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"Bridges"
Milena Pribis
6 April, 1999 

I would like to tell you about my friend Helga Mueller.  She and I met in 1997 through an organization called One By One which was invited to speak at Concord’s Annual Holocaust Memorial.  Helga is a child of a Nazi mass murderer.  Her father was personally responsible for the annihilation of 40,000 Jewish victims in White Russia during WW II.  I am the daughter of a woman who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp form which she managed to escape.  My mother survived in hiding, thanks to her savior, an Orthodox Russian Christian who kept her alive until the Russian liberated.  My mother lost her husband, mother, father, and over 70 of her immediate relatives.  My father was born in Backa Palanka, Yugoslavia.  Before last week the only place I have seen that name was on his birth certificate.  It was too small a place to make it into my World Atlas.  Last week we bombed its bridge.  My father, a Lutheran, was part of a resistance group during WW II.  He was denounced and subsequently was tortured and interrogated by the Gestapo.  From being severely beaten my father screamed from nightmares for the rest of his life.  My parents rebuilt their lives after the war and tried to put the past behind them but the trauma would surface at regular intervals.  I, as their child, witnessed first hand what war does to its victims no matter how heroic their escapes.  As a child refugee from the Cold War I can also clearly remember the helplessness I experienced with my parents in an Italian refugee camp awaiting asylum into any country that would have us.  I think I vowed then to try somehow, some day to prevent others from having this fate.  In 1996 I found myself without family in America having lost both my parents within two years.  The questions I was forbidden from asking were waiting to be answered.  Survivors of the Holocaust, Nazi victims - and I think of both my parents in this way - fall into two categories.  Those that talk and those that don’t talk.  My parents wanting to appear strong and invincible chose not to talk or to talk haltingly and unpredictably and seeing my pain would blame me for wanting to know what I was better off not knowing.  Once I was left on my own I needed to seek out others who were also asking questions.  From both sides, the Christian and the Jewish, for that is what embodied my own experience.  I saw myself as the bridge I was trying to build between the two sides.  When I met Helga I had never met a child of a Nazi or a German for that matter.  She, in her strong German accent, told of stories of atrocity that mirrored my own, her pain in telling them mirrored mine.  She also had a great burden in living with her parents’ past.  Our pain brought us together the way my parents’ pain had.  Helga and I have since become close friends.  Through our friendship we have spoken side by side on numerous occasions trying to show that if we from opposite sides of our extreme histories can build a bridge, it should be possible to build many such bridges in less extreme situations.  Along with Helga I found others with whom I was able to experience a great shared hope for a better world.  As life for me was getting better the Yugoslav negotiations collapsed and the bombs started to fall once again in Europe.  The only place I have family is in Yugoslavia, my mother’s family having been successfully cleansed out of Europe 50 years ago.  My father’s family is Slovak Lutheran and thus one of the many minorities under the Orthodox Serbs.  For the past nine years I feared for their safety.  When the Serbs attacked Bosnia I telephoned to see how they were doing.  Fine for now, they said, because the Serbs were too busy with the Moslems, and then it was the Albanians and I wondered when their turn to be displaced or worse would come.  In 1996 the sanctions against travel to Yugoslavia were finally lifted and I could hardly wait to go there.  In the airport almost by instinct we recognized each other; I had not seen my family since I was nine.  My deepest longings were answered.  I stayed with them in Backa Palanka where I used to spend childhood summers with my Grandmother.  In Novi Sad I walked with them across the pedestrian bridge that was bombed last week.  I know the feel of a Balkan evening and the sound of the Danube River I was also born on.  After the bombing of the first bridge I called Novi Sad, the second of such phone calls to see if they were alive.  My cousin Zvonimir slipped and said “You really should not have bombed that bridge.”  I could feel the pain in his voice.  He had friends living across its wreckage and that is all they can now see from their shattered windows.  He corrected himself meaning NATO but the damage has already been done.  I was that bridge and we were on opposite sides.  He asked me not to call again.  I follow the nightly bombings on CNN and search the internet link sites for Yugoslav information on the names of victims.  My friend Helga is coming this spring.  Together we hoped to build a bridge to a better world.

 

Milena Pribis is a Concord resident.  She was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.