Number 4 was occupied by a tailor named Elias Elzmann, a refugee from Galicia who had moved first to Germany, then to Austria, and finally to Yugoslavia. His knowledge of Polish enabled him to communicate with his customers, while his wife and grown-up children (who like their father were of heavy build, with oxlike eyes and big noses) spoke only German. For that reason his family — a wife, two sons, and two daughters — did the sewing while he rushed from one customer to the next in a constant sweat, taking measurements, making alterations, bowing and scraping, and lisping all the while in his Slavic mishmash. The Gestapo had the Elzmanns down as German citizens and required the Hungarian authorities to hand them over. They were sent to Serbia, where they perished in the gas chambers. When the Hungarian soldiers went to Jew Street to round them up, they amused themselves by making the Elzmann daughters dance naked in front of their parents and brothers, who had to sing foxtrots and waltzes and clap in rhythm.
Number 3 was the workshop of a small, hunchbacked watchmaker named Aaron Grün. He was commandeered to help clear the rubble from the Novi Sad Airport, had a heart attack, and died in June 1941. His elder son, also a watchmaker, was mobilized in the same year and sent to forced labor in the Ukraine, where he froze to death during the fighting at Voronezh. Grün’s younger son, who was still in school and remained at home, was executed together with his mother in the January 1942 raid.
The upper story of number 6 housed the law office of Sándor Vértes. Vértes was a morphine addict, and his wife had tuberculosis. They were childless. Detained as a Communist, he was interrogated and beaten for two days, but was released when he was discovered to be the wrong Vértes. He went home and immediately asphyxiated himself and his wife in the kitchen.
In number 5 a family of well-to-do Zagreb booksellers had opened a secondhand bookshop for their poor hatter brother, Leon Mordechai. After the Hungarian occupation, Mordechai and his family were deported to Croatia, where they ended up in an Ustasha camp. Mordechai’s wife and daughter died there of dysentery, but thanks to an early apprenticeship as a tailor, Mordechai survived. Having no reason to return home after his release, he went to Zagreb, where he waited a year for members of his large family to show up or give some sign of life. When none did, he moved back to Novi Sad and joined a hat-making cooperative, where he worked until retirement. He never remarried.
Number 8 was the home of a cross-eyed woman who made bathing suits and girdles. Her name was Elsa Baumann, and she was the widow of a surveyor who died young of neuritis contracted during the First World War. She had one son, a student at the vocational school, who was thin, wore glasses, and had thick, constantly chapped lips. Mother and son were both killed in the 1942 raid.
Number 9 was Ernst Mahrer’s laundry. Mahrer had learned his trade in Vienna and was the first to introduce dry cleaning and home delivery to Novi Sad. The van he used had a sun painted on it, with eyes, cheeks, and a smiling mouth. When the van was requisitioned by the Hungarian occupation forces, Mahrer drove it to the artillery barracks himself, parked it in the courtyard, and got out to wait while the papers were drawn up. When the officer in charge saw the smiling sun and the firm’s name, he reprimanded Mahrer for not having painted them over. Mahrer responded that that was the least the recipients of the free van could do. Furious, the officer snatched the rifle from the shoulder of a guard, pounded Mahrer with the butt until he fell unconscious, then jumped into the van, whose motor was still running, and ran over him. Word of the incident got around, and the officer was transferred and Mahrer’s widow and children ordered to leave Novi Sad forthwith. They received official permission to move to Budapest. In 1943 the son was sent to forced labor in the Bor mines, but escaped and joined the Yugoslav partisans. After the war he remained an officer in the Yugoslav army. Mahrer’s widow and daughter were killed during an Arrow Cross show of strength in the Budapest ghetto.
The owner of the shoe shop at number 10 was a methodical, meticulous man named Armin Weiss. A lover of things beautiful and costly — more aesthete than merchant — he was known as far as Budapest for his expertise. Immediately after the occupation a Budapest company offered to make his shop a branch of theirs and let him stay on as an employee. Armed with papers documenting this all-but-governmental commission, he escaped forced labor, which the military authorities prescribed for all Jews; he also survived the raid several months later. But when the Arrow Cross came to power early in 1944, Weiss was deported to Germany with his wife, two daughters, and mother-in-law. None of them returned.
Number 11 was shared by a lamp merchant, Eduard Fiker, and a stove fitter, Jakob Mentele. Fiker and his family were killed in the raid, while Mentele, a bachelor, managed to survive. He then left Novi Sad for Budapest, where he acquired false documents and lived out the war. After the war he remained in Budapest and died of cancer several years later.
Number 13 housed Arthur Spitzer’s grocery and delicatessen. Spitzer played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends. Having married a Hungarian and converted before the war, he was spared persecution. He had no children of his own, but his sister sent him her six-year-old daughter from the Independent State of Croatia, where Jews had an even harder time of it. Spitzer held on to his business until the Arrow Cross came to power, and for a while his baptismal certificate, Christian wife, and soccer friends protected him. On the day his young Jewish niece was to be deported, Spitzer and his wife went to the station with her, hoping to save her with their papers and connections. They were all crammed into a train for Auschwitz. There Spitzer was separated from his wife and niece. They all died.
Here is where the former Jew Street came to an end. The section after number 12 on the even side and number 13 on the odd side was torn down after the war to make way for New Boulevard, which intersects the stump of the street with a broad, open, two-way thoroughfare sprinkled with traffic lights. But in the distance, beyond the thoroughfare, its severed extremity — the dot under the exclamation mark — is still visible: a tall, secluded synagogue with Moorish cupolas that is occasionally used for concerts by the Novi Sad Chamber Orchestra or visiting ensembles because of its famous acoustics and absence of a congregation.
Chapter Four
WHEN HOUSES WERE torn down to make way for New Boulevard, the part of Jew Street subjected to the sledgehammer and pickax provided unexpected opportunities for observation and thought. As the work proceeded and the buildings lost their roofs, the jagged walls jutted into the sky like scarecrows, then became shorter and shorter — melting away, losing their domestic, human face as doors and windows disappeared to expose undreamed-of twists and turns, mazes like coloring-book puzzles — until finally only the foundations remained, naked and floorless, with gaping chasms where cellar stairs had been and the last walls forming the backdrop for a drama of doom. Standing in parallel rows, shorn of crossbeams, these remaining walls gave the most poignant illustration of the temporary nature of human dwellings: from sky blue to pink and from pink to pale green, with brighter patches of various shapes and sizes representing the beds, pictures, wardrobes, chests of drawers that had stood in front of them, protecting them for years from soot and sun, with here and there a hook, nail, or brace sticking out of their otherwise smooth surfaces. The walls with stubborn magnanimity maintained the tastes and habits of the people who were no longer there; they demonstrated that each house, each room was distinctive, unique, providing each family, each individual with its own way of eating, sleeping, reading, cursing, making love, throwing a fit, and that these different ways of doing things coexisted in amazingly close proximity to one another as well as to what the buildings themselves had kept at bay — the world, the sky, the rain to which they were now pitilessly exposed — and with which they were now becoming one.