Mila Evanovich

From the first glance, it’s hard not to be drawn in and captivated by the arresting painting covering a complete wall in the entryway of the Banjica Museum, which formerly housed the Gestapo-run concentration camp in Belgrade, Serbia, during World War II. Initially, it’s easy to confuse this work with a Picasso, but on closer inspection, realize it was created by the famous Serbian painter Miloš Bajić, and titled September 11.

The mesmerizing eyes of the women in the painting commanded my attention. Riveted, I could not look away. Curious, I explored further, leading to the untold and remarkable story of the twenty-six women of Banjica. But the burning question I continued to have was this— who was Miloš Bajić, and what was his connection to these women?

Miloš Bajić was born in 1915 in Resanovci, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he was seven years old, he and his family moved to Belgrade, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His passion for art developed at a young age, and he was fortunate enough to have some of his caricatures published in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. Although he began his art studies in Belgrade, the outbreak of World War II had him joining the resistance.

In October of 1942, the Nazis captured Bajić and sent him to Banjica, where he became one of the longest-held prisoners on record. For the male inmates still housed inside Banjica, the memory of the act of defiance of the twenty-six women in their dignified attempted break out on September 11, 1944, became indelibly scorched in their minds.

At this time, the Gestapo was hurriedly burning records in anticipation of the camp’s imminent shut down. They were hurriedly killing or releasing prisoners or sending them to other concentration camps. Miloš Bajić was forcibly transferred to the notoriously harsh Mauthausen Concentration Camp, located twelve miles east of Linz in Upper Austria. He later described these experiences as the most unimaginable hardships of his life.

Labeled as “Prisoner 106621”, Bajić was sent to Ebensee, one of Mauthausen’s many sub-camps, after being imprisoned in Mauthausen for a few months. Feeling the weight of despair as he witnessed countless lives stolen by the Germans’ infamous insecticide Zyklon B, he never expected to be spared. Yet instead, he was thrust into another form of anguish—twelve-hour shifts of relentless, back-breaking labor in the stone quarries, where survival was merely another battle against exhaustion and brutality. Bajić and his fellow inmates described how upon returning to camp they were often greeted with hostility by the SS guards on duty in the watchtower, who pelted them with stones.

Unsure why his life hadn’t been snuffed out like the thousands around him, Bajić used a pencil no larger than his little finger to document and create over 150 drawings, each a testament to the most horrific and unimaginable scenes he had ever witnessed. He drew the sorrowful faces of those in the camp—their pain emblazoned across their bodies while he observed the massive atrocities before his eyes. He also began to draw people from other camps who were dumped in Ebensee and left in the snow, their naked bodies frozen and stacked in piles, never realizing that he would one day transform these unspeakable horrors into hauntingly powerful visual narratives.

Bajić hid his work from the SS, concealing his sketches beneath his shirt or in his pants until he found an old fire extinguisher lying on the ground. He began stuffing his drawings inside the extinguisher and burying them in a hole he and his friend had dug inside their cell. As soon as the Allies liberated Mauthausen and its sub- camps, Bajić and his friend unearthed the fire extinguisher and found his drawings intact. However, it was years later before he could bring himself to open the suitcase that his friend Hrvoje Makanović brought to him. Inside were all of his sketches from that horrible time.

Bajić returned to Belgrade to complete his art studies, only to discover that his girlfriend had married another man. Under pressure from OZNA (akin to the SS) to denounce his comrades, Bajić sought refuge in Paris. Many believed this escape helped him cope with the horrors of war and his time in the camps, leading Bajić to achieve greater heights in his artistic expression. However, Belgrade beckoned him, and Bajić returned home. In the 1960s he became head of the prestigious University of Arts, where he was recognized as the first abstract painter in the Balkans.

Today Miloš Bajić is recognized as one of the leading artists of his generation. The Gallery of Matica Srpska is currently hosting an exhibition titled ”Miloš Bajić: A Dream of Freedom.” This marks the artist’s first solo showcase at this prestigious gallery in Novi Sad Serbia. The exhibition features more than one hundred works by Miloš Bajić, drawn from various museum collections: including the National Museum of Serbia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Military Museum, the Branko Čopić Foundation, the
Contemporary Gallery in Subotica, the Contemporary Gallery of the Art Colony Ečka in
Zrenjanin, the Gallery of Fine Arts— Gift Collection of Rajko Mamuzić, Art Gallery RIMA, and the Nikola Tesla Primary School in Bračka Topola, Serbia. Numerous pieces from the private collections of Miloš Bajic’s heirs are also on display.

September 11 was created by Milos Bajić to honor the twenty-six courageous women of Banjica. These women made a daring, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to escape on the night of September 11 while Bajić was still in the camp. It is possible that he heard the commotion that night, and this profound event inspired him to commemorate their bravery through his art. Stirred by this painting, I knew I had to rewrite sections of No Bread Tomorrow to include them— their tale and their acts of bravery were too powerful to ignore.

References:

*Notes from Andrej Ćirić, curator of Banjica Concentration Camp Museum.
*Documentary Line of Life by Darko Bajić and Darja Bajić, and graciously lent by GM Films.