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My father was a merchant and he had a shop on Kralja Aleksandra Street, on Tasmajdan, near St. Mark's Church. He sold suits and various other things. My father closed his store when he felt he could no longer compete with the younger and more promising people. He closed the store and lived on the interest, I do not know exactly how. In our family, the children never knew what the parents did or how they got by. My elder brother had a furniture store on Tasmajdan, also on Kralja Aleksandra Street, across from the law faculty. [He] had the store until the Germans came to Belgrade and confiscated people's property. He was wounded during the bombings. He was treated, but the Germans captured him and sent him to forced labor in Smederevo, Belgrade, and the surrounding ruins. After that, they locked him up in Topovska Supa [camp] at Autokomanda, and later in Sajmiste [camp in Belgrade]. I heard that, on one occasion when he bent over to pick up bread, one or two Germans beat him on the head and the rest of his body with shovels. I do not know if it is true, but I never saw him again. He was probably killed at the end of 1941. My youngest brother, who was two and a half years older than me, finished secondary technical school, but like every young Belgradian he thought he needed to learn a trade as well. Father wanted him to work in the store, but he did not want to do that. He wanted to finish learning the typesetting trade and then work as a typographer, engraver, and typesetter. He worked for a man named Horovic, and then for [the newspapers] Vreme, Politika, and I do not know where else. When the Germans came to Belgrade, they captured him and sent him to slave labor until November, or December, when the whole group was taken to forced labor, either in Germany or Austria. Or else he was killed in Banjica or in a mobile gas chamber. We never found out. His wife and two kids had to register at Tasmajdan. It seems to me that this happened in November, when we were already deep into winter, and the kids were from two to three and a half years old. They confiscated their three-and-a-half-room apartment, and they locked them up in Sajmiste. What happened to them, only history knows. They blackmailed us to send packages, we sent them; whether they received them or not comes down to the humanity of those people who blackmailed us.
Location
Serbia
Interview
Sofija Zoric-Demajo