My Father's Blessing, My Salvation

MY FATHER’S BLESSING, MY SALVATION

Ivan Singer

Singer Consulting Pty Ltd, 2002, 2004, 456pp, rrp $32.00

Ivan Singer is a Jew of Hungarian ethnicity, who lived in Vrsac, near Belgrade, when Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941.  He and his family were removed to Belgrade, where the men were separated from the women and children, and placed in a camp.  Soon, batches of about 100 began to be taken away, supposedly for work parties, actually to be murdered.

After Singer escaped to Italian occupied territory, where Jews were treated leniently, the women were also murdered.  Virtually all of Singer’s family, and most of the other Jews from his hometown, died in the pogrom.

Singer was deported to a concentration camp in Italy, and liberated by the Allies.  He joined an American mission to Yugoslavia, and later Tito’s forces.  There are interesting descriptions of operations with the partisans, and cynical comment on the recorded ‘history’ of those operations.  Late in the war he was sent to the Soviet Union, to train as a pilot for the Yugoslav air force.

The tragedy of the Holocaust, and Singer’s nascent disenchantment with communism, become clear as the book concludes.  It is a stark reminder, if such were still needed, both of the rightness of the Allied cause in the war against Hitler’s Germany, and the need, when threats of a future Holocaust are made in some quarters, to ensure that history is not allowed to repeat itself.

Ivan Singer now lives in Australia.

JOHN DONOVAN