 |
mp3 – 122.77 MB » |
Download Full Program »
View Transcript »
Listen to Podcast »
Learn more about Dora Klayman »
Learn more about Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia »
Learn more about Jasenovac »
USHMM Online Exhibition: The Holocaust Era in Croatia: Jasenovac »
BILL BENSON:
Good afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson and I am the host of the Museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us. This is our eleventh year of the First Person program. Our first person today is Mrs. Dora Klayman and we will meet Mrs. Klayman in just a few minutes.
This 2010 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation.
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their firsthand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each first person serves as a volunteer for this Museum. With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August 25th and we will have First Person programs on Tuesdays until the end of July. The Museum's web site -- www.ushmm.org--provides information about each of our First Person guests.
Excerpts from our First Person programs are available as podcasts on the Museum’s website. They are also available through iTunes. The podcast for Dora’s program today will be available in the next few weeks.
Dora Klayman will share with us her first person account of her experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 45 minutes. If time allows we will have a few minutes for a few questions from you the audience at the end of the program. We ask that you stay in your seats during our one hour program that way we minimize any disruptions for Dora as she speaks.
We’d like to let you know that if you have a pass to the Permanent Exhibition this afternoon, know that they are good for the time marked on your ticket, but they are also good for anytime after that today.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims–six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti or Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet Prisoners of war, and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany.
The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades. What you are about to hear from Dora is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Dora’s introduction.
And we begin with a portrait of Dora Klayman sitting on a park bench with her younger brother Zdravko. Dora was born, Theodora Basch on Jan 31, 1938 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. On this map of Yugoslavia in 1933 the arrow points to Zagreb. In this photo we see Dora on an outing to the zoo with her parents Salamon and Silva. Salamon ran a brush making factory and Silva was a teacher. Here we see Dora's maternal grandfather Rabbi Leopold Deutsch.
In April 1941, when Dora was visiting her maternal grandparents in the small town of Ludbreg, Germany invaded Yugoslavia. Ludbreg became part of a puppet state run by the Ustasa (the Croatian fascists.) In June 1941, Dora's parents and her brother were arrested. Their housekeeper got the baby Zdravko out of prison and their mother's sister Giza and her husband Ljudevit picked him up and took them to Ludbreg, where he joined Dora.
From that time on Dora and her brother were sheltered by Giza and her husband, Ljudevit. On the left here we see Aunt Giza and on the right we see her husband Ljudevit. The picture of Ljudevit was taken many years later so it’s a much more contemporary picture than the picture of Aunt Giza. Later in the war Aunt Giza was denounced and sent to Auschwitz, where she perished. Dora's parents did not survive the Holocaust. Dora remained in Yugoslavia until 1957 when she emigrated to the United States. We close with a studio portrait of Aunt Giza, Dora and Zdravko that was sent in order to be sent to Giza’s husband Ljudevit in the concentration camp to which she’d been sentenced.
In 1957 as Dora was on her way to Switzerland she met Daniel Klayman, who was returning to New York from year’s post-doctoral studies on a Fulbright scholarship in India. They were married in Switzerland a year later and together they arrived in the United States in the fall of 1958. By the following year Dan and Dora came to Washington D.C. and Dan embarked on a career as a researcher in medicinal chemistry at the Walter Reid Army Institute of Research with his work culminating in his expertise in the development of medicines against Malaria.
After the birth of their two children, Wanda and Eliott, Dora resumed her education getting her degrees in French and English as a second language and then she taught in Montgomery County’s public school system, including 23 years at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School where she headed the English as a Second Language Department. Dan passed away in 1992.
Both of their children live in the Washington area. Wanda is Deputy executive director of an international association that deals with issues of transportation. Elliot is a free lance videographer and owns a video and film production company. He is married to Iona and they have three children ages 15, 13, and 6. After Dora retired from full-time teaching in 1999 she became active as a volunteer with this Museum. Her work consists primarily of translating material from the Holocaust written in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. The ongoing project is connected with the Jasenovac Archive.
Other recent projects have included the translation of a booklet that accompanied a 1942 antisemitic exhibit in Croatia and the translation of the captions on a large archive of photographs that had been gathered during the post-WWII trials in Yugoslavia. Dora enjoys traveling and just this past week returned from a trip to her former home in Croatia. And with that I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our first person Mrs. Dora Klayman [applause].
Dora thank you so much for joining us and for your willingness to be our first person today.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Thank you for having me.
BILL BENSON:
We have so much to cover in a short period of one hour, so we should begin. You were just three years old when WWII came directly to Yugoslavia, when Germany attacked Yugoslavia. Before we turn to the horrors of the war and the Holocaust, let’s begin by telling us what you can about your family and your community in those pre-war years.
DORA KLAYMAN:
As you say I was very young so I don’t remember all the details. I have a lot of images in my head, memories, flash backs, things of that nature. But I can tell you a little bit about what my family was like, the structure of the family. So my father’s family lived in Zagreb and there were six siblings of whom the male members of the family were very involved in religious practices. It was a very Orthodox, very observant family.
One of my uncles was particularly a very good Cantor and practiced his Cantorial ability, but the other two brothers were also very good at that kind of prayer, leading of the prayers in a synagogue. So they did that, however, on occasions and when it was necessary. But it became sort of an important, in my father’s life because it’s through that that he met my mother. My mother’s family did not live in Zagreb; they lived in a small town much further north, practically on the Hungarian border. Another Orthodox family-I think you saw the picture of my grandfather. So that, they actually lived on the grounds and in the building that housed also the synagogue and my grandfather was not only the Rabbi of that town for some 40 years, but also served in teaching the Jewish children in the local school and it’s amazing to think that in that school at that time Jewish children were taught by the Rabbi and the Catholic children by the Catholic Priest and there were Serbian Orthodox children taught by the Serb Orthodox…
BILL BENSON:
And basically side by side?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Side by side, and I have a photograph, which is amazing with all of them together. So it was a very comfortable community. And my grandfather wrote also a lot and was head of the Chevra Kaddisha which is the burial society, Jewish Burial Society which is very important. My grandmother of course stayed home and the amazing thing about it is even though it was an Orthodox family, I noticed in the pictures–I have no opportunity to ask–that she was not wearing a head covering at all times. He was of course.
They had three daughters and one son. The youngest daughter, who was actually born in that town of Ludbreg, the oldest daughter was not. They had come in from Slovakia actually at that time. But my mother was born there and she was the youngest and then the older sister, Giza, whom we saw in the photographs, was actually 15 years older than my mother. So there was a very great bond between them, which also played some role in our life later on. The middle sister, Blanca, was by the time war started, she was married and she and her husband had a store which was sort of in the center of Ludbreg and it was in a building that was constructed by her and her husband and by the older sister Giza and eventually her husband.
Now her husband, Giza’s husband Ljudevit, it was an unusual marriage by the time war started because, well he was 10 years older than she, he was from a very different kind of family. One difference was that he was not Jewish and for that marriage to take place it took many, many years of courtship, which my grandfather did not particularly approve of from the beginning from what I’m told. But it’s amazing that in that world, in the society they still saw each other all the time and eventually my grandfather must have given in because I see pictures of weddings and occasions and I see him present all the time. So a picture of my mother’s wedding for example, which precedes their marriage, Ljudevit and Giza’s marriage, he is in the picture.
BILL BENSON:
Ljudevit, of course, one of the differences you said was that he was not Jewish; second he was a very significant figure in the community wasn’t he?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes, he was. He was a particularly significant presence–he came from a long, an old family. The mother was a minor aristocracy. He was the director of the local bank, he had his hand in every cultural endeavor in that town. He had been a mayor for a while. To the point that there was almost nothing that was happening, all the pictures show him as the honorary chairman of everything from the fire department to the local orchestra. He did play the violin and they played tennis, and it was just a very sort of active social scene altogether.
BILL BENSON:
And Dora your aunt Giza and uncle Ljudevit, and Aunt Blanca and others were in the town of Ludbreg but you were now with your parents living in the town of Zagreb and in January of 1941 your brother was born, and then of course in April of that year 1941 Germany attacked Yugoslavia and war was underway in Yugoslavia. But at the time of your brother’s birth, soon after that and before the invasion of Germany, you would end up in the town of Ludbreg living with relatives, your maternal grandparents. Tell us what you can about why you were not with them in Zagreb when the Germans invaded.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Actually I am not absolutely certain why I was sent, but… I know there were neighbors of my grandparents that were visiting and that it seemed to be, my parents seemed to have an opportunity to send me to my grandparents for a bit. I actually remember that train trip–very exciting. But I don’t know exactly whether they sent me because they knew that something was brewing, or I think more likely is that my mother just had a baby and my grandparents wanted me to visit and there was somebody available to take me so, I went. I was three and that was the last time I saw my parents.
BILL BENSON:
Do you know Dora, when Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, that was essentially 18-months after war had began elsewhere in Europe with Germany invading Poland in September of 1939. Did those initial years of the war, to your knowledge, have any impact on your family, or the community, or Yugoslavia at that time? Or was Yugoslavia generally not affected by the war until the Germans actually attacked it?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Well it seemed to me that from what I gather from others–of course I was too young to note myself, that Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav–at least Croatian Jews, went through the same kind of thinking that we always here about the German Jews. “It’s not going to happen here, things are too good, life is pleasant, nobody here is ever going to do anything of that nature.” They heard some of it, there had been already German so called refugees and Austrian Jews coming through, but even they at that time were not yet recounting the horrors and so there was a sort of a comfortable, it had not been a particularly antisemitic world. And so they couldn’t even understand that something like this could be happening to them.
So nobody tried to really get away or worried about it. After the beginning of the war however, one part of my family did flee and it was Blanca and her husband and my two cousins. And they went to Dalmatia which was at the time, after the war began while Germany took the Northern part of Yugoslavia-I mean actually the northern part of Croatia and then on to Serbia and so on east into Yugoslavia–Dalmatia was occupied by Italy. And Italians were not running concentration camps. They had camps going but they were sort of to keep people in the right place and not let them go anywhere. And there was tremendous pressure, historically we know, from Hitler on Mussolini to comply with running camps and so on, but it didn’t happen. So one part of my family did flee and they were in that safe zone and then unfortunately they returned later because the head of the fascist government in Croatia pronounced “everybody who can return will be safe,” so they returned and of course they were not safe at all.
BILL BENSON:
They were immediately sent to a camp.
DORA KLAYMAN:
They were immediately sent to camp, yeah. But that’s the only people in my family that at least made an attempt to flee.
BILL BENSON:
When the Germans attacked Yugoslavia, at least in the area where you lived in Zagreb and Ludbreg, it wasn’t actually the Germans who were running it day to day, it was the fascist government the Ustasa. Tell us what the Ustasa was.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Well, as soon as the German government, Nazi Germany attacked Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia fell in about six days. It was extremely fast. The King fled and in came a group of nationalists who had been out of the country and who had been just waiting for this opportunity. And they came in, back into the country and established what they called the Independent State of Croatia, or in Croatian it’s called Nezavisna Država Hrvatska which is often referred to as N-D-H. So they basically created a government that was totally in the hands of Nazi Germany. Even though they called themselves independent they were anything but.
In contrast to Italy, they actually followed German dictates to a T and so they immediately established all the racial laws. Everything that had been established in Germany in 1938, I mean from 1933 on and then Kristallnacht of course in 1938 which was sort of a culmination of it all, all these laws were also promulgated in Croatia. And then they began the creation of camps and the deportation of Jews, Serbs, and so on.
One of the things about Ustasa, they had another idea in their head besides the one that that Germans had, because the Germans couldn’t care less about the Serbs but the Croats did, and so not only did they deport and discriminate against and murder those people who were mentioned in our definition of the Holocaust, but they also in large, large numbers killed Serbs. Why? Because there was a political animosity between the two to begin with. It’s of course, they were different in terms of religion, that was the important thing. And so they ended up deporting Jews, Roma, all of the categories mentioned, but the largest number of people that were killed by the Ustasa were in fact Serbs.
BILL BENSON
Your parents were taken almost immediately Dora when the Germans came in. Tell us what you can about what happened to them and also about your brother who ended up being spared.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Right. Well the Jews, since my parents were in Zagreb and it seems like the Jews of Zagreb, there were a number of, throughout the time there were groups of people that were deported and somehow my parents were among the first. There was a gathering sort of a camp in Zagreb and my brother, being a baby, my mother took him along and then there was somebody, I’m not sure whether it was our housekeeper or our landlady or who, but there was a lady who actually rescued him out of there. She came and she took him…
BILL BENSON:
From out of the camp?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah from out of the camp. It was a sort of, more of a jail. A very strange place, I’ve been reading about it and its someplace where they kept people gathered before they could get them on the trains and eventually deport them. They didn’t have the camps built yet at the beginning so it was sort of a make-shift kind of thing, a prison. So she got him out of there and then she called my uncle in Ludbreg who at that point had already married my aunt, Aunt Giza. And they came and got him out, basically got him from our housekeeper. I do remember his arrival somehow even though I was very young because I have this image of this baby that arrived to my grandparents’ house; my grandparents were still there, and crying. I was three, three and a half or whatever, and this was sort of a fascinating baby and so I have that image in my head. Sorry where were we?
BILL BENSON:
So at that point it was you and your brother living with your Aunt Giza and your Uncle Ljudevit.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Not yet, we were first living with my grandparents. We were first living with my grandparents, and then began the deportations in Ludbreg and then came this fascinating thing where people would, there would be a raid and the Ustasa would come and have a list and these were basically often not local Ustasa. Ustasa were sort of a military force. They, this was, it was very strange in Croatia because there were actually two military forces besides the Germans. There was the so-called Domobranstvo who actually were the sort of real army and there were recruits, real recruits. And then there was the Ustasa who were the volunteer army, and they are the ones who perpetrated horrors and ran camps, but they were really army units.
BILL BENSON:
But they were the power?
DORA KLAYMAN:
They were the power, yeah. The other ones were sort of like we’ll do what we want you to do. And so they would come and say you know, take people and drag them onto trains and deport them. And that’s what happened to successive numbers of Jews in Ludbreg, including my grandparents. My grandparents at that time were quite old in their 70s or 80s. And they got them on those awful trains that we hear about all the time and deport them to a concentration camp and at that time Jasenovac, the concentration camp already existed. So once they were taken I was at that point at Giza’s and Ljudevit ‘s house because they were not deported until later.
BILL BENSON:
In fact your uncle, and as you’ve described to us Aunt Giza married Uncle Ljudevit who was not Jewish, but he would be taken and sent to the Jasenovac camp. Tell us about that.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes, Yes. Well when they originally married, they had to get in a civil ceremony in Hungary because there was no…that was just before the war because there was no possibility of getting married within Croatia in a civil ceremony. And the thought was that this would protect her but of course, as we know these protections did not last very long. In fact Ludbreg was an area that was surrounded by foothills of mountains and almost as soon as the war started, there were partisan forces, there were people who decided that they are not going to go along with this government, they are not going to stay peacefully waiting to see what happens and they went into the mountains and they eventually created military units. And that happened very soon around Ludbreg.
In terms of those forces, they were obviously anti…they considered themselves sort of anti-fascists forces, partisans, guerilla fighters. And my uncle was accused of collaborating with them, which of course I’m sure he was, but they found out and a number of other prominent citizens and they were actually sentenced to go to camp, to a jail. And I think he was sentenced for something like ten months or so.
BILL BENSON:
As opposed to being deported with a notion of it’s permanent.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Exactly, exactly. And also for a very different reason, it was now political dissidence rather than being Jewish.
BILL BENSON:
Right, right. So he does get sent to this Jasenovac camp…
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes
BILL BENSON:
…which from what you’ve told me, I hadn’t known much about it, an especially brutal camp.
DORA KLAYMAN:
It was [an] especially brutal camp and a lot of people don’t know about it because, we talked about it why isn’t it so well known? I think it’s overshadowed by the big German camps and Polish camps, and people don’t pay that much attention unfortunately to what is happening until something other horrible happens in the Balkans. And of course after the war, this was a Communist world so it did not become very well known.
However, it was an enormously brutal camp that, in which thousands of people perished in a very horrible way. It was not an organized camp like what we know of Auschwitz where people were registered and so on and there was order and so on. This was sort of brutal people just shooting and hitting people on the head and I really don’t want to talk about that horrors of it very much. I fortunately, personally did not experience it but one of the things that has happened in this Museum, which I am very grateful for is that we in this Museum actually have copies of the Archive which is now stored in Jasenovac which is now a memorial camp. So we have, unfortunately, a very good idea of the horrible things that were happening there.
BILL BENSON:
And in fact one of your roles is to translate some of the documents that have been uncovered and maybe if we have time later we’ll ask you about some of that, absolutely. What do you know about your uncle’s stay at Jasenovac.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Because it was such a brutal camp where people were being starved to death and worked to death and just being killed without reason whatsoever, he was first of all a lot older. I mentioned that my mother’s sister was 15 years older than my mother, he was 10 years older than she was. So he was quite a bit older than my parents than let’s say my parents and not in very good health. His whole family pretty much died off and so he was pretty much alone and that’s because their health was fairly poor. So he would have never survived. And he had a fortune of knowing, being capable of running an office because he was a banker.
BILL BENSON:
A mayor, a banker, all kinds of things.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah. So they stuffed him into an office where they needed, these people were, many of the people who ran the camps were just really uneducated, horrible people that would have liked to have something going but didn’t know how. So anyway he was put into a camp to keep some type of track of something, finances actually and so he managed to survive that way. He actually saw my father while he was there and my father was carrying bricks and doing very strenuous physical labor with almost no food, so my uncle would have never survived not even for a short period of time. My father on the other hand survived until almost the end of the war. He, as the war was coming to an end and the Ustasa were trying to tear down the camp…
BILL BENSON:
To get rid of the record of it…
DORA KLAYMAN:
To keep, yeah to have no record. There was a break out and my father was among the people who broke out of the camp and unfortunately he and some people stumbled on a German patrol and he was shot. So, that’s how his life ended. My mother was also in that camp. She died fairly early. I’m told about some people who had witnessed things say that my grandfather never even got into the camp, they just bludgeoned him outside of the fence. My mother I think made it into one of the auxiliary camps called Ðakovo and I think probably died of starvation or typhus.
BILL BENSON:
Dora when your uncle came across the fact that your father was alive in there, do you have any idea whether he was able to communicate that at that time to anybody back at home with your Aunt Giza or anybody. Did they know what was going on?
DORA KLAYMAN:
I think so. I think so. It was very strange, I have a hard time sometimes understanding it, and I think lots of people do, but actually there was some communications going on between people in camps and outside. In fact in the Jewish community in Zagreb it was allowed for quite a period of time to send packages. And we were even able to send packages hence that picture.
BILL BENSON:
That picture…
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah, sometimes people who were supposed to get it were already dead. But sometimes they were able to get it. Sometimes, it was totally supervised as to what they could write, but they were able to write something like “saw such and such,” or “send such and such.” So I don’t really know whether he wrote about my father, I really couldn’t ascertain that. But they were able to write sometimes and I remember some of the things that they asked to send and I just met someone who I spent time during the war with, they hid me in their family for a while and the daughter is still alive in her 80s, and she was remembering some of the things that we were sending. And the thing that we were sending were was like a mixture of flour and fat, sort of like roux if you’re cooking French way. And you heat the oil and you mix it with flour and you make a thick paste. And we were sending that so they could take a little bit of that and put it in what they called soup, which was just really just water with some grass in it or something. And they would make it a little thicker and it would be a little more nourishment.
BILL BENSON:
While your uncle was at the camp you of course and your brother remained with Aunt Giza and deportations continued during that time. Couple of questions for you about that time. You do remember the comings and goings of people, people saying goodbye, and disappearing. Why do you think, say a little about that and why you think ultimately you and your brother were not taken despite family members around you going?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Well, it’s a miracle of sorts. And I think there are some things that are, that underlie the miracle. I think for one, but this is really what I think I don’t know, that we were not on the list. When you look at, even there were books published about the town and you have lists of Jews from that town and I am not on the list and neither is my brother because we were not from Ludbreg, we were from Zagreb and nobody had put us on the list. So that’s one thing.
The other thing is that we were the youngest and a lot of people in Ludbreg sheltered us. This was a town that had a large number of people who had joined the partisans and while they couldn’t really very well take over the town, there were many battles and they tried but they didn’t succeed until the very end. I think there were people who sheltered us. Every once in a while Giza would take off and take us some place. We would be with one person or another or there were times that, we would be told at times that there would be a raid and we would be hidden by somebody.
BILL BENSON:
And at some point, as you said earlier your uncle was sentenced to a period and that time was up and he came home, but while he was gone his wife, your Aunt Giza with whom you were living, was taken and deported.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes. So even though for a long time we were able to somehow make it and survive and no one would give us up, at one point there was a person, and they eventually knew who that was. He fingered my aunt and she was arrested and taken away. She begged the people who were living next door, as I told you there was a building that was constructed in the same courtyard with the house we were living in, and in the back apartment behind that store was being rented and the people who lived there, the Runjak family, there was a mother and father and three children who were sort of early teens late teens, we were left with them. And they were willing to take us in. I heard just recently that my aunt begged for them to save us and they agreed and took us in and we stayed there for quite a while.
BILL BENSON:
And this was the Runjak family?
DORA KLAYMAN:
That was the Runjak family.
BILL BENSON:
You told me that a Priest basically was aware that you were with the Runjak’s and essentially insisted that they baptize you, more or less or else. Will you share that with us?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Well I was told that, I don’t remember it very well. But it was the local Priest who eventually, who obviously knew who we were, and so did the rest of the town. Everybody knew who we were, the fact that we were not given away was just miraculous and that Priest I think was getting uncomfortable and eventually went to that family and said what are we going to do with these children? And so either or. And he must have been satisfied with that because we remained until my uncle returned.
BILL BENSON:
And then your uncle returns after his time was up, his wife, your aunt, is gone. And now most of his in-laws are gone and he has you and your brother.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Everybody’s gone.
BILL BENSON:
Everybody’s gone by that time. What do you know about that time for your uncle and meanwhile the war is raging around you?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Well I think the first thing he did is he tried very hard, he went to Zagreb, he went, we were still left behind, to try to find people and connections he had, anybody who would be able to tell him where she is. And hoping that probably that she was someplace within the country. But she was not. She, he was told I think that she went to Auschwitz. And I recently confirmed that. From the time, only recently, since our Museum had received this latest Archive that we have from Bad Arolsen I put her name in and sure enough there she was.
BILL BENSON:
And this is very recent.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Very recent, like few months ago.
BILL BENSON:
And that was the confirmation…
DORA KLAYMAN:
That was the confirmation that she arrived in Auschwitz and, in quote, “died” in 1943.
BILL BENSON:
So what did your uncle do with you at that point? Just try to survive in the town of Ludbreg?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes, he was given some of his job back. Not really running the bank but something less than that and we tried to survive. It was an incredible time, because there were battles fairly often in the town…
BILL BENSON:
And the battles were not between the Allies and the Germans, it was the Ustasa and the partisans.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Exactly, Ustasa and the partisans, and the battles would be at night, sometimes small and sometimes major battles. There were some major sort of offenses they called ofanziva, they were major attacks during the time. And we would spend time, sometimes running into the basement in the middle of the night and sometimes there were times when we actually spent many nights in a row we would just not go to sleep, we would go to sleep in the basement. Now the basement was not an American style basement, it was a wine cellar, because we actually had a vineyard and the in cellar was a dirt floor cellar with big barrels and lots of frogs jumping around and shells with drying apples and things like that. And then we actually had some cots down there and we spent nights there. And it was lucky when we were able to get there because there were times when we didn’t manage to get down before a battle would start and we would be caught in the house. The house was fortunately, had very, very thick walls so if you were lucky to be someplace in a corner that was okay, but the bullets would sometimes fly in through the windows.
There was one time that there was a big battle and one side was shooting from our backyard and the other side was shooting from the second floor of the house on the other side of the road and bullets would be flying through into our house. And I was crying in a corner and my uncle came at that point just where he had passed the bullet flew in, so it was… you know, a shattering moment. But it was wild to see our living room after the war because we had armoires in the house and they all had holes and if you took, you know we had table clothes stored in or our sheets and you take it out it looked like when you take a napkin and fold it up and you cut it and you have little holes. That’s what it looked like. And the walls had holes.
BILL BENSON:
You had described to me that for a child your biggest fear was more getting shot and killed rather than being deported because it was so much more tangible, you could understand that.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Right exactly, you could understand someone shooting at you but being deported, what does that ever mean? And otherwise during that time, you know wartime, you think about hunger and things of that nature. Because this is a rural area, we were not, I don’t remember ever actually being hungry because there were always some chickens or, and we would trade things that we had from before the war, like you know my aunt’s dresses or my uncle’s sister’s dresses. You would trade that for a bag or potatoes or carrots or whatever. And so we were not starving.
And we had, there were women from the farms who would come and we used to have one at a time sort of stay and do the cooking, or cleaning, or whatever, taking care of me when my uncle was working. Me and my brother, my brother was alive then. And sometimes they made wise decision and sometimes made terrible decisions and one of the things that I remember well is one of these women taking me to the main square and it was just after one of the battles and they had caught so many partisans and when I was passing through there was at least one partisan per tree in the square. They had hanged them that morning, so… it was, there were sort of unpleasant to say the least.
And the battles were sometimes horrific because there was a, there was a time when, it was one of the worst battles when there was a battalion caught in the street and they were surrounded and they couldn’t leave. And the final command of it was in a house, sort of the last house in that street before it becomes again fields and a cemetery, and they barricaded themselves in there and blew themselves up with a bomb. And, you know, they would then the next morning there would be… carts coming by the house and we would like look through the jalousies and I remember seeing carts of dead bodies being carted away.
BILL BENSON:
Dora, you showed me before we started today, when you were in Croatia, just last week, picked up a current June 30th I think issue of a publication that was recounting this fighting that took place, specific in Ludbreg from 1941 to 1945 and what you described was essentially sounds like a “see-saw” battle with the partisans taking control of either Ludbreg or portions of it, and the Ustasa taking it back, back and forth for four years. It all came to a close with the end of the war in May 1945. What do you recall about the end of the war and what happened with your uncle and how they were able to get the Ustasa out of there?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Oh well there was a, this is another thing that’s going on in Croatia right now, the war doesn’t seem to end there. There was just now a, the great debate of whether the president is to visit the town of Bleiburg. And apparently Ustasa were withdrawing along with the German troops and they were withdrawing to, they were trying to escape into Austria and they were caught in the town of Bleiburg and what happened there is up for debate right now.
And this is the first time that a president of post-war Yugoslavia, Croatia, whatever you want to call it went there because the partisans apparently surrounded them and I’m not sure whose version I’m giving you but, from what I understand Ustasa would not give up and would not give up arms. And then many, or some, or I don’t know how many were shot by the partisans. Which of course is considered because… so the question is were they prisoners of war and they were shot when they shouldn’t have been shot, were they just not giving up, were they still fighting and they were shot? So this is a big political…
BILL BENSON:
Going on today.
DORA KLAYMAN:
It’s going on today, right. What I remember of it is that when many of them were caught, the Ustasa were caught, they were then marched through in toward the east and I do need to figure out where to but I can’t remember it now because all I have in my memory is columns and columns of these Ustasa who had now been marched with not much food or water through the town. And there were columns and columns and people were just standing watching these people being marched by the partisans through.
And of course I have some memory of the trials afterwards, but we were free and it was amazing. The partisans came, many of the local partisans came, many of the people from that town who had joined the partisans returned and it was then first evident how many had in fact joined the partisans. It was obviously a town that had its heart in the right place and in essence saved my life as a town because everybody knew who I was. I was, you know, we were the Rabbi’s grandchildren; there is no question of who we were.
BILL BENSON:
And were you possibly the only Jews left in Ludbreg at that time?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Definitely.
BILL BENSON:
Definitely. You and your brother.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes
BILL BENSON:
Sadly your brother didn’t live for very long after the war.
DORA KLAYMAN:
No. Very sadly. Oh yeah well one of the things that happened is that my uncle with whom we survived adopted us right away and then everything was just fine until one day my brother got ill with scarlet fever. There were two other little boys that got sick and the other two boys survived and my brother must have had a weak heart they said, and of course we had no penicillin and he died within three days or so.
BILL BENSON:
Five years old?
DORA KLAYMAN:
He was, yeah he was born in ’41 so yeah he was five years old. And he died and actually, with my uncle there of course, and Mrs. Runjak the one with whom we stayed. One of the things that I did not mention is that when we were staying with the Runjaks, because there were Ustasas everywhere – they were in our yard, they were everywhere – and I was told by Mrs. Runjak that I absolutely must call her Mother because if I didn’t I would be taken away. So I obliged, I could understand, I was old enough to understand to call her Mother when they were there, when they Ustasa were there, and not when they were not. My brother was too young so they just told him “this is your mother.” So he called her Mother to the rest of his life and she was there when he died. It was horrendous.
BILL BENSON:
And then it’s just you and your uncle.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Right
BILL BENSON:
And did any other family members survive and come back? What can you tell us about that?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah. On my mother’s side of the family one person survived, her brother. My mother’s brother. He returned for a short period of time then he wanted to take me with him, but my uncle in the mean time, my uncle Ljudevit of course had adopted me and he very much wanted to keep me and I very much wanted to stay, I loved him. So I refused to go pretty much. And then my mother’s brother also remarried and he married a Holocaust survivor, a woman with two children and they left for Israel. And that’s the last I heard from him, he passed away since. And on my father’s side of the family, one brother survived in the prisoner of war camp and he returned to Yugoslavia and pretty much the same story. He came to see if anybody survived in Ludbreg and…
BILL BENSON:
You’re his brother’s daughter so he…
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah his brother’s daughter well he wanted to take me and then again my uncle Ljudevit said no and I was already adopted so he had some rights there. But there were some disputes about that and I said “No I’m not going,” and they listened to me. He also then married another Holocaust survivor and left for Israel. Another person who survived is Father’s sister. She and her two children and husband survived with the partisans and they left for Israel. Another of my father’s brothers survived, but he survived via a camp Bergen-Belsen, and he and his wife fled Croatia to Hungary and from Hungary to Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen they were liberated into Switzerland. They started writing to me and I wrote back and eventually, by the time I was in high school around 1954, I got to go and visit them.
BILL BENSON:
Which was no small feat coming from Communist Yugoslavia?
DORA KLAYMAN:
No it was quite an incredible feat, actually. For one we didn’t have the money. For another you could not leave a Communist country just like that to go abroad, nobody could leave. So I applied for a passport and eventually actually got it and a visa to go into Switzerland, because I was labeled and that was important in Yugoslavia at that time, I was labeled a Victim of Fascism.
BILL BENSON:
A victim of Fascism?
DORA KLAYMAN:
A victim of Fascism, there was such a nomenclature. As such I was allowed to leave. My uncle sold whatever we had and got money together and so in 1954, I was at that point in high school, I went to Switzerland and my uncle waited for me at the border, waited for the train to come. It was late in the evening and I recognized him right away, he had sent me pictures. And it was very emotional for me. And then we got to their house, they had spent time after Bergen-Belsen in camps…
BILL BENSON:
Displaced persons’ camps?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Displaced persons’ camps thank you, and then were allowed to stay in Switzerland and were managing to survive and sort of make a living. They remained quite religious and I didn’t even know what Jewish was, never mind being religious and I mean I knew I was Jewish but it was sort of an abstract concept. For one there were no Jews around and for another it was a Communist world and in a Communist world nobody practiced any religion. So I found myself in a very Orthodox family, but it was a wonderful family. They had one son at that point who was seven and one baby, Jacob and Dani, and it was a very nice time. I spent a month with them and we thought that it would be nice if I could come back once I was at the University and stay for a while.
BILL BENSON:
We’re almost to the end of the program, but there’s one thing I absolutely want Dora to share with us and that relates to what she just said when she was planning to return to study but it’s also when she met her future husband, if you can tell us about that.
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yes I will, succinctly. Okay well I’ll also tell you about Jacob and Dani who both grew up and both left for Israel and live there and I see them a lot and it’s wonderful, their parents have died since unfortunately. But when I went to visit them it was when I was in my second year of University and I was to spend a year…
BILL BENSON:
And again it was not easy to get out to go back.
DORA KLAYMAN:
No it was very difficult at that time, again because it was 1957 Communism was still in full force in Yugoslavia so it was hard to get out, but I got the visa and out I went. And in the train there were some people discussing Little Rock and Governor Faubus…
BILL BENSON:
In English?
DORA KLAYMAN:
In English, and I had been studying English I was an English major at the University and I had had five years of English before that and I was dying to speak to them and it was the time of all the problems of integration in the United States. And they were discussing that and I wanted to be part of the conversation so I kind of went back and forth a few times and they said something, my future husband said something and I smiled and he said, “ah you speak English…”
BILL BENSON:
But what did he say? What did he say?
DORA KLAYMAN:
He said “What beautiful red hair.” I was fully red haired at that time…
BILL BENSON:
In English and not thinking you understood, right?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah yeah, not knowing whether I did or not. Anyway, so I responded and we started speaking and we had about two hours until we got to Venice to talk and we talked about many things and sang Mozart and then we parted and exchanged addresses and very shortly after that I got a letter from him and I responded and then we wrote some more and I responded. That was in the fall because I was going to school and he was going back home after spending a year in India, in letters we decided to get married, which I don’t recommend to any of you children. [laughs]
And we decided to get married so in August of that year he came back to Switzerland with his mother and his brother and fifteen days later we were married in an Orthodox ceremony. He turned out to be Jewish, which was what made my uncle and aunt encourage this whole correspondence very highly. So we were married in Switzerland in an Orthodox ceremony and I came to the States. I could not go back to visit my uncle which was very sad because it was so difficult to get out of Yugoslavia at that time that I was afraid if I went back I would not be able to get out again very fast. So we left and came to the States. Once I was able to get my citizenship we did go back and by that time I had two children and we went and visited with him. He passed away since of course because he was really almost like my grandfather in terms of age, he was a lot older, he was born in 1885, but he was a wonderful person…
BILL BENSON:
And you stayed close with him until the end right?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Yeah, right
BILL BENSON:
Dora, I wish we had more time, and obviously we’re out of time for you to ask some questions but Dora if you could stay behind for afterwards for just a few minutes?
DORA KLAYMAN:
Sure I’d be happy to.
BILL BENSON:
If you want to come and ask Dora a question or meet her please feel free to do that. I would like to remind you all that we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August 25th and for the remaining Tuesdays of July so we welcome you back anytime. Our next program is tomorrow when our first person will be Mr. Gideon Frieder who is from Slovakia.
I’d like to remind you that First Person podcasts are available on the Museum’s website as well as through iTunes and we will have Dora’s posted as a podcast in the coming weeks. It’s our tradition at First Person that our first person gets the last word. And so with that I’d like to turn back to Dora to close our program today.
DORA KLAYMAN:
As much as I’ve thought about what I wanted to say, it all escapes me. Just a sense of gratitude for life and for all the people who helped along. And a sense of gratitude to this Museum for many things, and for keeping the memories alive and for keeping the idea that tolerance and freedom are important. The Museum has also done, particularly for me, a very important thing and that is saving the material that came out of Jasenovac.
Jasenovac is a horrible camp, and was a horrible camp and it was the beginning of what continues to be a sort of, not a very happy experience in that land. After we had Yugoslavia there was yet another war, a terrible war. And we are about to discuss this war on Thursday, the war in which Serbs killed so many Muslims. So first Croats killed Serbs and then Serbs killed Muslims and it’s just not a very happy land and the idea of maintaining some sense of sanity is so important in this Museum and I’m very happy that I can add something to it. [Applause]
