unusually tall—leading my uncle Robert, who specialized in coining nicknames, to dub them “The Levinger Travelling Circus.” For my part, I was perfectly happy to join this “circus” because one of the girls, Nada, was a close friend of mine. The Levingers had left Rab before us and had found shelter in the coastal village of Novi Vinodolski (where I had lived for a time under Italian “free coninement” eighteen months earlier). Local Partisans had warned them that the area was unsafe and urged them to leave as quickly as possible. The Levingers had therefore moved south to the town of Senj, which was where we joined up with them. I later heard that Jewish refugees who had remained in Novi Vinodolski were subsequently caught by the Germans and deported. 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 120 FI 122 11 LIKA drawn cart heaped high with bundles and suitcases, followed by a group of about twenty refugees, many of them unusually tall. I remember thinking to myself that this was what it must have felt like during the Exodus from Egypt. We pushed on for days, spending the nights in barns. At one point during our trek, we heard that the town of Senj, which we had just left, had been razed by German bombers. It was already the beginning of January 1944 when we reached the village of Babić Most, in an area called the Lika, on the way to the Kordun. The weather had become very cold and it had started to snow heavily. We were lucky to ind some peasants who allowed us take shelter, in return for payment, in a very small but warm barn. We unloaded the cart, piled all the luggage into the barn, and squeezed in ourselves. It was extremely crowded; when night fell there was barely enough room on the ground for all of us to lie down. It snowed during the entire night, for the whole of the next day, and during the following night as well. When we woke up on the second morning, the small windows of the barn, which were about a metre above ground, were completely covered. We dug a little trail through the snow and looked around: the countryside was blanketed in white, and no roads or paths of any kind were visible. We realized that it would be impossible to continue on our eastward trek and decided to stay where we were until conditions improved, assuming that the Germans too would ind it diicult to advance in such deep snow. Babić Most was a typical Yugoslav village, consisting of two rows of simple houses lining an unpaved country road, with a few barns and shacks in the vicinity. The atmosphere was cold, unfriendly, and threatening. The entire Lika area had a distinctly inhospitable air about it; temperatures were freezing, food was scarce, the countryside was forbidding, and even the population was not particularly welcoming. Within a few days, however, I made a thrilling discovery: there was an American in a house at the other end of the village. I could hardly wait to meet him. The only American I had ever seen in my life was Jimmy Lyggett, the boxing coach in Zagreb...