Remembering Jasenovac: The lesser Recognized Concentration Camp

*Final solution of Serbian Question in Jasenovac*

While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims.

April 22 is a date that binds two groups of people who shared the same tragic fate. It is the date that commemorates the revolt of the prisoners of Jasenovac, the death camp that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma.

While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims. The saddest point is that there is no final decision on what the final number of victims is. The Croatian authorities have been decreasing it down to a mere 30,000 and sweeping it under the carpet, only officially commemorating Jasenovac in haste on this specific day.

The Jewish and Serbian people have a history together based on positive relations and suffering together.

When the Sephardi Jews were forced to leave Spain, a large number of them settled in the Balkans. This was a place where they were able to practice their religion freely and conduct their trades undeterred. There were no pogroms, nor did they live in ghettos. This was a region that treated them as equals, and the Serbian people who were continuously harassed by the Ottomans due to their refusal to convert to Islam knew exactly how it felt to be persecuted.

*The entrance-gate to the death camp of Jasenovac in Croatia*

After 500 years under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan peoples succeeded in fighting back for their freedom and a new era began. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Jewish people were an integral part of society and enjoyed a respectable life without fears of repercussion. Many felt so strongly for the country they lived in that they fought on the side of the Serbs against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Central Powers in the First World War as brothers in arms. The years after the Great War were also prosperous for the Jewish community in Serbia.

With the Second World War, disaster struck the two ethnicities. The kingdom fell apart, with the Slovenian, Croatian and Bosniak people siding with the Axis powers in exchange for land and power. The Serbian people, who bravely protested in the streets against joining the Axis powers, were brutally punished by having their capital city bombed ruthlessly on April 6, 1941.

Hitler, furious that such a small ethnic group would show such staunch rejection of his country’s offers, ordered Operation Retribution to be carried out, bombing that began in the early hours of Sunday morning when unprepared civilians were sleeping in their beds. More than 2,000 people were killed and the Nazis targeted monuments of Serbian culture, such as the National Library, which lost thousands of precious antique books in the fires that broke out from the bombing.

After that treatment, the Nazis occupied the country and set up a puppet government, just like they had done in France. This was a difficult time for both Serbs and the Jews, but some of the worst horrors were seen just across the border in Croatia, whose newly independent government had eagerly taken up the mantle of fascism.

The Jasenovac concentration camp was established in 1941, which lead to a four-year horror of torture and murders. Prisoners were starved to the point that they resorted to eating grass and dirt. Those who were executed were not shot nor gassed, but had their throats slit open in killing competitions among the guards, and parts of their bodies were cut off as souvenirs.

Children were poisoned, beaten and locked away to sleep on the cold floors of cells where they were not given food for days. Even the German officers who visited the camp found the brutality unimaginable. Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac – which the contemporary Croatian government is lobbying to be canonised by the Catholic Church – enthusiastically recommended this as an opportunity to pressure prisoners into converting to Catholicism.

Some of the most notable Jewish victims were rabbis Leib Weissberg and Simon Ungar, activist Armin Schreiner and feminist Julia Batino.

On April 22, 1945, 600 inmates made a desperate rush for their freedom, with only 60 of them managing to escape. On April 30, the Ustashe (Croatian fascists) burned down the camp to conceal their crimes, and they have unfortunately been successful, as only the survivors’ accounts provide an insight of what had happened there.

Many of the Ustashe escaped abroad, never having to face justice. Yugoslavia became a socialist country, and for the sake of upholding “brotherhood and unity” among the constituent peoples, Jasenovac’s investigations were poorly carried out and shut down prematurely.

Throughout the years, the Jewish people have always been respected members of Serbian society, and they are open about their heritage and proud of their Serbian citizenship. One of the most beloved writers in Serbia was Oskar Davico, who proudly claimed that he was a Serb of Moses’s faith.

Actor Predrag Ejdus and actress Jelisaveta ‘Seka’ Sablic are favourites among the Serbian public, and one of the most famous publishing houses was named after Jewish editor Getsa Kon. Serbia has returned property that has been confiscated during the Second World War to the Jewish people. Serbia is the first Balkan country that has been bestowed the honor of Righteous Among Nations, and takes pride in this recognition.

The Jews and the Serbs are two ethnicities that have suffered throughout history and supported each other, understanding the plights they suffered.

Let us now commemorate and mourn together the anniversary of Jasenovac, the lives that have been lost and the victims whose numbers have still not been recognised. May we never forget it.

Originally published on 2020-05-02

About the author: Aleksandra Petrovic is a political researcher working for Dow Jones in Barcelona

Source: The Jerusalem Post

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

*Killing a Serb in Jasenovac by Croatian soldiers in WWII*

READ MORE!

Bill Clinton and Kosovo Albanian War Criminals

President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with ...

Russian Military Interventions Throughout the World since 1945

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

Why London Presented Hitler with Vienna and Prague?

State frontiers are established by human beingsand may be changed by human beings.Adolf Hitler. Mein KampfDiplomacy, with all the conventions of its forms,recognizes only real facts.Charles de GaullePart OneAll of Adolf Hitler’s actions, from the time he rose to power in 1933 until 1939, could be described as one triumph after another. He met each challenge he faced: he took over as head of the country, returned Germany’s lost territories without a struggle, and was given permission from England and France to rearm. But one further task lay before him, and failure now would make his previous achievements almost pointless. ...

Cold War Then, Cold War Now

The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American media appears to have no limit. You would think that they would have enough self-awareness and enough journalistic integrity -– just enough -– to be concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming, piled higher and deeper.One of the latest cases in point is a review of a new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times Book Review (September 10). The review says that Gorbachev “was no hero to his own people” because he was “the destroyer of their empire”. This is how the New York Times avoids having to say anything positive about life ...

The Geopolitics of the Kosovo Battle (1389)

In 1389, the Turks wanted to magnificently celebrate the first hundred years of their Ottoman Empire, which had a Sultanate at the time. Their plan was to go to war, to conquer the Serbian Empire and defeat its Army in Kosovo, and to mark the anniversary in a glorious way. The Turks started from Anatolia and headed to the Balkan peninsula via Kosovo, Belgrade, then over Drina, upstream Sava river, then to the South towards the Adriatic sea and then, go back home via Zeta and Raška. They wanted to make their sultanate an intercontinental empire. The battle against the ...

War On Identity – The Abuse Of Kosovo Toponym

Every now and then we are being bombed by some terms in order to get used to them and accept them as something regular, accurate and correct. Such a thing happened with the toponym of Kosovo.The same method was applied in Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e with the toponym of Bosnia, which once was an Orthodox Christian medieval kingdom, meanwhile global media portrays it as it’s exclusively Bosnian Muslim land regardless the fact that history, old books speak differently. In that sense here are the facts easy to check:Encyclopedia Britannica, Edition 1971Reference: EB, Edition 1971, Volume 3, page 983, Entry: Bosnia, ...

President Obama’s Farewell Speech

Must Serbia Harmonize its Foreign Policy with the EU and the Rest of the West?

A lot of dilemmas, lies, and misconceptions are present in Western geopolitical narratives taken without any critical approach by domestic Serbian pro-Western supporters (usually financed by Western agencies and Governments) about the war in NATO/EU-sponsored Ukraine, and Serbian position in newly geopolitical circumstances. This article aims to present the focal Western lie about Serbia trying to give some reasonable arguments regarding some open questions: Serbia must harmonize its foreign policy with the EU and the rest of the West!Serbia, in essence, must not harmonize its foreign policy with the EU for several reasons. First, not all EU Member States harmonized ...

Why Venezuela’s People are Suffering

INTRODUCTIONThe case that will be documented here is that Venezuela’s people are suffering from a tragic national situation which actually cannot be reversed by anything that’s within the power of Venezuela’s Government to do or to block. In order to understand this very unfortunate reality (if one wants to understand it), one must first understand the relevant parts of the broader situation in the world that affects Venezuela. What’s dooming the country isn’t merely a local situation, but instead is global and environmental. It also is economic, pertaining to the role that Venezuela is playing in the global economy. But ...

Khashoggi vs. 50,000 Slaughtered Yemeni Children: Europe has no Morals, no Ethics no Nothing

The European Parliament has asked yesterday (25 October) for an immediate embargo on the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, hence sanctioning the Kingdom of rogue Saudi Arabia which is joining the United States and Israel as the main purveyor of crime throughout the Middle East and the world. France still said they will apply sanctions only if it is proven that Riyadh was indeed involved in the killing of the controversial Saudi journalist. Madame Merkel at least days ago said that Germany would no longer supply the Saudis with arms – as a result of the heinous crime committed ...

Global Security, the United Nations Organization and the Role of the Security Council

Historical backgroundAfter the failure of the interwar League of Nations to prevent international crises and military conflicts of the 1930s which finally culminated in the next global war, the major Allied states (the USA, the USA, the UK, and China) agreed in Moscow in October 1943 to create a new, more functional, and improved international peace-keeping organization after the war under a new name of the United Nations Organization (the UNO). In other words, the UNO has evolved from a wining coalition of countries fighting against European Nazism and fascism in WWII. Following further negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta, ...

Neo-Nazi Network in German Army Exposed

The arrest of a German army officer suspected of plotting the assassination of leftist politicians and high-ranking state officials has exposed the operations of neo-Nazi forces at the highest levels of the German military (Bundeswehr).The information that has emerged thus far indicates that the suspected officer-terrorist was part of a broader network of fascists within the Bundeswehr, and that his activities were known to his superiors and covered up by them.Most astonishing is the official reaction to these alarming revelations. They have prompted an outpouring of anger in the German media and from the establishment parties directed not at the ...

The Fallacy of Calling McCain or Anyone Else a War Hero

Obit scribblers are calling John McCain a war “hero.” Well, I have to concede that unlike so many warmongering chickenhawks such as Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan and most other neocons, McCain did actually serve in the military. But the same could be said for nearly all top Nazis including Hitler and Goering; they fought in a war and they loved war. They were destructive persons who learned nothing positive from their military experience.Of course, few of the pundits and politicians who are eulogizing McCain would wish to include Nazis in their hall of fame, nor would most of ...

Croatia Must Not Whitewash the Horrors of Jasenovac

There are horrific realities of history that must not be questioned, distorted or denied by anyone with even the slightest integrity or sense of decency.The slaughter of millions of Jews in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor during the Holocaust of World War II falls squarely in this category.So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.Any attempt to deny or to attempt to trivialise or minimise the enormity of this genocide, or to rehabilitate its perpetrators in any way whatsoever, is, simply ...

Fallujah: A Symbol of US War Crimes

No city in Iraq is more symbolic of the criminal consequences of the US invasion of Iraq than Fallujah. Prior to 2003, the 300,000-strong, prosperous, predominantly Sunni Muslim community on the Euphrates River, one of humanity’s oldest continuous urban settlements, was known as the “city of mosques.” After 13 years of destruction at the hands of the US military and its client state in Baghdad, it is today a labyrinth of ruins, a city of the dead.Following weeks of air strikes by US, British and Australian bombers, a combination of Iraqi government forces and Shiite militias is reportedly on the ...

The Korean War and Crimes against Humanity

“ON JANUARY 3 [1951] AT 10:30 AM, AN ARMADE OF 82 FLYING FORTRESSES LOOSED THEIR DEATH-DEALING LOAD ON THE CITY OF PYONGYANG. … “THE NUMBER OF INHABITANTS OF PYONGYANG KILLED BY BOMB SPLINTERS, BURNT ALIVE AND SUFFOCATED BY SMOKE IS INCALCULABLE, SINCE NO COMPUTATION IS POSSIBLE. SOME FIFTY THOUSAND INHABITANTS REMAIN IN THE CITY, WHICH BEFORE THE WAR HAD A POPULATION OF FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND.” [UN Repository]With tension ever mounting in the Korean peninsular, all the higher every year with US bombers conducting annual drills over South Korea within direct strike range of North Korea, it is notable and deeply regrettable the West has lost all ...

The Failure of US Democracy

I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump.Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this:- is not endeared to the oligarchs.Who are the oligarchs?— Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who ...

The Geopolitics of South-East Europe and the Importance of the Regional Geostrategic Position

PrefaceA geopolitical issue of South-East Europe became of very importance for the scholars, policymakers, and researchers with the question of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire as one of the most crucial features of the beginning of the 20th century in European history. A graduate collapsing of the one-time great empire was accelerated and followed by competition and struggling by both, the European Great Powers and the Balkan national states, upon the territorial inheritance of it. While the European Great Powers have the aim to obtain the new spheres of political-economic influence in South-East Europe, followed by the task to ...

UN, France & US in Libya and Ivory Coast: Using Violence and Islamic Forces Just Like Kosovo

Albanian terror in Kosovo against the Serbs from June 1999 up to the end of 2000The current problems in Libya and Ivory Coast are complex and clearly the opposition has different aspirations. After all, both sides are involved in a bloody conflict and the use of violence is being used by each faction in these divided nations. Therefore, it appears that the “new democratic warriors” of peace and freedom carry guns and kill their enemies, just like their enemies would kill them.This article is not about defending the leaders of either nations and clearly the leader of Libya is known ...

Fifty Years of Imperial Wars: Global Neoliberalism and America’s Drive for World Domination

Over the past 50 years the US and European powers have engaged in countless imperial wars throughout the world. The drive for world supremacy has been clothed in the rhetoric of “world leadership”, the consequences have been devastating for the peoples targeted. The biggest, longest and most numerous wars have been carried out by the United States. Presidents from both parties direct and preside over this quest for world power. The ideology which informs imperialism varies from “anti-communism”in the past to “anti-terrorism”today.Washington’s drive for world domination has used and combined many forms of warfare, including military invasions and occupations; proxy ...