“On October 20, 1942, Trajko Latifović, together with two agents [of the Serbian Special Police, author’s note] and a guard [of the local police station, author’s note] came to my house and took my husband, Ćazim Ašimović, and my son Jakup out and took them to the Special Police building. At that time, I saved my son Ašim by hiding him under pillows so that they could not see him.“1
With these words, Anifa Ašimović, a Serbian Muslim Roma woman from Niš, recalled the events of October 1945 that would change her and her family’s lives forever, in front of the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission (Komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihova pomagača). Her husband Ćazim (55 years old) and her oldest son Jakup (25 years old), both musicians by profession, were taken from their home first to the building of the Niš special police, from there on to the Niš concentration camp “Crveni Krst” and finally to the local prison.
The mention of the Roma man Trajko Latifović, who was present during the arrest and served as a contact person for the occupation authorities, is also revealing at this point. After Anifa’s husband and son had been held in prison for almost four months, they were shot together with dozens of other Roma on February 24, 1943, during a so-called “reprisal action” on a hill outside the city.
Historical context
Several laws, discriminating against Roma and Jews and excluding them from Serbian majority society, preceded these arrests. Immediately after Yugoslavia’s capitulation and the establishment of a German military administration in Serbia in April 1941, the first laws discriminating against Jews and obliging them to register were passed. By the end of May 1941, additional measures were introduced, now targeting both Jews and Roma and forbidding them from participating in social life and working in state institutions.
In the following months, the laws were amended to replace the racial categorization with one based on sociographic criteria, so that Roma who could prove that they pursued a respected profession, led a regular way of life and whose ancestors could be proven to have been sedentary since at least 1850, would be exempt from discrimination and persecution.2 Additionally, Muslim Roma in Serbia and in the Independent State of Croatia-annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina were not to be designated as ‘Gypsies’ but as ‘Aryans’ ‘of Croatian mother tongue’ and treated accordingly.3
However, none of these legal adjustments provided any actual guarantee of survival, neither for “settled” Orthodox or Catholic Roma nor for Muslim Roma, who, in the case of the Roma of Niš, for example, could even have presented additional proof of a long history of settlement. In response to the partisan insurgency that flared up in the summer of 1941, thousands of Roma were arrested as hostages and later murdered in Belgrade, Šabac, Kragujevac, Leskovac, Niš and many other places as part of so-called ‘retaliation operations’.
The arrest of Anifas husband and son, along with hundreds of other Roma from Niš and the surrounding villages, can be located in the context of such ‘hostage shootings’. Many of the imprisoned Roma were released for a variety of reasons, some of which are not traceable from the sources. Those deemed ‘fit for work’ were selected for forced labour in the nearby copper mines in Bor. Some were deported to forced labour camps in the Reich, some possibly released at the insistence of Muslim representatives. The remaining ‘hostages’ were shot by German Wehrmacht soldiers on 24 February 1943 on the Bubanj hill in a so-called ‘retaliatory action’.
Anifa’s statement as a hybrid testimony
Anifa presumably made her statement primarily to seek compensation from the new Yugoslav authorities and to document the shooting of her husband Ćazim and her son Jakup. This becomes clear in the second part of her statement, in which she states that she is claiming 200,000 dinars for her husband and 500,000 dinars4 for her son, as the latter left behind two children, a seven-year-old son (Ćazim) and a five-year-old daughter (Selima). She also mentions that her grandchildren have lost not only their father but also their mother, who, like many Roma in Niš, had been forced to do unpaid labour in the homes of the German occupiers during the occupation and had disappeared without a trace after the end of the war.
In addition to the great despair over her own precarious situation in post-war Yugoslavia and the deep mourning she must have felt for her murdered relatives, Anifa’s testimony also points out the scope she had for action. Both at the moment of the arrest, during which she hid her son with a quick mind, and in her efforts to obtain compensation, she used the limited opportunities available to her to her advantage. The term agency is by now well established in the social and historical sciences to describe these scopes of action [Handlungsspielräume]. Signifying “power to act”, the term describes the ability of an actor within a given situation “to have an impact on themselves and others with a certain degree of openness”.5
Such moments of empowerment of those affected by persecution and discrimination are particularly evident in sources that we can categorize as self-testimonies. In a self-testimony, the author “appears as acting or suffering subject or explicitly refers to themselves.” Self-testimonies are therefore “drafted, and usually also written by the author […] and written on their own motivation, i.e. ‘on their own initiative’.”6 The source at hand can be characterized as such a self-testimony, but it is of a hybrid nature.7 Hybrid because the framework within which Anifa bears witness to herself is an administrative one, prescribed by a state authority.
For our analysis of the source, this means that the social context of the statement – that is, where, in what form and before whom it was made – must be considered. When assessing the source’s informative value beyond the question of agency, the factor of social desirability must be taken into account. According to this the interviewee tends “not to give the answer that is actually true for him or her, but rather the one is expected to be socially approved or desired”.8 While this might not necessarily have an influence on the truthfulness of the statement, it definitely impacts the prior selection of what is told and what is left unsaid. However, this limitation also applies to non-hybrid self-testimonies such as letters or diaries.
Furthermore, it should be noted that most of the Roma interviewed were illiterate, so it is likely that the statements were dictated and typed up by a commission member. An analysis of the whole source collection also revealed that many of the statements are written in a similar way, so it must be assumed that the commission created templates based on statements made about, for example, the chronology of the crime they testified about, which were then signed by the victims, possibly even in collective surveys, or approved with a fingerprint.
Working with such hybrid self-testimonies is especially indispensable in cases where there are hardly any other written self-testimonies available for the subject under investigation – such as the genocide of Roma in Serbia and the situation of Serbian Roma under German occupation. Incidentally, this applies to the entire region of former Yugoslavia. These types of sources and the insights they provide into the individual stories of persecution and the scope for action are indispensable if, in the spirit of Saul Friedländer’s “integrated history”, we want to show alternative perspectives and narratives to a historiography based exclusively on perpetrator’s sources.9
Source material and state of research on the genocide of Roma in Yugoslavia
In order to verify the authenticity of individual statements on the history of events, it is helpful to compare them with other available sources. However, in the present case this is often impossible. On the one hand, this is because the history of the genocide against Roma in Serbia has received very little historiographic attention and it is therefore quite possible that some source material has not yet been discovered and processed. It was only in 2014 that Milovan Pisarri presented the first monograph on the subject.10
On the other hand, during their retreat the German occupiers destroyed many of the administrative occupation documents, which would have allowed for an easier reconstruction of the chronology of the persecution from the perspective of the perpetrators. Other factors that have contributed to the fact that the records are often extremely fragmented include the focus of Yugoslav historiography on the heroic narrative of the ‘anti-fascist struggle’. In practice, this led to a selective weighting and preservation of source material. Not least, the consequences of decades of underfunding of local archives in Serbia also must be mentioned in this context.
This makes it even more important to address the question of the value of the source material that is currently known and accessible. A qualitative analysis of the corpus from which the source presented here is taken, provides insights into the everyday life of the Roma of Niš under German occupation, including their survival strategies and instances of forced labour for the occupiers. In addition, the commission’s forms also contain important demographic information, such as the age, gender, and occupations of the murdered and the survivors, or the places of residence of the respondents.
Information about the social structure in the Roma neighbourhoods also includes the mention of kmetovi, neighbourhood elders, such as Trajko Latifović, who was named in the source. Figures like him played an important role in mediating between the local community and the occupation authorities. Finally, yet importantly, the quantitative analysis of the selection of sources in relation to the information on ‘nationality’ (narodnost) given in the forms also allows for insights into the question of how members of the minority self-identified and were identified by others in the immediate post-war period.
Final considerations
Bearing in mind their specific context, the statements made in front of the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission are quite suitable for filling gaps in the local history of persecution, for emphasizing the perspective of the persecuted and demonstrating their agency, as well as for contributing to research into the context of the genocide of Yugoslav Roma using micro-historical methods.
Incidentally, it emerges from the analysis of further statements made to the War Crimes Commission that Anifa’s son Ašim survived the genocide and the period of occupation: two weeks after his mother’s testimony, 22-year-old Ašim gave a statement about the deportation and murder of his father and brother, but also about his own rescue.
Translation: Nils Bergmann
References
- Report by Anifa Ašimović, Arhiv Jugoslavije (AJ), 110−526−436.
- Verordnung Nr. 2051−2142−41, 11.07.1941, published in: Milovan Pisarri, The Suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust, Belgrade 2014, p. 50.
- Promemoria No. 2208–41 from Zagreb to the German military administration in Serbia on the special treatment of “White Gypsies”, June 19, 1941, published in: Karola Fings, Cordula Lissner, Frank Sparing, “… einziges Land, in dem Judenfrage und Zigeunerfrage gelöst”. Die Verfolgung der Roma im faschistisch besetzten Jugoslawien 1941 – 1945, Cologne 1991, p. 116.
- In 1940, the exchange rate between Yugoslav dinars and dollars was approximately 50 dinars:1 dollar, so that the claims amount to the equivalent of around 4,000 or 10,000 dollars at the time.
- Felix Stalder, Digitalität und Handlungsfähigkeit. Was bedeutet “Agency” im Zeitalter des Netzes?, in: Berliner Gazette, 21.05.2018, , accessed on 18.10.2023.
- Benigna von Krusenstjern, “Was sind Selbstzeugnisse?” Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, in: Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994), pp. 462–471.
- Gruner and Kaplan introduce the term “hybrid sources” to categorize petitions by Jews during the Nazi era. However, they argue against designating such sources as ego documents, since this would obscure the hybrid character of the petitions and the regulations and conditions that defined them. I would like to thank Verena Meier for suggesting the merger of the two categories into the source type of “hybrid self-testimonies.” See: Thomas Kaplan Pegelow, Wolf Gruner, Introduction, in: Id. (eds.) Resisting Persecution. Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust, Contemporary European History 24 (2020), New York, Oxford, p. 18.
- Rüdiger Hossiep, Soziale Erwünschtheit, in: Dorsch Lexikon der Psychologie: , accessed on 06/11/2023.
- Saul Friedländer, An Integrated History of the Holocaust, in: Federal Agency for Civic Education, January 3, 2022, https://www.bpb.de/themen/nationalsozialismus-zweiter-weltkrieg/dossier-nationalsozialismus/39637/eine-integrierte-geschichte-des-holocaust/, accessed April 18, 2023.
- Pisarri, The Suffering.