Righteous Among the Nations from Serbia honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem

by Maureen Shamee
JERUSALEM (EJP) A Righteous Among the Nations from Serbia was posthumously honored at Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust.
A ceremony to honor Dragoljub Trajkovic took place Wednesday in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations in the presence of the daughter of the Righteous, Nada Djurasevic-Trajkovic, who received the medal and certificate of honor on her late father’s behalf, and the daughters of Holocaust survivor Tihomir Ungar.
Margita and Marcel Unger and their two children, Olga and Tihomar, lived in Arandjelovac in the Banat, an area northeast of Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.
In August 1941, the Jews of Banat were deported to Belgrade. From there the men were taken to the Topovske Supe camp, and the women and children were permitted to remain in the city temporarily.
In December 1941 the remaining Jewish women and children were killed. 10,000 of Belgrade’s 12,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Shortly before the final liquidation, in October 1941, Dragoljub Trajkovic, a railway employee, heard that the remaining Jews in Belgrade were to be deported to the Sajmiste concentration camp.
On the day of the deportation, Dragoljub hurried to the apartment where the Ungar family, relatives of his wife, was staying and brought them to his home where he hid them and tended to all their needs.
As the peril involved in concealing the family increased, Dragoljub obtained forged identity papers for them and stealthily moved Margita and her two children to a nearby farm.
Dragoljub paid the farmers to hide the mother and her two children, visiting them monthly and providing them with food and drink. The Ungers remained on the farm until the end of the war.
So far, over 22,700 individuals have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.
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