Hilda Dajč (, ; also Hilda Deitch; 22 March 1922 – 1942) was a Yugoslav Jewish student and Holocaust victim. Her letters from the Sajmište concentration camp are effectively the only surviving documents written by Jewish prisoners held there, and represent one of the few surviving first-person accounts from German-occupied Serbia during the Holocaust.
Born in Vienna and raised in Belgrade, Dajč studied architecture at the University of Belgrade. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia and occupation of Serbia in 1941, she volunteered as a nurse at the Jewish Hospital in Belgrade and, in December 1941, chose to enter the Sajmište concentration camp to provide medical assistance to the prisoners. Between December 1941 and February 1942, Dajč wrote and smuggled four letters to schoolmates outside the camp, describing the hunger, overcrowding, and disease endured by the prisoners. Her father was killed at the camp in February 1942; that spring, she was murdered in a gas van, as were her mother and brother, when German authorities exterminated the camp's remaining Jewish prisoners.
Dajč's letters, now held by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade and the Historical Archives of Belgrade, were first published in 2005. She has sometimes been called a "Serbian Anne Frank" and her letters likened to Frank's diary. She has since been commemorated in Serbia through memorial stones outside her family's former home, two documentary films, a graphic novel, and an award established in her name.
Early life and education Hilda Dajč was born on 22 March 1922 in Vienna into an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the daughter of Augusta (1889–1942) and Emil Dajč (1883–1942), an engineer; she had a younger brother, Hans (1924–1942). She was raised in Belgrade, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where she completed her secondary education at the State Third Girls' Gymnasium and later enrolled to study architecture at the University of Belgrade. Her studies were interrupted in April 1941 by Nazi Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia, during which Belgrade was subjected to heavy aerial bombardment; the Germans then established the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia.
During the early months of the occupation, she began volunteering at the Jewish Hospital in Belgrade, which had been created after the German authorities barred Jews from using city hospitals or receiving treatment from non-Jews. The Jewish community was responsible for equipping and maintaining the hospital, where Jewish doctors and nurses worked without pay. Her father had previously served as vice-president of the Jewish Community of Belgrade, the representative body of the city's Jewish population, then, from April 1941, as vice-president and later president of the , a Jewish representative body established by the German occupation authorities that replaced the Belgrade Jewish community council.
Persecution and imprisonment On 30 May 1941, the Military Commander in Serbia issued the ('Decree on Jews and Gypsies'), requiring Belgrade's Jews to register with the authorities. Over the following weeks, Jewish men aged 14 to 60 and women aged 16 to 60 were conscripted for forced labour, made to wear yellow armbands marking them as Jewish, and barred from the city's trams, theatres, and cinemas. Their property was also seized through punitive levies and forced Aryanisation. Within two months of the invasion, the occupation had stripped Serbia's Jews of their legal standing and property. Following the uprising that began in the Serbian countryside that summer and culminated in the Partisans' capture of Užice in September, occupation authorities adopted a policy of reprisal executions targeting Jewish men and Romani people. Around 5,000 Jewish men were shot between September and December 1941 alone; by the year's end, most of Serbia's Jewish men were dead. Harald Turner, chief of staff of the German Military Administration in occupied Serbia, then shifted his attention to the women and children who remained, arranging their internment.
Sajmište (Judenlager Semlin)
On 8 December 1941, the surviving 7,000 Jewish women and children in Belgrade, along with others from across occupied Serbia, were ordered to report to the police to be transferred to the former Belgrade Fairgrounds across the Sava River, near the town of Zemun (Semlin in German). There, German authorities established a camp that they called ('Jewish Camp Semlin') and that Yugoslavs called Sajmište (Serbo-Croatian for 'fairground'), using the pavilions of the pre-war exhibition complex to confine the remaining Jewish population, along with several hundred Romani women and children.
The camp fell under the and SD office in Belgrade. From late January 1942, the camp was commanded by SS- Herbert Andorfer, with external guards drawn from a police reserve battalion. It was located less than from central Belgrade but formally lay within the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. Between December 1941 and March 1942, around 7,000 Jewish prisoners were interned there, roughly half of German-occupied Serbia's Jewish population before the war; within six weeks that spring, all of them were killed.
Her father's role in the German-established initially protected the family from some anti-Jewish measures in occupied Serbia. After completing a medical course that year, Dajč chose to enter the camp voluntarily to serve as a nurse in early December 1941, against her family's wishes. Like other Jewish women and children, she reported to the offices of the , the German security police's Jewish affairs section, on 8 December and was transported by truck to the Sajmište concentration camp.
She was held in Pavilion No. 3 at the newly established camp, which stood directly across the Sava River from the city; conditions there were severe, with widespread starvation, disease, and frequent deaths among the inmates. Prisoners slept on wooden scaffolding installed inside the pavilions, with no heating, few toilets, and only one shower room for the entire camp. During the winter of 1941–42, an average of around one hundred prisoners at Sajmište died each day from exposure. Contemporary testimony describes prisoners crossing the frozen river to bury the dead in the Jewish cemetery. The camp's hospital was later housed in the Spasić Pavilion, where Dajč worked alongside Dr Moša Alakalaj. By the end of 1941, Emil Dajč, who had by then become president of the , was himself interned at Sajmište, where he served as representative of the camp inmates and an administrator. On 31 January 1942, he took part in a meeting with Milan Marković, chief of the Belgrade city administration's welfare section, and Weinstein, the camp's Jewish administrator, to confirm invoices for food supplied to the camp between 26 December 1941 and 21 January 1942. Her mother and younger brother Hans were interned at the camp as well.
Letters While imprisoned, Dajč wrote and smuggled four letters to two schoolmates: Nada Novak (b. 1920), a former president of their school's Aleksa Šantić literary society, who was the daughter of the academic Viktor Novak, and later became a Slavist, and Mirjana Petrović (b. 1920), later Mirjana Kašanin, a lawyer and translator. Dajč herself succeeded Novak as the society's president in her final year at the State Third Girls' Gymnasium in Belgrade. Written between December 1941 and February 1942 in Serbian Cyrillic script, the letters provide a rare first-person account of life in the camp, describing severe overcrowding, hunger, and isolation among the prisoners. According to the historian Magdalena Saiger, they were probably smuggled out by staff from the Jewish Hospital who regularly entered the camp. The Holocaust researcher Jaša Almuli reports that the first internee executed was a courier named Heslajn, who had been carrying letters between the camp and the Jewish Hospital; five women and girls were shot for the same reason in mid-February 1942.
The first letter, dated 7 December 1941 and addressed to Novak, was written the night before Dajč's departure to the camp. In it, Dajč explains her decision to enter the camp as an act of conscience and duty, writing that "there are so many people in need of help that my conscience dictates to me that I should ignore any sentimental reasons regarding family and home, and place myself completely at the service of others". She also expresses optimism about the assistance she hoped to provide, and refers to her friends from the literary society, writing: "I will think of you often. You are my most beautiful memory from the most pleasant period of my life, the literary society."
Written on 9 December 1941 and addressed to Petrović, the second letter opens with her first impressions of the camp:
She goes on to portray the overcrowded pavilions, where prisoners slept on wooden galleries with only about of personal space each, likening the camp to an "ant heap" filled with thousands of inmates. She writes about the harsh living conditions, including freezing winter temperatures, insufficient food and water, constant roll calls, and the presence of barbed wire surrounding the pavilions. The letter also reflects her efforts to maintain intellectual and emotional resilience; she mentions that reading Heine helped her cope, despite a latrine half a kilometre () away shared by fifteen people at a time. She also recounts beginning work in the camp infirmary, a makeshift surgery suite consisting of a table with a few bottles and gauze, assisting a doctor and pharmacist in treating prisoners.
In a third letter to Novak, written on 11 December 1941, Dajč turned to the camp's deteriorating conditions and the daily routines of imprisonment. Dajč writes about severe overcrowding, long queues, and the constant noise produced by thousands of inmates confined in the pavilions. She also recounts treating prisoners for lice infestation, at one point burning her arms with the disinfectant cresol. That same day, camp authorities removed a group of boys and sick adults from the pavilion without explanation. On the day the hospital's daily courier visited, her brother Hans came and told her their parents would arrive at the camp the following day. Even amid these conditions, Dajč continued to cultivate an intellectual life, referring with irony to a small personal "library" she had brought with her, consisting of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, along with works by Heine, Blaise Pascal, and Michel de Montaigne, as well as English and Hebrew textbooks. Despite these circumstances, the letter retains an unexpectedly optimistic tone: Dajč notes that she remained calm and continued working long hours in the camp infirmary, expressing the belief that her efforts would give meaning to her decision to volunteer for the camp.
By the time she wrote her final surviving letter, on 7 February 1942, again to Petrović, the desperation of several weeks' imprisonment had set in. In it, Dajč describes the effects of severe hunger, cold, and exhaustion on the prisoners, and the growing sense of isolation.
Saiger observes the growing separation between the prisoners and the outside world, as Dajč fears that her relationships with those outside the camp will be broken. She refers to herself as a ('camp inmate'), reflecting the psychological transformation brought about by life in the camp. At the same time, she describes helping to lay out the bodies of 27 prisoners who had died in the camp's former Turkish pavilion. The letter also registers the uncertainty surrounding the prisoners' fate, as Dajč wonders whether they might be shot, deported, or otherwise killed. It retains a deeply personal tone, expressing Dajč's longing for her friends and the outside world, which she calls a lost paradise.