Hilda Dajč

Hilda Dajč^[a] (also Hilda Deitch; 22 March 1922 – 1942) was a Yugoslav Jewish student whose letters from the Sajmište concentration camp constitute the only known written testimony by Jewish prisoners of the camp and one of the few surviving first-person accounts from German-occupied Serbia during the Holocaust.

Born in Vienna and raised in Belgrade, she studied architecture at the University of Belgrade. During the German occupation of Serbia she volunteered as a nurse at the Jewish Hospital in Belgrade and in December 1941 chose to enter the Sajmište concentration camp to provide medical assistance to the prisoners.

Between December 1941 and February 1942, Dajč wrote and smuggled four letters to friends outside the camp describing the hunger, overcrowding and disease endured by the prisoners. She was murdered in the spring of 1942 when the camp's remaining Jewish inmates were killed using a gas van.

Hilda Dajč was born on 22 March 1922 in Vienna^[2] into an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the daughter of Augusta and Emil Dejč; she had a younger brother, Hans.^[3][4] She was raised in Belgrade, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where she completed her secondary education at the State Third Girls’ Gymnasium and later enrolled to study architecture at the University of Belgrade.^[5] Her studies were interrupted by the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the establishment of the German military administration in Serbia.^[6] During the early months of the occupation, she began volunteering at the Jewish Hospital in Belgrade, which had been established after the German authorities barred Jews from using city hospitals or receiving treatment from non-Jews. The Jewish community was responsible for equipping and maintaining the hospital, where Jewish doctors and nurses worked without pay.^[7][8]

Her father, Emil Dajč, served as vice-president of the Vertretung der jüdischen Gemeinde, a Jewish representative body established by the German occupation authorities that replaced the Belgrade Jewish community council.^[9][10]

Following an anti-German uprising in German-occupied Serbia in the summer of 1941, German occupation authorities implemented a policy of reprisal executions in which hostages were shot in retaliation for attacks on German forces. Thousands of civilians were killed under this policy and by the end of 1941 most Jewish men in the territory had already been shot by the Wehrmacht.^[11][12]

On 8 December 1941, the surviving Jews in Belgrade, about 7,000 women and children from Belgrade and Banat, were ordered to report to the police to be transferred to the former Belgrade Fairgrounds across the Sava River, near the town of Zemun (Semlin in German).^[13][8] There, German authorities established the Sajmište concentration camp (Judenlager Semlin), using the pavilions of the pre-war exhibition complex to confine the remaining Jewish population.^[14][b] The camp was operated by German Einsatzgruppen units stationed in Serbia.^[11] It was located less than five kilometres from central Belgrade but formally lay within the territory of the Independent State of Croatia.^[16] Between December 1941 and March 1942 around 7,000 Jewish prisoners were interned there, representing nearly half of the pre-war Jewish population of German-occupied Serbia.^[17][18]

Although her father’s position initially protected the family from some anti-Jewish measures in Occupied Serbia, Dajč chose in early December 1941, after completing a medical course that year, to enter the camp voluntarily to serve as a nurse, against her family’s wishes.^[6][2][19] On 8 December 1941 she reported, like other Jewish women and children, to the headquarters of the Jewish police and was transported by truck to the Sajmište concentration camp.^[20] She became one of the first detainees held in Pavilion No. 3 at the newly established camp, which stood directly across the Sava River from central Belgrade. Conditions in the unheated camp were severe, with widespread starvation, disease and frequent deaths among the inmates.^[11] During the winter of 1941–42, an average of around one hundred prisoners at Semlin died each day from exposure.^[12] Contemporary testimony describes prisoners crossing the frozen river during the winter to bury the dead in the Jewish cemetery.^[21][22]

While imprisoned, Dajč wrote and smuggled four letters to her schoolmates Nada Novak and Mirjana Petrović, both members of the Literary Society.^[22][7] Written between December 1941 and February 1942, the letters provide a rare first-person account of life in the camp, describing severe overcrowding, hunger and isolation among the prisoners.^[23] According to historian Magdalena Saiger, they were probably smuggled out by staff from the Jewish hospital who regularly entered the camp.^[6] Jaša Almuli reports that the first internee executed was a courier who had been carrying letters between the camp and the Jewish hospital; this was followed by the execution of several women and girls in early 1942.^[24] Dajč’s letters constitute the only known written testimony by Jewish prisoners of the Semlin camp.^[25]

The first letter, dated 7 December 1941 and addressed to Nada Novak, daughter of academic Viktor Novak, was written on the eve of her departure to the camp.^[8] In it Dajč explained her decision to enter the camp as an act of conscience and duty, writing that "there are so many people in need of help that my conscience dictates to me that I should ignore any sentimental reasons regarding family and home, and place myself completely at the service of others".^[7][26] She also expressed optimism about the assistance she hoped to provide and referred to her friends from the Literary Society, writing: "I will think of you often. You are my most beautiful memory from the most pleasant period of my life, the literary society."^[22]

The second letter, written on 9 December 1941 and addressed to Mirjana Petrović,^[6] describes her first impressions of life in the camp. Dajč portrayed the overcrowded pavilions where prisoners slept on wooden galleries with only about 80 cm of personal space each and described the camp as resembling a "cowshed" or "ant heap" filled with thousands of inmates.^[23] She wrote about the harsh living conditions, including freezing winter temperatures, insufficient food and water, constant roll calls and the presence of barbed wire surrounding the pavilions.^[23] Despite these conditions, the letter also reflects her efforts to maintain intellectual and emotional resilience. Dajč also described beginning work in the camp infirmary, assisting a doctor and pharmacist in treating prisoners suffering from exhaustion and illness.^[22]

A third letter, written around 11 December 1941 and addressed to Nada Novak,^[6] continued to describe the deteriorating conditions inside the camp and the routines of daily life among the prisoners. Dajč wrote about severe overcrowding, long queues for food and water and the constant noise produced by thousands of inmates confined in the pavilions.^[22] She also described the difficulty of maintaining hygiene in such conditions and recounted assisting with basic medical care, including treating prisoners suffering from lice and exhaustion.^[27] The letter also reflects her attempts to preserve a sense of intellectual life despite imprisonment. Dajč referred with irony to a small personal "library" she had assembled in the camp, consisting of books by Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Blaise Pascal and Michel de Montaigne, as well as English and Hebrew textbooks.^[28][22] Despite the harsh circumstances, the letter retains an unexpectedly optimistic tone: Dajč wrote that she remained calm and continued working long hours in the camp infirmary, expressing the belief that her efforts would give meaning to her decision to volunteer for the camp.^[28]

The final surviving letter, written in February 1942 and addressed to Mirjana Petrović,^[6] reflects the increasingly desperate situation in the camp after several weeks of imprisonment. In it Dajč described the effects of severe hunger, cold and exhaustion on the prisoners and the growing sense of isolation from the outside world. She wrote that the inmates felt "so near the outside world, yet so far from everyone", noting that life in Belgrade appeared to continue as if a "slaughterhouse containing six thousand innocent people" did not exist only a short distance away.^[28]

The letter also conveys a marked shift in tone from the earlier correspondence. Dajč wrote that the prolonged deprivation and uncertainty were eroding the prisoners' morale and social bonds, describing how starvation and desperation were transforming relationships among the inmates.^[29] She referred to herself as a Lagerinsassin ("camp inmate"), reflecting the psychological transformation brought about by life in the camp.^[29] At the same time she described her continued work in the camp infirmary, including helping to lay out the bodies of prisoners who had died from exposure and illness.^[27] The letter also reflects the uncertainty surrounding the prisoners' fate, as Dajč asked whether they might be shot, deported or otherwise killed.^[30][27] Despite these circumstances, the letter retains a deeply personal tone, expressing her longing for her friends and the outside world, which she described as a lost paradise.^[28]

According to later recollections by Petrović, the two friends were able on several occasions to arrange brief meetings when prisoners were allowed to cross the frozen Sava River to meet staff from the Jewish hospital on the opposite bank.^[31] Petrović recalled that during one such occasion Dajč escorted sick prisoners to the Jewish hospital in Dorćol and briefly met her at a tavern near the harbour, where the letters were handed over.^[32] In recollections later shared with Holocaust researcher Jaša Almuli, Petrović remembered that by this stage of her imprisonment Dajč appeared thin and pale and seemed increasingly dejected and desperate.^[33] Saiger notes that the signatures of the letters reflect a shift in tone, from "Hilda" or "your Hilda" in the early letters to the ironic description "happy volunteer", and finally to "your camp inmate" in the final letter.^[29]

Dajč's letters were first published by Almuli in the anthology Jevrejke govore (2005; Jewish Women Talking) and later republished, together with accounts based on interviews he conducted after locating their recipients Nada Novak and Mirjana Petrović in 1989, in his book Stradanje i spasavanje srpskih Jevreja (2010; Suffering and Saving of Serbian Jews).^[7][34]

Hilda Dajč was killed in the spring of 1942 in a gas van deployed to Zemun during the systematic murder of the remaining Jewish inmates at Semlin.^[35] Between her last known letter in early February 1942 and 10 May 1942, a mobile gas van, referred to by the German authorities as a "delousing truck" (Entlausungswagen), was used to kill prisoners from the camp and transport their bodies to unmarked mass graves outside Belgrade.^[36] Operated by two SS officers, the vehicle made between sixty-five and seventy trips and resulted in the murder of approximately 6,300 Jews, nearly all those detained at Semlin, including Dajč's parents and her younger brother Hans.^[37][25]

The same gas-van operation was also used in March 1942 to murder the patients and staff of the Jewish hospital in Belgrade where Dajč had earlier worked as a nurse.^[38] In August 1942 Harald Turner, head of the German military administration's staff in Belgrade, reported that "Serbia is the only country in Europe where the Jewish problem has been solved".^[38]

Dajč's letters have been published and preserved in archival collections. The first three letters are held by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, while the fourth is preserved in the Historical Archives of Belgrade.^[33] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has featured her correspondence in its documentation of the destruction of the Jewish community in German-occupied Serbia. Her letters are virtually the only preserved documents written by Jewish prisoners at Sajmište.^[25]

Scholars have sometimes compared Dajč's correspondence to the diary of Anne Frank. Nevena Daković writes that she is occasionally referred to as a "Serbian Anne Frank", noting that her letters offer an intimate and personal account of persecution comparable in tone, though much shorter in form, to Anne Frank's diary.^[39] Holocaust researcher Jaša Almuli similarly described the letters as resembling "a small diary of Anne Frank".^[18]

A 25-minute documentary, Pisma Hilde Dajč (Letters from Hilda Dajč), was released in 2019.^[40] The Serbian artist Aleksandar Zograf later created a graphic novel based on Dajč's letters depicting the experiences of Jewish prisoners at the Sajmište camp.^[41]

On 5 July 2022, a brass memorial plaque commemorating Hilda Dajč was installed outside her family's former residence at 9 Maršala Birjuzova Street in Belgrade as part of a memorial project initiated by German artist Gunter Demnig. The plaque states that Dajč lived there, volunteered in 1941 to assist at the Jewish hospital at Staro Sajmište, and was killed in 1942.^[42]

In 2022, the Remembering Hilda Dajč Award was established in Serbia to mark the 80th anniversary of the murder of Jewish prisoners at the Sajmište concentration camp and to promote youth engagement in Holocaust remembrance and democratic values.^[43] The award trophy, designed by Serbian artist Vojislav Klačar, is shaped as a bundle of four terracotta letters symbolising the four surviving letters written by Dajč.^[44]

• The Holocaust in German-occupied Serbia
• History of the Jews in Serbia
• History of the Jews in Yugoslavia

• Letters of Hilda Dajč – scans and English translations, semlin.info
• Letters of Hilda Dajč – scans and English translations, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum