Ivan Ivanji's life takes place between stacks of books – dozens of them written or translated by him personally. Between those stacks are his desk and computer. Ivanji answers emails within minutes even at the proud age of 89.
"I'm not a particularly social person," he told DW. His third — and as he says, "final" — wife Dragana, a former ballet dancer, died three years ago. Now, he is a lone wolf. "I live out my life in books. I have invented a lot of characters. I find them easier to deal with than real people."
But Ivanji is constantly dealing with people. And he is happy to talk when people ask him about the Nazi era, his time in the Buchenwald concentration camp, about socialist Yugoslavia, literature or the state of democracy in his homeland and in Europe. Whether in lectures, interviews or texts — Ivanji seems driven.
It seems logical — if a person has lived three lives, they likely have a lot to say. He was born the son of Jewish parents and was interned at both the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. He was a Yugoslavian diplomat and German interpreter for Communist-era President Josip Broz Tito, to whose ideas Ivanji remains faithful even today. And moreover, he is a respected author and journalist.
The prisoner
Born in 1929 in what was then Grossbetschkrek in the kingdom of Yugoslavia and is now Zrenjanin in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, Ivanji grew up among Serbs, Jews, Germans, Hungarians and Romanians. He says his early life was "idyllic."
His parents – both of whom were German-educated physicians — were not practicing Jews. An Austrian governess was tasked with teaching their son German, free of the heavy Danube-Swabian accent so prevalent in the region. Thus he learned a third mother tongue — or as he jokes a governess's tongue — alongside Serbian and Hungarian.
He was 12 years old when the Germans marched into Yugoslavia in 1941. In 1944 he was deported. "I am fit for work!" he told the SS doctor upon arrival in Auschwitz. Those words, which would eventually save his life, were based on a false assumption on his part: The 15-year-old thought workers were given better food. He did not believe that Jews were actually being exterminated. It was not until after the war that he learned his parents had both been killed in Belgrade.
Read more: Auschwitz: Evolution of a death camp and Holocaust memorial
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel" to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared "undesirables" by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: "gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears."
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
'Stolpersteine' - stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany's Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in 18 countries in Europe - it's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau" where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the "Brown House" in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon
After a short stint at Auschwitz, he was taken to Buchenwald, where he toiled as a forced laborer. Still, he survived. "I was really given a life sentence at Buchenwald, because I go there every year, sometimes twice a year. The longer I live and the more fellow concentration camp prisoners die, the more often I go," says Ivanji.
When he visits, he insists on being put up in Hotel Elephant in the nearby city of Weimar. That is where Hitler stationed himself when in the area. The hotel even installed a special balcony so that the "Führer" could speak to his people. Ivanji jokes that another reason he likes to stay there is that the beds are more comfortable than in the concentration camp's barracks.
The interpreter
Right now, Ivan Ivanji is back in Germany. He came to Bonn at the invitation of Deutsche Welle and the German historical museum, Haus der Geschichte. For Ivanji, the trip is a chance to revisit another part of his life. Decades ago, when Bonn was still the capital of then West Germany, he lived here; working as a cultural attaché at the Yugoslavian Embassy.
After the war, he studied and began work as a journalist. Around that time, his governess's tongue also opened doors to the most powerful communists in Yugoslavia. He soon began working as an interpreter for head of state Tito – who had become a political heavyweight on the international stage when he founded the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961.
"That was really where I was at home, especially in terms of ideology. And my home is still to be found there – between Triglav, the highest peak in Slovenia, and Lake Ohrid in Macedonia," says Ivanji, some 27 years after the fall of Yugoslavia. He quietly protests the bloody collapse of his former homeland by living in Vienna, preferring to travel on an Austrian rather than a Serbian passport.
Read more: The western Balkans: A region of secessions
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
A billion dollar ruin
A military resort Kupari situated on the Croatian coast near Dubrovnik was built exclusively for the highest ranking Yugoslav officers and retired generals. It was financed by the country's military budget and is said to have ended up costing the modern-day equivalent of a billion dollars. During the war, the complex was abandoned and looted. Borko Vukosav captured the scene then and now.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
Full metal mountain
Seen both then and now, Željava Air Base, an underground airport, was an important military complex in former Yugoslavia. In 1968, it was built on the border between Croatia and Bosnia in complete secrecy by political prisoners who were forced to labor there. The airbase was destroyed in 1992 by the Yugoslav National Army during its withdrawal from the region to avoid use by other factions.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
The last stand
It was of the utmost importance for all six Yugoslav republics to be protected by the air fleet of the Željava airport. Generals used to come to Željava's hidden rooms to present military strategies intended to defend the country from external threats. Today, one dilapidated aircraft guards the Croatian-Bosnian border. It is one of Vukosav's photos now on show at the Format Festival in the UK.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
A forgotten battle
this monument to the uprising of the people of Kordun and Banija on Petrova Gora commemorates the approximately 300 Serb peasants who died in the very place during the 1942 attack by the Independent State of Croatia's Ustaše Militia. It stands as a symbol of the Yugoslav resistance against the Nazi during World War II, even though the structure has been decaying since 1991.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
Lakes of the past
In 1942, hundreds of Serb children died in the concentration camp established in Jastrebarsko by the Independent State of Croatia. After World War II, the military base built nearby the camp was home to the elite forces of former Yugoslavia. Nowadays, the lakes created by bombs and missile tests are a reminder of the region's unsettling history.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
Marxist education
The political school of Yugoslavia's President Josip Broz Tito was founded in Kurovec, his hometown, in 1975. Its only aim was to teach and spread the ideology of Marxism. In the present day, the complex is deliberately neglected and left to crumble as it symbolises the era of socialism, something that the current political scene in Croatia considers immoral.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
All eyes on Sarajevo
The XIV Winter Olympic Games that took place in Sarajevo in 1984 were watched by 60,000 Yugoslav citizens in the stadium alone. This bobsled and luge track, built on a hill overlooking the city, was one of the few structures that were used even after the games were over until the beginning of the war. The city council has been making steps to reopen the track, pictured then and now, since 2015.
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Croatian photographer captures the ruins of Yugoslavia
Bananas, mines, and celebrities
Originally an Italian trade ship and later a minelayer used by Nazi Germany, "Galeb” was Tito's personal yacht as of 1951. Tito considered airplanes unsafe and hard to protect, so he used the ship to travel across the globe. He hosted Winston Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Kirk Douglas and Elizabeth Taylor on board. Today, the ship is docked in Rijeka and is considered a piece of cultural heritage.
Author: Jan Tomes
The writer
The things Ivanji has seen and experienced hover in a space between fact and fiction in all of his books. He has written autobiographically about his life as a concentration camp prisoner in Mein schönes Leben in der Hölle (My Beautiful Life in Hell) and used the words "Jedem das Seine" ("To Each His Own"), which are forged into the entrance gate at Buchenwald, as the basis for the novel Buchstaben von Feuer (Letters of Fire). His governess plays the main role in Das Kinderfräulein (The Governess) and he also published another autobiographical work describing the historical events that he experienced alongside Tito in Titos Dolmetscher (Tito's Interpreter). Beyond that, he has penned some 150 further novels, essays, plays and radio dramas. He says he has "a writing obsession — it's good for me."
In the 1980s, Ivanji was the secretary general of the Yugoslav Writers' Union. He also shared a friendship with the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass. Only twice did that friendship teeter: Once, when Ivanji refused to continue translating Grass's novels into Serbo-Croatian — too complicated — and a second time when Grass came out in support of NATO's 1999 bombing of Serbia.
In 2016, the Belgrade weekly magazine Vreme named Ivanji its "Person of the Year," praising the author's ability to make clear that, "even after experiences as bitter as the grounds left at the bottom of a cup of coffee, he celebrates life and shows that history has not yet destroyed mankind. And that is a valuable message."
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Traces of war
In the late 1990s, the conflict in Kosovo was escalating as tens of thousands of people fled the region. After all efforts at pacifying the region failed, NATO began carrying out air raids on military bases and strategic targets in Serbia on March 24, 1999. Eleven weeks later, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic finally gave in.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Peaceful resistance fails
In the mid 1980s, protests began in Kosovo against government attempts to curtail the rights of the Albanian majority. The reprisals worsened in the 1990s. Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the political movement in Kosovo since 1989, tried to make Milosevic change course using peaceful resistance - without success.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Armed guerilla warfare
An armed resistance formed in Kosovo. The self-appointed liberation army UCK started a brutal guerrilla war and carried out violent attacks against Serbs and Albanians whom they saw as collaborators. Serbia reacted with retaliatory measures: Houses were torched and shops plundered, as hundreds of thousands fled the region.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Systematic expulsion
As time passed, the war became ever more brutal. Serbian forces increasingly attacked civilians with the aim of breaking the UCK's resistance and its support among the population. Many people looked for refuge in the forests. Trains and trucks transport thousands of people to the borders - without passports or other documents which could prove that their home had been in Kosovo.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Last attempt at negotiation
Under the auspices of the US, France, the UK, Russia and Germany, the conflicting parties attended a conference in Rambouillet, France in February 1999 with the aim of working out a limited settlement guaranteeing Kosovo's autonomy. Representatives of Kosovo accepted the conditions of the deal, but their Serbian counterparts were not willing to make any concessions. The negotiations failed.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
'Humanitarian intervention'
On March 24, 1999, NATO began bombarding military and strategic targets in Serbia and Kosovo in order to stop the violence against Albanians. Germany joined the military action, known as Operation Allied Force. It was NATO's first war in its 50-year history - and that without the official backing of the UN Security Council. Russia sharply condemned the intervention.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Infrastructure destroyed
Next to military installations, NATO also attacked transportation networks such as railroad tracks and bridges. During the following 79 days and nights, the alliance carried out more than 37,000 operations with 20,000 rockets and bombs striking Serbian territory and killing countless civilians - what NATO referred to as "collateral damage."
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Poison clouds over Pancevo
Industrial sites were also among the targets. NATO bombs hit chemical plants and a fertilizer factory in the town of Pancevo near the capital, Belgrade. Huge amounts of toxic substances made their way into rivers, soil and the air, with grave health consequences for the local population. Serbia accused NATO of having used depleted uranium ammunition, as well as cluster and fragmentation bombs.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
War against war propaganda
In order to deprive Slobodan Milosevic of his most important propaganda tool, NATO decided to attack Serbia's public television station in Belgrade. The Serbian government, although told of the attack in advance, withheld the information from the public. Sixteen people lost their lives in the bombing.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Off target
In Kosovo, NATO bombs inadvertently hit a group of Albanian refugees, killing an estimated 80 people. More "collateral damage" occurred when NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing four people. The incident led to a severe diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Washington.
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1999: NATO intervention against Serbia
Horrific outcome
In early June, communications out of Belgrade showed that Milosevic was finally willing to make concessions. NATO brought an end to its raids on June 19. During the air strikes, thousands of people were killed, 860,000 refugees were displaced and Serbia's economy and infrastructure were largely destroyed. Kosovo was placed under the administration of the United Nations.
Author: Sonila Sand / ad
The past and the future
Ivan Ivanji is not someone to hold his tongue. For instance, he has voiced harsh criticism of the Israeli government — he knows that as a Jew and a concentration camp survivor he can. His friend Grass would have created a scandal if he had done the same.
The author has also compared the death of refugees in the Mediterranean with the mass murder carried out at Auschwitz. Can one make such a comparison? "One can and one must!" answers Ivanji: "The child that trustingly holds its mother's hand as she is forced to lead him into the gas chamber and the child that drowns clinging to his mother in the Mediterranean while you and I sit here – both situations are awful, but the second is more so."
Ivanji's overall concern for the future of Europe goes hand-in-hand with his criticism of European refugee policy. He warns that Europe must unify and defend itself economically against the US and China. The old communist says: "As far as I’m concerned, this can be done on a Christian basis" — religion can be overcome later.
