Biography
Miloš M. Damjanović was born in Kosovska Mitrovica on March 2, 1985. He completed his primary and secondary education in his hometown. He earned his degree in history from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Pristina, temporarily based in Kosovska Mitrovica, defending his graduate thesis in 2011 on "Jews in Kosovo and Metohija 1804–1918", which was awarded a purchase prize by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade in the annual scientific-literary competition for works on Jewish topics, organized by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia. At the same university, he defended his doctoral dissertation titled "Jews in Kosovo and Metohija 1918–1941". He has participated in over twenty international scientific conferences in Serbia, the region, and abroad. To date, he has published more than forty independent and co-authored scientific and professional papers in national and international academic journals and conference proceedings in Serbian and English. In 2023, his first monograph, "Dr. Nehemiah Schönfein (1886–1942): A Biography of a Swiss in Yugoslavia", was published by the Archives of Vojvodina. His latest exhibition, "On Some Unrecorded Victims of the Holocaust in the Territory of the NDH", was organized in cooperation with the Public Institution Memorial Site Donja Gradina, with which he visited multiple locations in the Republic of Srpska (Donja Gradina, Banja Luka, Doboj...) during 2024.
THE FATE OF WHITE ÉMIGRANTS OF JEWISH ORIGIN IN YUGOSLAVIA DURING WORLD WAR II
Abstract: After the bloody October Revolution and the devastating civil war in Russia, nearly 50,000 Russian White émigrés of diverse ethnic, religious, social, and professional backgrounds found temporary or long-term refuge in the newly established political entity of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Among this conglomerate of people, united by a common language, deep nostalgia for their involuntarily abandoned homeland, and the tragic fate of exile, there were also several hundred individuals of Jewish origin. The White émigrés of Jewish descent in Yugoslavia formed a distinct community, ranging from those firmly rooted in the Jewish faith and integrated into local Jewish congregations, to those who remained within the broader White émigré circles and were indifferent to Judaism, and even those who had fully assimilated, practicing Orthodox Christianity or maintaining only a distant ancestral connection to their Jewish heritage. Regardless of their diverse identities, religious differences, ethnic discrepancies, and ideological divides, all of them inevitably faced the menacing and fateful Nazi policy of biological extermination of Jews during World War II in the disintegrated and occupied Yugoslav state. The fate of this specific category of the population during the Holocaust in this region has so far failed to attract scholarly attention and has remained largely unknown or almost entirely unexplored. This paper aims to provide insight into the wartime experiences of Jewish White émigrés, using individual case studies accessible through a wealth of primary source material, and to examine the potential for their categorization.
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