In her fascinating and insightful new memoir, “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia,” Julie Brill breaks new ground in a little-known piece of Holocaust history—the year-long Nazi genocide of Serbian Jews in their own country.
Brill’s father, Haim, was born in Serbia in 1938 and survived the war in the countryside with his younger sister and mother. His father had been shot at the mass grave site in Belgrade while forced to do punishing labor. For years, Brill had been curious about the fate of her Serbian relatives and the Holocaust story her father obscured for most of her life. Brill began to understand her father’s history when she, her older daughter and her father went to Serbia in 2017.
For Brill, that first trip was the culmination of a lifetime preoccupation with her father’s history and a dozen years of research about her Serbian family. In a recent interview with JewishBoston, Brill said on those first of three trips to Serbia, “There was a warm welcome for my father, Haim. He returned to a homecoming. When we went through border control in Serbia, the immigration officer noticed my father’s birthplace on his passport, and he said, ‘Welcome home.’”
For Brill, it was finally her time to meet Belgrade. In her mind, Serbia had been a “gray and grayer” place shaded by the Cold War and communism. The first scene of her memoir places her at the computer searching Google Maps for her father’s house in Belgrade before her first trip. “Seeing the map of Belgrade and related images brought home that my father’s country was real, and it existed in the modern world,” she said.
It was a critical and emotional fact to uncover, especially since Haim never called himself a bona fide survivor of the Holocaust. “My father is reluctant to call himself a survivor,” Brill said. “He always said his mother instilled in her children a sense of security. Under her protection, he felt safe. Ninety percent of Serbia’s Jews were murdered in their own country in 1941, and by the next year, the country was Judenrein.”
Men were shot in front of open graves they had just dug. Nazis deployed vans of mobile gas chambers on the streets of Belgrade to murder Jewish women and children. Brill pointed out the vans reflected how Nazis did not want to murder women and children at gunpoint.
Brill said she was cognizant of Serbia’s portable gas vans during each of the three times she was in Serbia. “Being on the streets in Belgrade, I was struck that this was where the Nazis hooked up the mobile vans before they drove them to the camp,” she said. “There are no signs on any site commemorating the victims. Our guide pointed out the site of the gas van hookup to us. It’s a place on the street where people walk by living their lives.”
On each of their trips to Belgrade, the Brills were detectives trying to find remnants of Jewish life in the city. They found evidence of a current Jewish community when they discovered a synagogue in Belgrade on their first trip in 2017. It was the only operating synagogue in the city, and it happened to be around the corner from where Brill’s father had lived. Since then, a second synagogue has been renovated and is now active in northern Serbia.
In the book, Brill recalls standing in the Jewish cemetery in Belgrade, where people were buried for generations. “I had that sense again that I was at home. We went to the Jewish cemetery where we have family, and I knew I was in a place where my family was from. I don’t have a cemetery like that in Massachusetts,” she writes.
In her own life, Brill has created a sense of rootedness. She lives in the town where she grew up, north of Boston and a short distance from her parents. She is the third generation of women—including her mother and grandmother—to graduate from Tufts University. Her Jewish maternal grandparents immigrated to Boston from Ukraine when her grandfather was a youngster, but her grandmother was born in Boston. Her grandfather was a doctor whose medical office was in the family home in Dedham.
Brill recently retired as a doula, a choice that reflected a love of children her parents instilled in her. “My mother was very pregnancy-positive, so I grew up thinking that was a happy thing to be around,” she said. “Of course, it can be. But it’s emotionally complex, and my current focus as a lactation consultant is on new life.”
After Brill’s second trip to Belgrade, she still felt unsettled about why there were no Jewish memorials to the Holocaust in Belgrade like other Eastern European countries. “There was not one stone memorializing Serbian Holocaust victims,” she said. “I wanted to fix that situation. With a dose of American optimism, I persisted in having one installed for my grandfather.”
Brill had amassed documentation that included a census from the 1930s showing where her grandfather lived. “Once I figured out where to look for this information and how to hire translators to have access, the floodgates opened,” she said.
She found a street pass proving that her grandfather was forced to repair sewers with his neighbors for the Nazis. She also found a facsimile of her grandfather’s death certificate in German when her grandmother applied for restitution. There was even a roll call list in Serbian in which his name was checked.
With most Holocaust survivors now in their late 80s and 90s, “Hidden in Plain Sight” is an urgent and welcomed addition to Holocaust literature. Brill has led readers on a moving journey, stopping to include the story of Stolpersteine—“stumbling stones,” or plaques installed on the sidewalks in cities the Nazis occupied—in memory of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. After much bureaucratic red tape, she arranged for the installation of the first Stolpersteine in Belgrade to memorialize her grandfather, Alexander Brill.
Julie Brill will be in conversation with author Judy Rakowsky at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Wednesday, May 7, at 7 p.m. RSVP.
