In April, 1941, we were living at 23 Gundulićev Venac Street in Belgrade. On April 6^th, the first day of the war, a bomb hit the building in which we were living in a two-bedroom apartment and we were left without a penny to our name. After the bombing, we, the women, fled headlong towards the villages surrounding Belgrade, while Dad was mobilized. On an ox-drawn cart, which we shared with other refugees from Belgrade, we fled to the village of Žarkovo. We spent the night together with a group of other refugees in a school building, sleeping on school benches. Before the break of dawn villagers came to the building with axes in their hands. They wanted to chase us away, since we would bring misfortune on them. The Germans would come because of us, the Jews, and kill off the entire village. We were frightened, and we decided to return to Belgrade. My dad, when he heard where we had fled to, said that we should have on no account fled to those parts. He was familiar with the region, because before the war he was involved in the news coverage of some local murder, and on the peasants from the area. Upon our return, when we registered with the police, we were given yellow armbands and went to do forced labor. Then, Dad escaped from captivity. That makes for an interesting story:

My father Rahamim, Raka, Ruben, then an employee of "Politika" newspaper was, on April 6^th, mobilized into the Drina Division and sent towards Šabac. It was there that he was taken prisoner of war. During the first days after the capitulation of Yugoslavia I went to get vaccinated against typhoid. It was on Vuka Karadžića Street that, completely by chance, I came across a file of Serbian soldiers who were prisoners of war. My father was among them. I came home and, overwhelmed with infinite joy, started to talk about how I had seen Dad, when my father appeared at the door, in an unfamiliar overcoat and clothes that were at least a few sizes too small for him. Then he told us about how he managed to escape from the line of the prisoners of war.

Having taken the soldiers prisoners, the Germans were escorting them through Belgrade en route to Pančevo. They were supposed to cross the Pančevo Bridge. The German officer in charge did not know how to get to the bridge, so he took the file of POWs several times in circles up and down 29^th of November Street (then Prince Paul’s Street). People came out to watch this, that strange formation. Among the on-lookers was a typographer of "Politika", Dad's colleague and acquaintance, whose name I no longer remember. He was standing in front of the entrance gate of his house. When he saw the formation pass by again, he shouted to Dad, "Raka, quick, run into my house!" As Dad hesitated, the POWs persuaded him to do it, and blocked the German soldier’s field of vision with their bodies, thus allowing my father to run off, first into the yard and then into the building. There, Dad’s colleague gave Dad a set of his own work clothes. Since these were too small, as my father was much larger than his colleague, the man also threw a coat over my father’s shoulders in order to cover the trousers, the jacket and the shirt that could not be buttoned up.

For a while we lived in an attic on Molerova Street, crammed like sardines, because the houses of several family members had been destroyed by bombs. We were living here when the end of the school year came. I was a second year student at the State Academy of Commerce – today this is the Economics High School.

In July, 1941, on the 27^th, my grandpa, Leon Judas Koen, my mother's father, was shot. He had a kiosk in Belgrade. Grandpa Leon, ever since the beginning of the war, used to go around and tell everyone to go into hiding and not to register with the police when summoned, because the Germans were killing and deporting. However, he was among the first to report after a sabotage had been carried out in Belgrade, and he was among the first one hundred hostages shot at Tašmajdan. Our uncle Isaac moved to Priština. We spent the whole of June, July and August doing forced labor; Dad was clearing the ruins left by the bombing, I was cleaning buildings which housed German administration and commands. One day, the men were just taken to "Topovske šupe" camp.

In October, 1941, the remaining men were rounded up. My dad went to the Orthopedic Hospital to see doctor Đorđe Marinković, a very good friend of our family, who put a plaster cast on my father’s healthy leg, and kept my father in the hospital. This friendship had been established before the war, when my Mom, Flora, met Mrs. Stanka Marinković during a hospital stay. My mother had broken her leg while skiing. Stana was working at the hospital’s Orthopedic Clinic. Since that skiing accident, one of my mother’s legs was shorter by a few centimeters and she walked with a slight limp. During my father’s hospitalization we acquired false documents stating that we were refugees from Priština. The wife of Doctor Marinkovic, Stanka, helped us with the papers. She got them in "Suvi đeram" pub on Sarajevska Street, through friends. My father became Radovan Rosić (the same initials as Rahamim Ruben), Mom Flora became Ljubica, my sister Buena became Bojana, while I, Rachel, became Jelena Rosić.

In November, 1941, they started to round up the men who had been hospitalized, so on November 13^th my father, with Stanka’s father, Miloš Grčić, fled to my uncle Isaac’s shop, where he spent the entire night hiding. On the morning of the 14^th, he came to the railway station in a fiacre (horse-drawn French hackney coach). The plaster cast he still had on his leg was removed by Stanka on the train. We, the women, early in the morning, around five, during the curfew, led by Stanka, braved the heavy snowdrifts and snowstorm and snuck to the railway station. Because of the bad weather, there was only one German standing at the entrance of the railway station. We snuck along the passage between the post office building and the railway station and then we all boarded the Priština-bound train to go to our uncle's. Inside the rail carriage, in the dark, Dad struck a match and saw a host of familiar faces. "My goodness, this carriage is full of Jews", he said.

We arrived in Kuršumlija and could not go any further because the Albanians (šiptari) had closed off the border at Prepolac. There were many Jews in Kuršumlija, probably about forty. Mika Altarac Smederevac was at the railway station waiting for us, which he had been doing every day. Mika was accompanied by his wife, daughter and sister-in-law; Dača Coen was also there, as were his wife Lenka, brother Simče (the secretary of the "Brothers Baruh" Choir), his sister Elsa, his aunt Rejna and her husband, who owned a photographer’s shop on Sarajevska Street. Mr. Pesah, the owner of the "Takovo" cinema theatre, was also there, with his son. Jaša de Josif, a man by the last name of Pinto, the Pijade family and others were there, as well.

We stayed at the "Europe" hotel in Kuršumlija, owned by Mr. Živorad Arsenijević, a café owner. Here, along with all the Jews, were also R. Uvalić and V. Stojanović, who were later hidden by Raša Nikolić from Konjuva. We moved from the hotel when we rented from Aki a room in a thatched hut at the livestock market. From there we were supposed to move to Priština. However, as the winter of 1942 had been a very cold one, we refused to move further.

Heavy fighting between the Partisans and the Chetniks took place that winter. As the Partisans remained in power, the Germans came on a punitive expedition. After every German punitive expedition we went farther, on foot, to villages deeper in the mountains. Some followed the Toplica river to Mereces, while we went towards Blace. The first stop we made was in Dankovići, approximately four kilometers from Kuršumlija. There were about thirty of us hiding in the house of Predrag Vasić. We slept on the floor, in sheds… the date was February 20^th, 1942. We stayed there for a month.

It is in the village of Preskoča that we spent the following six months. Raša Nikolić had been working for a Jew in the shop on the Terazije Square in Belgrade, so he protected us. From Ljuba Nikolić we rented a house which was near the market. Together with a woman from Slovenia, who was an interpreter, and with Milenko, we fled to Grgure one night. From there on to Kaljaja on September 10^th, where we stayed with Živadin for about three months, because of Mom’s sister Olga, who was married into the Bogdanović family (later on she was shot in a prisoner camp in Niš, at a location called Crveni krst). We stayed there until December 20^th. From Kaljaja we moved to Preskoča, where we stayed almost from the beginning until the end of 1943.

In the summer of 1943 the Bulgarians came. They arrested us on July 7^th and took us to a prison in Kuršumlija. They did not find Dad, so only we, the three women, were imprisoned. Živorad and Živka Arsenijević helped us again, Živko went to see two Bulgarian officers, Divcev and Bakalov, who had been coming to his café every morning, and begged them to let us go. Živorad told them: "We, the Serbs, have an old saying: If you do good, good will be done unto you; if you do evil, evil will be done unto you". Thus he persuaded them and the Bulgarians let us out from the prison after seven days. We were on the run again. We left Preskoče on October 14^th, 1943, and walked eight kilometers to the village of Grgure, where we stayed with uncle Sava Bradić, Buda and Raša. We stayed in Grgure over the winter. We fled before the Germans to the hamlet of Muađare, where we hid from March 20^th until April 20^th, 1944. Then we returned to Grgure, to uncle Sava, and we stayed until the liberation of Belgrade, on October 20^th, 1944. Then we started on our way back to Belgrade, by the way of Barbatovac, where we stayed until October 31^st; we then continued via Prokuplje and Niš and reached a liberated Belgrade on November 7^th, 1944.

Here is the story about hiding at uncle Sava’s.

While we were hiding in the village of Grgure, in the Blace district, at uncle Sava Bradić’s, uncle Sava, who was a master cutter and carpenter, made a perfect wooden "dark chamber" for Dad. Dad would attach the lens from his camera onto it and expose the photographic paper at the window, using the sunlight. He developed the photographs at night, while we, the children, were asleep. I remember how we walked for several kilometers to a spring in order to bring enormous quantities of water which father used to rinse the photographs. For every photograph, and he made photographs both for genuine and false documents, and photographed at weddings, celebrations of patron-saints’ days and funerals, he would charge in wheat - one "šajkaca" (Serbian peasant/military felt cap) full of wheat for one photograph.

I do not want the noble-mindedness and magnanimity of the employees of "Politika" to be forgotten; I think particularly of uncle Diša Stevanović, his son Miro, his daughter-in-law Vida, of Jurij Isakovski and of others who gave photographic supplies to my mother when she, disguised as a Serbian peasant woman, carrying false documents, came to Belgrade and snuck into "Politika". Dad used these supplies to make photographs and thus provided food for us during the war. When she came to Belgrade, Mom stayed with Stanka’s mother; she would regularly register with the police, and the police would come at night to perform routine checks of the apartment. They went together through thick and thin, worried together and put it behind them together; it seems that on one occasion someone reported Mom to the police (we think it was a driver working for "Politika" who recognized her). She was declared a wanted person and the walls of the railway station were covered with her photographs. A woman, Stanka’s neighbor, who was working at the railway station, came and broke this news to Stana, telling her to move Mom out, so Mom quickly returned to the village, boarding the train at the Topčider railway station.

I would like to end with the most remarkable image from these days, an image attesting to the courage and noble-mindedness, devotedness and selflessness of uncle Sava, his wife Jovana and the fifteen members of their family: their children, sons Milan, Bora, Tomislav and Lazar, and their daughters, Milunka and Mirka. It is by writing this that I want to pay due tribute and express my gratitude to uncle Sava for the heroic act which, most probably, had altered the course of events related to our fleeing and hiding, and quite certainly determined the fate of our family, so that we were not taken to one of the camps in which many members of our extended family perished.

When the Chetniks came to the vicinity of the village at the beginning of 1944 to take away the communists and Jews, my father decided that we should pack again and run even deeper into the woods and try to find new shelter. Then uncle Sava stood in front of my father and said, "Raka, you are not going anywhere. You are safe and secure in this house. They shall have to kill me and my nine children first in order to kill you". When the Chetniks insisted that we favored the Partisans and that they would take us away, uncle Sava said, "The only way you can do this is over my dead body. This is an honest family; we have taken them in as if they were our closest kin. We are prepared to pay any price in order to defend them from anyone, and that means you, too". Little did uncle Sava know that Bojana and I had been sewing underwear from parachute silk for the partisan Drinka Pavlović, from the village of Španac, who was referred to us. This famous partisan woman was murdered in a treacherous, perfidious way in the Banjica camp in 1943.

After this event, Dad and Mom decided that we should stay. And so, until the end of the war, the two families lived together as one. The four of us slept in one bed in their home, but things were always alright and, most importantly, safe. Our families became linked by additional ties, uncle Sava was "kum" (the marriage witness/best man) at the wedding of my sister Buena (Bojana), and my mother was winess at Milan’s wedding in 1949, and also at the wedding of uncle Sava’s youngest son, Tomislav. Mom was also godmother to Milan’s daughter, naming the child Olga, after her sister who had been shot in the "Crveni krst" camp in Niš.

I have to emphasize that none of the courageous and patriotic villagers of Grgure ever blew the whistle on us during the war, although all the children in the village knew that a family of Jews was hiding and living in their midst.

The following persons were named The Righteous Among The Nations for saving us: Sava and Jovana Bradić, Predrag Vasić, Marinković Đorđe and Stanka. We were asked why the others mentioned in this narrative were not awarded this decoration. They charged for hotel accommodation or for letting us a room or a house, and therefore they could not qualify as the Righteous Among the Nations. After the war, Živorad Arsenijević sold café "Europe" and, with help from Mika Ezra and Pesah, whom he had also taken in during the war, opened a bar in Belgrade. The name of the bar was "Zeleni venac"; it was located close to the Zeleni venac open air market.