Controversial Serbian Holocaust Film Isn’t Anti-Croat Propaganda
The film ‘Dara of Jasenovac’, about a Serb girl in the World War II Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, has been accused of promoting a Serbian nationalist agenda, but it’s actually a serious attempt to portray fascist oppression [...]
Only a few recent Holocaust movies have provoked so many vituperative reviews or elicited so many strong opinions for reasons almost entirely divorced from the film itself.
Even before Predrag Antonijevic’s new film ‘Dara of Jasenovac’, about the Ustasa-run World War II concentration camp complex at Jasenovac in Croatia has been released in its native country – Serbia – it found itself at the centre of a welter of criticism, accused of a laundry list of transgressions by American and British film critics.
In August 1941, the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement established the Jasenovac camp system, where over 83,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and anti-fascists were killed as result of racial and other discriminative laws.
Reviewers have dismissed the film as crude Serbian nationalist propaganda, anti-Croat and anti-Catholic score settling and historical revisionism. One critic has gone so far as to assert that the film should not have been made at all.
The film’s depictions of camp violence – and allegedly incest – have generated particular scorn.
‘Dara of Jasenovac’ aims to convey everyday life in a concentration camp from the point of view of a ten-year-old girl, Dara Ilic, arrested along with her older brother, mother and two-year old brother Budo during the rounding-up of Serb civilians in the Kozara region by Ustasa militias and the German army.
Her father has already been incarcerated in Jasenovac by the Ustasa and is working as a gravedigger at the Gradina execution site, knowing that one day he will dig his own grave. Soon before arriving at the women’s and children’s section of the camp complex, Stara Gradiska, Dara’s mother and older brother are shot dead.
Thereafter, the story focuses on Dara’s determination to keep the promise she made to her mother: to never allow herself to be separated from her baby brother even as he becomes increasingly weak and a succession of surrogate mother figures in the camp are killed or transferred to Germany for forced labour.
Despite the assertions made by numerous critics, there is little evidence of a nationalist agenda in this film.
On the contrary, in the very first scene, a young Croat peasant woman rescues a baby from the column of prisoners making their journey to the concentration camp, bitterly condemning the inhumanity of the Ustasa towards Serb women and children. As such, from the outset the film explicitly separates ordinary Croat citizens from the regime.
Nor does the film ignore the suffering of Jews or Roma in the camp. The trumpet orchestra which accompanies a banquet for camp staff is a Roma one and obviously Roma women are present among the camp’s inmates, while two of the most important supporting characters in the film are Jewish.
It is true that the film focuses on the experiences of Serb women and children in the camp, but then the majority of those incarcerated in Jasenovac-Stara Gradiska were ethnic Serbs. This, in turn, reflects the fact that the Ustasa movement saw the annihilation of the Serbs as people as its overriding nation-building objective, without which a Croatian state was unviable, it believed.
A more reasonable criticism is that the film displays an anti-Catholic bias, an assertion presumably based on the supporting role played by a callous nun at the camp.
Sections of the Catholic Church in Croatia played a shameful role in the persecution of the Serbs: aside from the notorious Brother Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, who features as a supporting character in the film, numerous priests, monks and seminary students served as concentration camp guards.
However, while some nuns earned an unenviable reputation for their cruelty towards Serb children, most notably in the children’s camp of Jastrebarsko, no nuns were stationed at Jasenovac or Stara Gradiska.
Jasenovac, Independent State of Croatia – Final Solution of Serbian Question
Confrontation with horror
What the film’s producers seem to have done is to take real events from various camps and roll them all into the experience of Dara and her brother.
The portrait of Croat Archbishop Alozije Stepinac on the wall of the classroom where the nun indoctrinates the children with Ustasa ideology, hanging besides one of Ante Pavelic, the supreme leader of the state, is jarring.
No matter how morally slippery Stepinac was and how undeserving of sainthood, Stepinac was deeply unpopular with and fundamentally untrusted by the Ustasa regime. It is therefore unlikely his image would have been displayed next to that of Pavelic.
Whether this is evidence of anti-Catholicism is another matter entirely.
It is worth bearing in mind that ‘Dara’ is a feature film, not a documentary; conflating events and characters for dramatic purposes is a standard part of film convention. Still, it is the kind of error that should have been avoided.
Similar observations apply to the costume design.
It is clear that the costume designer Ivanka Krstovic has carefully studied the photographs of the camps inmates. However, the costumes for the female Ustasa guards – like the historical figure of guard Nada Tanic-Luburic – are less successful.
Some of the strongest criticism has been reserved for the banquet scene during which prisoners are forced to play musical chairs, with the losers being garrotted. On the surface, this scene bookended by the lovemaking of Tanic-Luburic and her colleague, later husband, and commander of Jasenovac, Dinko Sakic – not, as one review asserted, her step-brother – seems gratuitous.
However, these scenes make a bit more sense when you understand what Antonijevic is trying to achieve.
He wants to confront us head on with the horror of Jasenovac: in so doing, he makes us complicit voyeurs in his conceit and won’t let us look away. The macabre banquet, featuring a scene in which a young German officer vomits as his superior quips “Welcome to the Balkans!” is pure Bunuelesque theatre.
While incidents such as these depicted in the banquet scene did take place at Jasenovac, whether the head of the Ustasa’s concentration camp system, Vjekoslav ‘Maks’ Luburic, was present is more doubtful.
Likewise, although German officials regularly expressed their disgust at the sanguinary nature of Ustasa crimes and from time to time visited the regime’s concentration camps, there’s no evidence they were present when such atrocities were being committed. The black humour sits uneasily with the harrowing story at the centre of the film, but it also provides a context for what comes later.
The committed performances of the actors are what ultimately keeps the film on course. While actor Marko Janketic is far better looking than Luburic was in real life, he captures with uncanny accuracy the latter’s sociopathic, terrifying belligerence. Meanwhile, Jelena Grujicic as a Jewish nurse who befriends Dara provides a courageous moral core to the film.
In contrast to the sometimes-cartoonish portrayal of camp staff, the film movingly explores the tawdry and complex moral compromises that concentration camp inmates, in the waiting room of death, are forced to make, with the camera capturing in close up their pained, wonderfully expressive faces.
Above all, it is the quiet, dignified performance of Biljana Cekic as Dara, determined to save her baby brother but desperate not to be separated from him, even at the price of saving him, that carries the film along. By the final suspenseful reel, we are emotionally swept up in her fate; until the last moment it is genuinely unclear how her story will resolve itself.
Perhaps the merits and flaws of this film matter less than what it represents. For all its faults, ‘Dara of Jasenovac’ is a significant breakthrough, providing a reference point for regional directors who want to make serious, victim-centred, commercial films about wartime Yugoslavia.
In the four short, cataclysmic years of its existence, the Ustasa-run Independent State of Croatia had an outsized impact on the lives of millions of ordinary people, not to mention the generations that followed. The archives contain so many stories about the experiences of individuals in those years of terror – Serbs, Jews and Roma as well as Croats and Bosniaks – that are just waiting to be told.
If it encourages other film makers to tell some of these stories, then ‘Dara of Jasenovac’ will surely be remembered for far more than a handful of scathing reviews.
Killing a Serb in Jasenovac by Croatian soldiers in WWII
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
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.
When the civil war in Ukraine started, the question that arised is whether there are similarities between Ukrainian and Yugoslavian civil wars. So let’s compare these two countries, one that is falling apart – Ukraine and the other one that doesn’t exist anymore – Yugoslavia.Multinational countryYugoslavia was a multinational country with different national and ethnic groups coexisting together and two dominant nations Serbs and Croats. Ukraine is also quite a diverse country with Ukrainians, Russians (around 20% of Ukrainian population) and few minorities (Rusyns, Romanians, Hungarians) living together. Once the Yugoslavia collapsed, in a newly created ex-Yugoslav republic Croatia and ...
(JTA) — A Lithuanian judge postponed a precedent-setting trial in which a U.S. citizen is demanding that a state museum end its glorification of a deceased Nazi collaborator.Jonas Noreika - "General Storm"The case is thought to be the first in which civil servants intend to publicly defend in court the actions and good name of an alleged collaborator. Lawyers representing the museum said they needed more time to review materials relevant to the case, which involves the late Jonas Noreika. The postponement was announced Tuesday in Vilnius.The state-funded museum, known as the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the ...
Churchill’s famous dictum about the Soviet Union, that it was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” is arguably just as applicable to Srebrenica. July 11 this year will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of that landmark event of the Yugoslav wars which the late Prof. Edward Hermann, speaking somewhat less poetically than Churchill, had called “the greatest triumph of propaganda at the close of the twentieth century.”Whether we choose to view Srebrenica as a criminal investigation to sort out who and at whose direction executed prisoners of war, or as a political provocation to lay the groundwork for ...
The U.N. Organization was established in 1945 for the very security reason – to preserve the peace in the world. We believe that the governmental bodies and administrative structures of the U.N. have to be composed by the proved democratically oriented politicians and magistrates but above all this requirement has to be applied to the post and function of the U.N. Secretary-General. Nevertheless, in the history of the U.N. there is at least one (extremely) problematic appointment to the post of the U.N. Secretary-General: Kurt Waldheim from Austria.On the official website of the U.N. about its fourth Secretary-General one can ...
Such important reality as is shown in this picture is virtually unpublishable in mainstream US ‘news’media, because US ‘news’media need to deceive their public about the most important international realities — such as that the US imposed upon Ukraine a nazi regime against Russia, and the US now lies to accuse Russia for doing what Russia must do in order to protect itself from the US nazi regime next-door.This picture is among many which were originally published in the excellent 4 July 2018 article by Asa Winstanley at The Electronic Intifada. His article was headlined "Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. That article focuses upon Israel’s strong support for ...
As the Second World War advanced from its early stages, the United States was assessing which sections of the earth it would hold conquest over. American planners had to remain patient, however. A seemingly endless string of conquests for the Nazis had astonished the world – particularly those in the US – and led to Adolf Hitler being crowned as “the new Napoleon”.In the summer of 1942, under Hitler’s domineering command of the military, the Germans controlled vast swathes of Europe – from Warsaw to Oslo to Paris, and eastwards onto Athens, Kiev and Sevastopol. It was one major victory ...
While much is said in some American media outlets about “fake news” in the US, the smallness of the matters being discussed might come into focus when compared with Ukraine, which is of late producing rather much fake news about the Holocaust and elementary points in World War II history.As we reported back in October, Ukrainian media outlet Radio Svoboda — the Ukrainian arm of the US Government-funded arm of RFERL — posted a picture from the US Holocaust Museum. It is an image of Polish Jews being deported to a death camp. There was just one problem. Radio Svoboda claimed the picture ...
The Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar, above in 1943, was made up of 18,000 Bosnian Muslims and 300 Albanian Muslims. Bosnian Muslims were not Nazi and fascist “collaborators”, but Nazis themselves.The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army of Alija Izetbegovic reformed and reconstituted the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar from World War II. Contrary to the nonsensical screed of Croat Marko Attila Hoare, whose mother is Croatian Marxist and Ustasha apologist Branka Magas, and other Bosnian Muslim apologists and propagandists, there is overwhelming and abundant proof of the existence of a “Handzar Divizija” in the Bosnian Muslim Army. The existence of ...
Zagreb, 1941Become familiar with the basic info about one of the most beautiful countries in the world - Croatia. Photos, data & recommendations where to stay in order to enjoy this Adriatic pearl. If you are not the Serb.Split, Dalmatia, Croatia, 2019: "Kill the Serb" on the car with the plates from SerbiaOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & 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 ...
The massive artillery bombardment of the peoples of the Donbass, that has been raining down shells and fire on them since Christmas, is a war crime of horrific proportions designed to terrorise the people and bring their refusal to be subject to the NATO-installed regime in Kiev to an end. It is also becoming clear that it has a political purpose, which is to increase anti-Russian, pro-NATO propaganda among the Ukrainian people to influence them to vote to join NATO in a referendum, the consequences of which will be dramatic because a vote for NATO will be a vote for ...
Recommended alternative reading list on the Yugoslav studies not used by mainstream corporative Western mass-media and top Western universities dealing with global security, world politics and international relations. Reading proposed readers below you can complete picture on the Yugoslav studies out of the official Western approach.March Pogrom 2004 Book and Photo EvidenceKOSOVSKA GOLGOTA Intervju 198820 Principal Misconceptions on Kosovo IssueThe Srebrenica Massacre Evidence Context Politics Edward S Herman Phillip CorwinLista Diane Budisavljevic 1941 Do 1945 by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićJosip Broz Tito Bez Maske! by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićHayden Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia by ...
Long live the European court, the most humane court in the world! That is why seven times as many Croat and more than ten times as many (Kosovar) Albanian war crimes suspects, in percentage terms relative to Serbs, were acquitted by the Hague Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, with Radovan Karadzic being just its latest victim. (Source via this recent infographic from Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda).No matter that well before Srebrenica you had Sisak, where 595 Serb civilians of which 120 were women were disappeared by Croatian paramilitaries in 1991-1992. Everyone has heard of Srebrenica; almost nobody has heard heard of Sisak. The largest ethnic cleansing ...
Of the 22 Nazi concentration camps operating in the clerical fascist state of Croatia during World War II, nearly half were under the command of Roman Catholic priests.They were responsible for the grisly slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Serbs, Roma, and Jews were specifically targeted for extermination.Catholic clergy was especially keen to eradicate the Serbian Orthodox Church. This led to the murder of Christian Serbian Priests, forced conversions of Serbian Christians, and the destruction of 450 Christian Orthodox Churches during World War II.“Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and ...
Russian President Vladimir Putin put it succinctly when he recently warned that prospects for peace in Ukraine were negligible as long as the current authorities in Kiev remain in power. Worse, given a new rash of provocations by the Kiev regime, the entire region is being threatened with conflict, and even all-out war.It seems clear – and criminally reprehensible – that the Kiev regime and its President Petro Poroshenko are intent on dragging the United States and the NATO military alliance into a war with Russia. The incendiary conduct of Ukrainian politicians and their military is that of a regime ...
Seventy-five years ago Adolf Hitler launched the biggest and most destructive military campaign in history when three million German and allied troops invaded the Soviet Union along a 1,000-mile front.Operation Barbarossa – the codename for the German invasion of Russia - was no ordinary military campaign: it was an ideological and racist war, a war of destruction and extermination that aimed to kill Jews, enslave the Slavic peoples and destroy communism. The result was a war in which 25 million Soviet citizens died, including a million Jews, executed by the SS in 1941-1942 – an action which became the template ...
Kaunas, Lithuania, June 1941 (before Germans arrived): Killing of the Jews by local LithuaniansFor the tiny village of Sukioniai in western Lithuania, the exploits of General Storm, a local anti-Communist hero executed by the Soviet secret police in 1947, have long been a source of pride. The village school is named after him, and his struggles against the Soviet Union are also honored with a memorial carved from stone next to the farm where he was born.All along, though, there have been persistent whispers that General Storm, whose real name was Jonas Noreika, also helped the Nazis kill Jews. But ...
In regard to international relations (IR), power is understood as the ability of state or other political actors to impose its own control or influence over other state(s) or other political actors, or at least to influence the outcome of events on the local, regional or global level. Power politics as a phenomena has two dimensions: internal and external. The internal dimension is applied in the inner policy of the state and the external in the foreign affairs or outside of the home politics. The powerfulness of a state depends on its real independence or sovereignty from outside influence on ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & 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.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSaveSave
More than six decades after Berlin’s capitulation which capped World War II, the war is still raging, now in the form of revisionist attempts to cast a shadow over the memory of Soviet soldiers who fought in it. Among other things, the efforts aimed at equating fascism – a monster nurtured by the West in the 1930s-1940s – and Russia’s XX century wartime past are supposed to divert attention from the continuity between the Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the German national socialism. The nature and key traits of the continuity are exposed in “From Imperialism to Fascism: Why Hitlers’ India was ...
According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation. DWN says: “The Russian secret services have apparently thoroughly studied the paper. In advance of the paper’s publication, a harsh note of protest has been sent to Berlin: The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message: ‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an ...