By the numbers, the murder of the Serbian Jews in Belgrade during 1941-1942 was much closer to a tragedy than a statistic. And it is of this "tragedy", that Serbian author David Albahari writes his short novel, "Gotz and Meyer". Written in the first person by an unnamed Serbian Jew who had escaped the mass murder by going into hiding with his mother as an infant, the story proceeds at a fast pace as the man tries to understand what happened in Belgrade in that two year period.After the Germans invaded Serbia in 1941, a large majority of the male Serbian Jewish population was hauled off and shot by the SS, aided by local Serbian anti-Semites. The remaining Jews - mostly women, children, and the elderly - were put into the Semlin Judenlager, where they waited to be sent off "somewhere else". What really happened was that they were loaded into sealed trucks - 100 or so at a time - and driven around til gassed to death. Their bodies were then off-loaded and buried. So efficient was the gassing operation that Serbia - along with Poland and the Soviet Union - were the only Nazi-occupied country NOT to have to send off their Jewish population for extermination. They were killed "in situ", so to speak...David Albahari takes the facts about the camp and the gas vans and writes a story around two of the German drivers of the gas vans. He doesn't know their real names, but invents "Gotz" and "Meyer", and imagines how they viewed their job and the people they were murdering 100 at a time. The nameless teacher in today's Belgrade - the only family member left after the death of his parents long after the war - descends into a kind of madness as he tries to figure out what happened and how the two imagined - "Gotz" and "Meyer" - went about their murderous business. Albahari also introduces other characters, but the two (imagined) fair-haired monsters who he thinks gave out candy to the camps children before loading them into the gas van, along with the unnamed narrator are the main focus of the story.Because we are only talking about very small remnant of millions murdered, the horror of these murders is even more telling. Reading about today's man being driven mad while trying to deal with the murders of his relatives gives David Albahari's novel even more impact.