MPJ

While the short tale about famous actor is itself a small historical record especially for him and one little Serbian village half an hour away from my current location, I have to say that this post is a little bit mistitled even though De Niro's story has several connected points with what I want to write today. Instead, it will be about my grandfather and his war stories I listened yesterday for the first time. Actually, my mother told me all this before, but yesterday, during our annual dinner, he was in a great mood to tell them himself and this is my attempt to write them down while they are still fresh in my memory. But, for a moment, let's get back to the title story. Not too long ago, I read in a newspaper article* about Robert De Niro and his European travels he did about 40 years ago, more or less in the time where I was about to be born. Back then, these kind of tourist destinations were extremely popular among young Americans - if you were young and adventurou...

While visiting museums and exhibitions during travels is somewhat mandatory, touring our own cities and sightseeing their history is something we need a special reason for. I stumbled to this fact with many people and it is not much different with us as well. This special reason today was a time gap we've got between couple of errands we needed to finish downtown, so we decided to stop by WW2 Nazi concentration camp, now a perfectly preserved memorial museum and one of three in Serbia during the second world war. "Crveni Krst", concentration camp was named to nearby railroad station with more than 12000 people passed through its dark chambers who either died within or executed on the nearby hill "Bubanj". Probably similarly to other camps in Europe, this one imprisoned mostly Jews, Roma and members of the resistance, mostly partisans, communists and their supporters. Compared to the camps in Germany at the time specially populated with soldiers and officers, ...