He died on Thursday in Weimar, as the city administration announced on Friday. A few hours earlier he had taken part in the opening of the new museum on forced labor under National Socialism in Weimar.
On the occasion of his 95th birthday in January, Ivanji wrote to the APA that he was doing well. He said at the time that he spends most of his time in Belgrade, where his daughter, son and some of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren live. In 1992 Ivanji came to Vienna without giving up his apartment in Belgrade. He returned there following his wife’s death a few years ago.
As a 15-year-old to Auschwitz
Ivan Ivanji was born on January 24, 1929 in Veliki Beckerek (Groß-Betschkerk, today: Zrenjanin) in Vojvodina into a Jewish family of doctors. In January 1942 he witnessed massacres on the Danube in Novi Sad. In his hometown, out of 278 Jews, only 38 survived, he once said. He himself came to Auschwitz at the age of 15 and was only liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of the war. He never saw his parents once more.
He studied architecture and German and then worked in Belgrade as a teacher, theater director, journalist, but also for a long time as Tito’s interpreter and as Yugoslavia’s embassy councilor in Germany. Ivanji processed his experiences in numerous books such as “The Dancer and the War” (2002), “Tito’s Interpreter” (2007) and “My Beautiful Life in Hell” (2014).
The list of his novels published by Picus Verlag is even longer. It also includes, among others, “Barbarossa’s Jew”, “Ghosts from a Small Town”, “Schattensprung”, the Balkan family saga “Schlossstrich” (2017), in which the story of the protagonist Rudolf Radvanyi had many similarities with the author’s vita, ” Hineni” (2020), his own version of the story of the biblical Abraham, or “Corona in Buchenwald” (2021), a kind of Decameron of concentration camp survivors, in which twelve old men become storytellers in the quarantine of a Weimar hotel.
“Writer”
Just this year, the publishing house also brought out a new edition of Ivanji’s 1999 novel “The Cinder Man of Buchenwald”. In it he describes the discovery of 700 urns containing the ashes of nameless prisoners during renovation work in the crematorium of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial and gives voices to the anonymous dead, who unite to form a choir of murdered souls.
Ivanji described himself as a “skribomaniac”, a writing maniac. “Günter Grass said several years before his death that he didn’t want to start anything anymore because he didn’t know whether he might finish it,” he once said. “I’m always starting something new, and if I can’t finish it, it just remains unfinished. It’s already happened.”
