HOLOCAUST, COMMEMORATION AND BALKANS

cafebabel.com
http://arirusila.cafebabel. com/en/post/2009/01/29/Holocaust-commemoration-and -Balkans
Jan 30 2009

The UN General Assembly chose January 27 as the official day for
the commemoration, as it was on this day in 1945 that Soviet troops
liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. Throughout Europe, tributes
will be paid to the 53 million people who died during World War II,
of whom 31 million were civilians.

Commemoration has linked usually also to International Holocaust
Remembrance Day. The background is, that on January 27, 1945, Soviet
troops entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the last
such camp still functioning. They found 7,000 survivors from among
the more than 1,000,000 people murdered there. The memory of the
Holocaust in western Europe has historically been a kind of spur for
‘anti-racist’ movements, but how to define Holocaust?

Definitions

Most scholars define the Holocaust as a genocide of European Jewry
alone, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish
Question". Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution,
the total number of victims would be between nine and 11 million of
which figure appr. six million were Jews.

Earlier the word holocaust has been used since the 18th century to
refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people, e.g. many
writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide
of WWI.

If and when the word holocaust is reserved to describe murdering six
million Jews during WWII the other similar brutalities need another
term and the word Genocide is most used to describe the deliberate
and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic,
racial, religious, or national group. A word pogrom is used mostly
in relation with a form of riot directed against a particular group,
whether ethnic, religious, or other, and characterized by the killing
and destruction of their homes, businesses, and religious centers.

Balkans

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest extermination center created by
the Nazis. It has become the symbol of the Holocaust and of wilful
radical evil in our time. The death tolls in extermination centers
vary but rough estimations are following (source Wikipedia):

Auschwitz II 1,400,000 Belzeg 600,000 Chelmno 320,000 Jasenovac 600,000
Majdanek 360,000 Maly Trostinets 65,000 Sobibor 250,000 Treblinka
870,000 Few people know that 3rd biggest extermination center was
Jasenovac. Two reasons maybe explain this: 1st it is located in
Croatia and 2nd the main part of victims were Serbs. From total
600,000 murdered ones some 25,000 were Gypsies, some 25,000 Jews and
over half a million Serbs.

Yad VaShem – "Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority" –
is Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the holocaust
describes Jasenovac as follows (source):

Located in Croatia 62 miles south of Zagreb, Jasenovac was Croatia’s
largest concentration and extermination camp. Jasenovac, was a network
of several sub-camps, established in August 1941 and dissolved in
April 1945. The Nazis gave control of Jasenovac to the puppet Croatian
government, which was run by the fascist Ustasa movement. A large
number of Ustasa members served in the camp, most notably Miroslav
Filipovic-Majstorovic, who was notorious for killing prisoners with
his bare hands.

The Independent State of Croatia was created and supported by Nazi
Germany and Fascist Italy. It thus adopted their racial and political
doctrines. Jasenovac had a role in the Nazi "final solution"; it was
also used, however, in the ethnic cleansing of Romany and Serbian
inhabitants. So during the WWII, Serbs shared the similar fate as
Jews at the hands of Nazis. Jasenovac was not the only place where
Serbia’s neighbour Croatia ran several concentration camps where Jews,
Serbs and Roma have been murdered. Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians
were allies of Hitler as well.

(More about Jasenevac in my document library )

Memory today

In April 1945 the partisan army approached the camp. In an attempt
to erase traces of the atrocities, the Ustaša blew up all the
installations and killed most of the internees. An escape attempt by
the prisoners failed, and only a few survived.

It seems that after WWII Croats tried to hide all evidence about
brutalities in Jasenovac, all material evidence disappeared as if
there had not been any camp in that place. Later – during Tito’s time
– the state and the authorities tried to implement "Brotherhood and
Unity" motto, with the aim of creating tolerance between the nations
and the crime had to be forgotten as soon as possible.

On Summer 2008 Israel’s ambassador to Croatia, Shmuel Meirom,
harshly criticized the funeral given to a head of a WWII Jasenovac
concentration camp in Zagreb, saying also that it insulted the memory
of those killed in the camp run by Croatia’s Nazi-allied Ustasha
regime. "I’m convinced that the majority of the Croatian people are
shocked by the way the funeral of the Jasenovac commander and murderer,
dressed in an Ustasha uniform, was conducted," ambassador Meirom
said in a written statement to the state news agency Hina. "At the
same time, I strongly condemn the inappropriate words of the priest
who served at the funeral and said that Sakic was a model for all
Croats"Meirom said. (More about this in my article )

So commemoration or International Holocaust Remembrance Day or events
and history related to them has recent times been observed with various
ways. In Serbia Serbs and Jews held the main commemoration ceremony
at the Memorial to the Victims of Genocide in the Second World War
at the Old Fairgrounds (Staro Sajmiste) in Belgrade – a place where
thousands of them were murdered during WWII.

Yearly commemoration is important remainder for fair picture of
history. At least one day per year is good to think what ultra
nationalism can be at its worst level, what kind of interests, power
game, attitudes and hidden motivations are creating possibilities for
murdering civil populations or ethnic groups. And to remember that
these actions have been continuing also after WWII e.g. in Cambodia,
Rwanda and Darfur even today.

–Boundary_(ID_WEv4p9rG8gcZ5jG+/IDZlw)–