Tag #139144 - Interview #88224 (Aleksandar Necak)

When the war began we were living in Belgrade. At the time mother’s mother, Tereza, was also with us. When the Jews were rounded up in Belgrade she moved us in with family friends, the Djordjevic family, who lived on Knez Milos Street. Grandmother went back to Senta and mother did not tell anyone where she had moved us, thereby breaking all connections with her past. Mother went into this form of hiding because of her Jewish background but also because she was a member of a revolutionary group that had killed a police officer and whose members were being arrested. We lived with this family for the first half of the war and around 1942 we moved to stay with another family in Belgrade, also named Djordjevic. At one point, when all the Jews were told to register themselves with the authorities in Tasmajdan Park mother went to register herself. The clerk she handed her papers to looked through her paperwork and saw that there was no mention of her Jewish background. He ripped up her registration form and advised her that if ever asked she should make up a story about her parents’ background and would thereby avoid registering herself as a Jew. While we were living with these two Djordjevic families we were able to walk on the street and do many daily tasks because we had Serbian last names and had distanced ourselves from the family and friends.

At the beginning of the war, my father was captured and was taken to a camp in the Italian occupied zone. He escaped from that camp and was traveling back to Serbia by train when he was spotted by an acquaintance in the Zagreb train station. The acquaintance had him arrested and he was immediately deported to Jasenovac [concentration camp] were he was killed.