Menahem and Flora Montiljo and their daughter Hana and Hana’s baby brother, Rafo.(left), The Montiljo family owed their lives to Menahem’s boss, Gavro Perkusic, pictured in the center, in the photo on the left(right).

Hana Montiljo Gasic

Bosnia & Herzegovina
Interviewed in Belgrade, Serbia by Rachel Chanin

Menahem and Flora Montiljo and their daughter Hana and Hana’s baby brother, Rafo. Pictures like this are hardly unusual, only this picture was taken in Sarajevo in 1943, during the Ustashe and Nazi occupation and well after all the city’s Jews had been deported. So the site of a Jewish family celebrating the birth in the middle of the Holocaust is indeed unusual. The Montiljo family owed their lives to Menahem’s boss, Gavro Perkusic, pictured in the center, in the photo on the right.

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“My mother was forced to sell her wedding gown for four kilos of flour and a chunk of soap.”

During the war, my father's boss, Gavro Perkusic, protected both my father and the rest of us. When he heard that a raid was planned--usually to gather up Jews and Serbs--he would hide my father in his tailor shop until it passed. Several times my mother and my brother and I were rounded up and taken to detention centers and Mr Perkusic was able to get us released. Except for those occasions, my mother, brother and I spent the war living at home. Throughout the war my mother kept a rucksack packed and whenever we were rounded up, she grabbed it and had a neighbor inform Mr Perkusic.

I was so young then but I do remember my mother was forced to sell her wedding gown for four kilos of flour and a chunk of soap.

The location of our street and the fact that it was primarily a poor Muslim neighborhood also protected us. We lived on a steep narrow street, which must have looked daunting to the policemen that were sent to round up the Jews in the area. Many times the German and Croatian soldiers would holler up the block asking if there were any Jews living up there, and the neighbors would reply that they had all been taken away.

I am sure my mother's personality and role in the community also played a role in protecting us. My mother was one of the few literate women in the neighborhood. Like most Jewish women at the time in Sarajevo, my mother had a basic education and therefore could read and write. Most of the Muslim women in the area had not had an education and could not read and write. When these women needed such skills, they always came to my mother for help. Generally, she got along well with all of our neighbors and they with her.

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