Rahela Perisic and her brother Moric Albahari

Rahela Perisic

Bosnia & Herzegovina
Interviewed in Belgrade, Serbia in 2003 by Rachel Chanin

Photo: Rahela Perisic and her brother Moric Albahari

Historical note: Yugoslavia was formed in the wake of the First World War. At first called The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia, it was comprised of regions that had never historically been together before: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the country was occupied by Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria during the war.

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“A group of Jewish men took me to a barn in the middle of a snowstorm and led me through the bar mitzvah service as best they could remember it.”

Some time around 1934, one could feel that bad times were coming. Fascism could already be felt in the air. After the unification of the Third Reich in 1938 (editor’s note: this is how the respondent refers to the German takeover of Austria), many Jews arrived in Banja Luka from Austria. My uncle Salomon Levi took in one of these families. They left all of their property behind in Vienna. I was still too young to fully understand their situation. But, unfortunately, the hard times soon befell me, too.

For the 1940-41 school year I was enrolled in Prijedor. During this school year I started to have problems because my history professor was a fascist sympathizer and he always humiliated and insulted me in front of the whole grade. I cried after almost every class with him. My three school friends: Sveta Popovic, Joca Stefanovic and Milan Markovic were a great consolation to me. They would tell me: “Don’t give in to him, hold your head up high, you are not going to let one fascist make you suffer.” I listened to them. And obviously, I remember their names to this day.

Numerus Klausus, a law which restricted the number of Jewish children who were able to go to school, had already been enacted. They carried this out especially rigorously with those boys and girls who were supposed to enroll in the higher grades of the gymnasium. At the teacher’s meeting the director of my school insisted that I be thrown out, but I was lucky because my physics, geography and literature professors lobbied for me to stay.

Their argument was that it would be better to dismiss a younger student who had time to transfer to some trade school rather than me. In the end they did not throw me out. I learned about this incident later on during the war when I met one my professors in the partisans.

At the age of 19, Rahela joined the Communist partisans to fight against the Germans. Photo above right is of her and her younger brother Moric, who actually had his bar mitzvah in the partisans.

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Bullying Stories

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STANDING UP STORIES

Standing up Stories

“The priest gave me a Christian name for my false papers. I’ve kept it ever since because he didn’t just give me a name, he gave me a life.”