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Split, Croatia, September 14th, 2018: “Kill Serb” written on the car with the plates from Serbia
The mugshots show Ivo Goldstein, a Jewish librarian and book dealer, looking bright-eyed and calm — even after nine days of confinement in a Croatian police cell. One of the prints bears the number 28888 and a date: April 21, 1941.
Seventy-six years after they were taken by a police photographer, the photos hang as a triptych on the bedroom wall of Goldstein’s son, Daniel, in a drab apartment block in Zagreb’s Zaprudje neighborhood.
Daniel, 85, is a historian and human rights activist. He was nine when his childhood was shattered by his father’s arrest in the newly created Independent State of Croatia, NDH, during World War II.
A grave-stone full of fascist (Ustashi) symbols in a cemetery of the Croatian town of Samobor
This puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was set up after the invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by Axis powers in the spring of 1941. It was led by ultranationalist dictator Ante Pavelic, whose fascist Ustasa movement had sought a Croatian state by any means.
Modelled largely on the German SS, Ustasa units wasted no time in implementing Nazi-style racial laws, rounding up and killing Jews, Serbs and Roma along with anti-fascists.
The Ustasa built concentration camps across the NDH, which spanned most of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina along with parts of Serbia and Slovenia.
Ivo Goldstein was one of the first Jews to be arrested, in the industrial city of Karlovac.
He ended up at the Jadovno camp in the foothills of the Velebit mountain range near the Adriatic. Records show he was killed there, four months after his arrest, at the age of 41.
After the war, Daniel changed his surname to Ivin (son of Ivo) in memory of his father. He says he would have been killed too if he had not joined — at the age of 10 — the anti-fascist Partisan movement led by Croatian-born communist Josip Broz Tito, who would rule Yugoslavia for 35 years after the war.
“Shortly after I joined the Partisans, my close relatives were killed in the NDH camps, including my grandparents who had been looking after me until then,” he said. “My uncle, who was killed in Auschwitz, didn’t manage to save himself either.”
Given his life story, it is no surprise that Ivin is angry about a growing number of voices in Croatia seeking to whitewash Ustasa crimes during World War II.
Those crimes include the murder of tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, often referred to as the Auschwitz of the Balkans.
In a political climate that has lurched to the right since Croatia became the EU’s newest member in 2013, Ustasa apologists openly express their views on social media, in lecture halls and on prime-time television.
Bookstores stock monographs disputing overwhelming evidence that Jasenovac was an Ustasa extermination camp. Prominent politicians have cast doubt on the genocidal nature of Pavelic’s regime.
Critics say such revisionism is tantamount to Holocaust denial.
“Denying that Jasenovac was a death camp makes me feel so bitter,” Ivin said. “I consider revisionists who claim that kind of thing to be criminals because they are killing victims for the second time with their lies. I don’t know how the government can allow it.”
Rights activists say successive governments led by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union party, HDZ, have turned a blind eye to neo-fascist nostalgia, allowing hate speech to thrive.
