Our Faces in Glass
- Mar 26
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 1
Dina Greenberg
For Olga Alkalaj (November 23, 1907 – March 15, 1942)
i
When I try to pray, whose prayer is on my lips? Yours or mine, it makes no difference.
ii
Your brave voice silenced so I beckon Our people.1 Your breath strangled and I clutch my aching heart. Your face veiled in yesterday’s nightmares and mine eclipsed by their nearness. Through thick glass I meet you only once.2 Your eyes hold mine, power and sorrow mirrored in my own. How, if ever, can I leave you?
iii
Twinned, I follow your footprints in blood-laden snow. I see how the earth lies frozen, even the promise of spring foregone. I see how they dragged you, feet scarred and blackened. Did flakes drift from the sky your last day on earth? Brittle kisses alighting on your shoulders, your child-sized body stripped bare like a sapling. It makes no difference. Even now, they cannot break you.
iv
We walk arm in arm along the still-dark streets of Belgrade, your many faces concealed to all but me. Daughter. Feminist. Sister. Partisan. Defender.3 Our footsteps muted by a dense carpet of autumn leaves, we pass the handsome townhouses of Zerek, or perhaps Kneza Miloša.4 It makes no difference. You push open a grand, iron gate and we follow the path around back, then dip beneath a modest doorway. Inside—bourgeoisie splendor of burnished wood and dangling crystals. You tend these riches with the same care you show your Communist clients. Your house maid face is closed, compliant when your mistress calls you by a borrowed name. The mistress either divines your deception or she doesn’t. It makes no difference.5
v
At Banjica they cannot break you.6 At Sajmište they cannot break you.7 You will not betray your comrades.
vi
You choose your own fate. You will not abandon your comrades. You will not abandon your mother. I am there now when they push you through the thick, winged doors of the gaswagen.8 The others—dozens or more—keen in desperation and fear. Or maybe they submit quietly, too weak to protest even this. As always, you remain defiant, your silence practiced and sharpened. But do you get to hold your mother one last time?9
vii
The officer is scrupulous in his task. He affixes the rubber hose to the exhaust pipe, double-checks the fit. Inside, you are packed tight with the others as the great beast rumbles across the makeshift bridge toward Jajinci.10
viii
The rank vapor of filth and fear engulfs you. But do you remember the twinkling blue-and-yellow lights that traced the other bridge? Those sleek modern pavilions, a glinting spire of hope that pierced a moonlit sky. Did you know, even then, how swiftly the vision would crumble?11
ix
Your death is slow and painful death.12 Perhaps you die in your mother’s arms. Perhaps you die with the words of Kaddish on your lips, your face a mask of anguish. But it makes a difference how I choose to remember your face. The face before, the face I first beheld. I hold this image with clarity. I carry it here in my soul.
1 In his controversial 1981 book, New Contributions to the Biography of Josip Broz Tito, author/historian Vladimir Dedijer recounts a conversation with his fellow Yugoslav Partisan, Olga Alkalaj: “At one point, she said to me: ‘Vlado, it is so terrible! The German are sending all my people away.’ I asked her what she meant, and she added: ‘All my Jews’.”
2 The “meeting” describes a photograph of Alkalaj, taken before World War II and the Holocaust. I came upon the photo at the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade (Nov. 10, 2025) and, in turn, I took a photo of the photo, as viewed through the display case glass. Later, I discovered how my photo had fused our two faces into one image.
3 Alkalaj joined the Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) while still in law school. As a lawyer, she frequently defended her fellow Communists. As a Partisan in 1941, she participated in preparations for the armed uprising to take place at several locations throughout the city.
4 According to Srdjan Garacevic, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, grand neoclassical houses in Belgrade neighborhoods such as Zerek and Kneza Miloša were owned by “Serbian and Jewish early industrialists.” Before the war, 90 percent of Serbia’s Jewish population (approximately 33,000) lived in Belgrade and Vojvodina.
5 After the Axis powers’ invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Alkalaj took on a dual identity to better serve the resistance movement in Belgrade. She went by the name of Sofija Aleksić and. among other assignments, worked undercover as a maid. The duration of this perilous work lasted eight months.
6 In December 1941 Alkalaj was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Banjica concentration camp outside Belgrade where she was tortured, then (due to the severity of her injuries) brought to the Jewish Hospital in Belgrade. In July, 1941 Alkalaj was involved with the successful rescue operation of KPJ leader Alexander Rankovic from this site. Alkalaj refused the efforts of her comrades when a reciprocal escape plan was made on her behalf.
7 The Nazi conversion from fairground to concentration camp began in October, 1941; From March to May of 1942, some 8,000 Jews would be interned here at what the Germans named Judenlager Semlin (Jewish Camp Zemun) Sajmište,. Alkalaj was among them.
8 Aside from his responsibility for building and financing the camps at Sajmište, SS Gruppenführer Harald Turner is credited with inventing the gaswagen, a precursor to the Nazis’ fixed gas chambers. The SS created sanitized labels such as Sonderwagen and Spezialwagen to describe the mobile death chamber. In Serbia it was aptly called Dusegupka (soul killer). According to Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, 6,280 Jews from Sajmište were suffocated in the gaswagen, while another 1,200 died from starvation or exposure to the cold.
9 Vladimir Dedijer writes, “Olga Alkalaj remained faithful to her comrades — the communists. Even the most horrific torture could not break the fragile body of that girl who looked like a child. On the other hand, she did not want to part from her mother, Sophia, Vizorka, as she was called, and together with her went to the place where the Germans executed [people].”
10 At the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers, Sajmište’s proximity to Belgrade’s central railway station made it ideal for transporting prisoners from across Serbia. Once there, the camp’s location on the river banks made escape nearly impossible. Historian Milan Koljanin explains: "A truck-gas chamber used to pass along that route. A pontoon bridge was built next to the destroyed King Alexander Bridge during the German occupation, so the truck carrying prisoners, mostly women and children from the Jewish camp at Sajmište, would cross from there to the Belgrade side.”
11 On September 11, 1937, the Belgrade Fair Exhibition Grounds in Zemun opened to much fanfare. Modeled as a “World’s Fair,” the five Yugoslav pavilions were the first to be built, followed by the Central Tower, Italian, Romanian, zechoslovakian and Spasic’s pavilions, all within three months’ time. Short of its advancement to the second phase of development, this vision of Yugoslav modernity and unity lasted only another year.
12 Historian Milan Koljanin describes the “death transit” on which Alkalaj was forced to travel, emphasizing how passengers died “in an agony that lasted about twenty minutes.”
Image © Europeana
Nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and The Millions, Dina Greenberg’s cross-genre works have appeared in literary journals and media outlets throughout the U.S. and internationally. Her debut novel Nermina’s Chance received the first place 2022 Firebird Award in literary fiction. Ms. Greenberg holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as managing editor for the literary journal Chautauqua. She leads creative writing workshops across academic, nonprofit, and community-based settings.