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- Title
'Displaced Persons' aus Jugoslawien. Repatriierung und Reintegration seit 1945.
- Authors
Grünfelder, Anna
- Abstract
At the end of World War II, millions of Displaced Persons in Germany and all over the territories formerly occupied by the Nazis, including some 60,000 Jews who had survived the Holocaust, sought to recover their lost homes and families. “Displaced persons” (the terminus technicus of the Allied Forces’ Headquarter in Europe), their repatriation and reintegration, with particular regard to Yugoslavia, are the “Leitmotiv” of this research. Yugoslavia had to repatriate “Displaced Persons” from abroad including Yugoslav ex-inmates of the Nazi concentration camps and camps for forced labourers; Dalmatians evacuated in 1943 to the refugee camps of the Allied troops in Northern Africa; and Jewish emigrants who joined them in the British military camps in Egypt. At the same time, survivors of the Ustaša-concentration camps and victims of German deportations demanded repatriation to their former home countries. The repatriation and reintegration of “displaced persons” into their pre-war surroundings can be considered a substantial element of the post-war Yugoslav communist regime’s process of coming to terms with the past (“Vergangenheitsbewältigung”). Given this, one must also ask in which manner Yugoslavia treated the minorities, “representatives” and “memory” of the Axis forces, who were collectively accused of “collaboration with the occupiers” by the AVNOJ. To a large extent, the process of repatriation executed by the Yugoslav communist authorities resulted in a cruel “differentiation” between “those who are with us (and for us) and opposers”, “negative elements”, “enemies of the people”, and “enemies of the state”. It was for the state to decide who could return to his/her home country, whose return was desirable, and who should not, under any circumstances, be reintegrated. The refugee camps founded throughout the former Yugoslavia, with their military discipline, provided a dense network of police control over the repatriates. The collective trauma of the Yugoslav Jews as survivors of the Nazi and Ustaši concentration camps, deportation, humiliation and atrocities, was disregarded and instead they were submitted to the policy of “ethnic cleaning up”. Jewish partisans and Jewish emigrants were accepted and supported by the authorities, who often recognised their merits. Some of them even benefited from their reputation as antifascists. Yet, Jews were not acknowledged as Jews, namely as a group with a particular collective trauma. No earlier than the 1980’s was the Holocaust remembered as a crime sui generis. Some Jews decided to remain in Yugoslavia and to make the best of the situation – others left the country as they did not expect a prosperous future as Jews. The encumbrance of antagonisms between the victims and their surroundings and between select groups of victims with average civil survivors of the war resulted in merely a “partially coming out with the past”. Yugoslavia’s support of the post-war Aliyah can hardly be overestimated: Jews from Eastern Europe, victims again of anti-Semitic aggression (mainly in Poland) benefited from Yugoslavia’s liberal immigration policy (in spite of its communist regime). “In particular, it was the treatment of foreign survivors of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia as compared to their home countries as well as Yugoslavia’s support for the Western Allies to recognize and provide aid for the Aliyah of the Jews from the Communist Bloc, that was indispensable to the Yugoslav people as a whole. The only category of victims of the Holocaust not to be included in the process of repatriation seems to be the Yugoslav Roma. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, they appear to have disappeared physically and administratively. Only in 2015 did young Roma in Yugoslavia decide to remember their story of persecution and survival.
- Subjects
EASTERN Europe; POLITICAL refugees -- Services for; JEWS; REPATRIATION; HOLOCAUST survivors; SAVEZ komunista Jugoslavije (1952-1990); KOMUNISTICKA partija Jugoslavije (1919-1952); WORLD War II &; collective memory; YUGOSLAVIAN politics &; government; JEWISH history -- 1945-; SOCIAL history; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
Südost-Forschungen, 2015, Vol 74, Issue 1, p73
- ISSN
0081-9077
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/sofo-2015-0107