Righteous gentile Dragoljub Trajkovic was posthumously honored Wednesday for saving the lives of three Jews during the Holocaust. The ceremony took place at the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
Trajkovic’s daughter Nada accepted a medal and certificate of honor on behalf of her father, who passed away 20 years ago. Also present were descendants of the Unger family Trajkovic saved in Serbia during the Holocaust.
Nada Trajkovic accepts certificate of honor (photo: Yossi Ben David, Yad Vashem)
Trajkovic joins a list of over 22,700 individuals who have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations and whose names are inscribed on a memorial wall in Yad Vashem. He saved Margita Unger and her two children, Olga and Timohar, from almost certain death in the Nazi concentration camps.
Margita and Marcel Unger and their children Olgag and Timohar lived in Banat, in the former Yugoslvaia, until August 1941 when they were deported to the nearby city of Belgrade. A short time later Marcel was taken to the Topovske Supe concentration camp and his family would never hear from him again.
10,000 out of Belgrade’s 12,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
In October of the same year, Trajkovic, a railway employee whose wife was a relative of the Ungers, heard the remaining Jews in Belgrade were to be deported to the Sajmiste concentration camp. On the day of the deportation, he took the three remaining Ungers into his house.
Not long afterwards, Travkovic felt that the Ungers were in danger and decided to obtain forged identity papers for them. He moved the Ungers to a nearby farm and paid the farmers to hide the mother and daughters and provide for all their needs. They remained at the farm until the end of the war.
Nada Trajkovic by her father's name (Yossi Ben David, Yad Vashem)