Two weeks ago I turned 90. I have seen some history in my days and I have a story to tellabout just one manbut its also a history lesson on a generation and a century.
I was born a Sephardi Jew in Sarajevo, in what was then a Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia.
For both reasons, my life didnt develop according to my own plans. Instead, I was slapped around by world events.
More than 60,000 out of 70,000 Yugoslav Jews did not escape the Nazis. Those who did were totally uprooted. I was luckyin this context, a poorly chosen word, but I survived on the periphery of the Holocaust because I fled from Germans to Dalmatia, a province occupied by Italy.
For a long time, I avoided thinking about survival. It was a guilty achievement. I refused even to watch films about the Holocaust, thinking of them as an exploitation of a tragedy.
It took me 55 years before I could open up and write a memoir of my personal journey. I called it: The Last Exile. It was the first of my books written in English.
In a mad rush to tell my full story, while I still can, I wrote another book, Requiem for a Country. Its about mans cruelty to man and its a protest against hatred and genocide, which are still sweeping our world, because the new century has already proven itself quite blind and deaf to the memory of the last one.
Consider it my testament. Or perhaps a last manifesto to join the many I buried in the Asolo fields where I was interned and survived the Holocaust, 70 long years ago.
I have often thought of the injustice of fate: was it a roll of some celestial dice that decided which of the worlds Jews would live and which would die? Why them, and not me? Why does the world tolerate the persistence of anti-Semitism?
Some may question what anit-Semitism I am referring to. Ask Google. Search are Jews evil? You will find over 25,000,000 pages on the subject, many answering in the affirmative. There are only 13,000,000 Jews worldwide. YouTube even has a playlist entitled are Jews evil?
The naked truth is that Jews make up a mere 0.2% of the world population. One must wonder why anyone would bother hating them, but they do. It is called easy scapegoating. It is good for dictators, religious extremists and people like Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen.
As Jews, people still want to punish us for a bloodline that is five thousand years old.
The fashionable excuse nowadays for being anti-Jewish, by politicians and academics alike, is the harsh treatment of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, in an atmosphere of overwhelming mutual animosity and earned mistrust. The truth is that pragmatic Israelis, fearful in a sea of inflexibly hostile Arabs, feel theyd rather be safe than nice.
I hope Israel will survive. I will counter the persistence of anti-Semitism by standing up for my Sephardic ancestry and asserting my Jewishness more than I ever did before.
