Remember can't forget / Work cycle / Point 2 / Hilda’s Letter
The area of Old Sajmište in Belgrade is a place of many memories.
In 1937-1938, this was the site of the Belgrade Fair, where pavilions were built and cultural and commercial life took place. The first Belgrade Fair opened on September 11, 1937. And already on December 8, 1941, the Jews of Belgrade were sent to the fairgrounds, which were transformed by the German military administration into the Jewish camp Zemun (Judenlager Semlin). By December 12, there were already more than 5,000 prisoners in the camp.
In the Belgrade archives, there are 4 letters from nurse Hilda Deich, who voluntarily went to the camp to work in the camp hospital and help people. And like a large number of prisoners, she died there.
After the Second World War, the area of the fair was used to build barracks for the builders of New Belgrade (a district of the city located between Stari Sajmište and Zemun). People still live there. The Italian pavilion was given over to the workshops of the Serbian Union of Artists (there are still workshops there).
In July 2022, the reconstruction of the central tower of the fair began, which currently houses the Zemun Holocaust Museum. Next in line is the former Italian pavilion.
Once I get to this place, I can’t stop thinking about it and I come there again and again. The layers of historical traumatic context, the everyday life of the people for whom this is home, the gradual restoration of the memorial function, all this creates a very multifaceted pattern of the territory. The simultaneous presence of memory and, at the same time, the flow of ordinary life in the present against the background of this memoriality, outlines the issue of the visibility of memory and the history of the place.
Nurse Hilda Dajč volunteered for the Zemun concentration camp, considering it her duty to help people. Words from her letter (which she wrote from the camp to her friends who were free): “Stalno razgovaram sa vama i želim da vas vidim jer ste vi za mene onaj izgubljeni raj” (“I keep talking to you and want to see you, because you are my ‘lost paradise’”). These words contain both hope and despair. An appeal to the outside world, which is becoming increasingly ghostly, like the dissolving shadows of letters. I write these words on Plexiglas sheets and use them to cover the broken parts of the windows in one of the barracks. To make the memory of these words visible, to supplement reality, everyday life with shadows of the past — this is the return of the materiality of memory. The sun falls so that gradually the shadows of the words dissolve on the surface of the landing, the word «Paradise» practically blurs into a barely recognizable silhouette of letters. These shadows are like an appeal from a dead person to those living today.
A woman passes by, she returns with an empty basin after hanging the laundry outside to dry. She knocks her knuckle on the plate, says: «Hmm, plastic» and passes by. She does not read the shadows of the words.