Jasenovac: an ignored extermination camp. - No War No Born Committee

by Jean Toschi Marazzani Visconti

The 19 November 2019, for the first time outside the Serbian territory, A conference on the extermination camp was held in Jerusalem Croatian of Jasenovac, where since June 1941 at the end of the Second world War, in 1945, nearly a million were killed men, Jewish women and children, Serbia, Rom. Existence of this field has been carefully hidden for over seventy years, despite the efforts and requests of the families of the victims. The Jerusalem conference therefore assumes enormous importance for the Serbs, it means a first step towards recognition of the existence of that place of imprisonment and death, where almost all Serbian families, in particular those originating from Krajina and of Bosnia, they had lost a family member.

Jasenovac, Croatia. The structures of the camp
have been eliminated. Just a monument, today.

This little miracle happened thanks to commitment of two women, The ambassadors Liliana Nikšić and Dragana Tomasevic, president of the Serbian Jasenovac Foundation & Holocaust Memorial Foundation based in London, and the contribution of Prof.. Gideon Greif, researcher and author of books on the Holocaust e Auschwitz and the first multidisciplinary study that analyzes and compares the similarities between Jasenovac and Auschwitz from the title: Jasenovac - Auschwitz of the Balkans. The Ustasha empire of cruelty.

Long last This untouchable topic revealing the crimes was addressed carried out by Croatian fascism in the presence of three witnesses survivors: a man and two women, children at the time, Tansy Radojcic, Immortelle Tišma is Jelena Mraović.

Buhač Radojčić, one of the survivors of the Jasenovac camp in Croatia,
with JTMV in front of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem 20.11. 2019

There Conference was supposed to last three days with the participation of Israeli experts, Ma someone pressured the Jerusalem government, consequently it is was downsized at the last minute.

In that context, however, a Serbian Studies center was inaugurated- Israeli in the extraordinary university building ONO Academic College, in exchange for the opening of a similar Israeli-Serbian center, happened a short time before at the Department of Philology of the University of Belgrade.

When the 10 April 1941 the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed, the Poglavnik Ante Pavelić - pupil of Italian fascism and follower of German Nazism – had already made several fields of imprisonment even before signing the 2 June 1941 an order officer for the establishment of containment camps e the elimination of various uncomfortable ethnic groups: the Jews first, followed by Serbs and Roma.

These fields, from cui Danica, Kerestinak, Gospić It's pathetic, they were closed by order of the military authorities Italian, horrified by the brutality and cruelty employed. For the first time the sinkholes were used to speed up the eliminations of prisoners.

Jasenovac camp 3 , photo courtesy of Jasenovac&Holocaust Memorial Foundation,
London

The Serbs became the major target of the ustashas in deference to an equation devised by the Minister of Culture and Worship, Mile Boy, according to which a third of the Serbs had to convert to Catholicism; a third leave the territories; a third being deleted.

Throughout the duration of the Second World War the Croatian Ustashas took a this purpose the detention complex near the town of Jasenovac, located at the confluence of the Drina and Una rivers, in Western Slavonia. The Ustasha themselves called him the death camp.

Jasenovac, Croatia. The entrance to the field 3, today.

Jasenovac yes extended over an area of approx 210 square kilometers and it was consisting of a complex of eight concentration camps. Almost all were next to a stream, useful for easy elimination of corpses. Fields number one and two, situated ad est of Jasenovac, they only worked a few months, then they were flooded of the Sava River. The main course was the three, which he occupied 124 hectares next to the small town of Jasenovac, In the factory ovens brick, Brickyard, inserted in the complex of the field, they came corpses incinerated. Prison number four it was located in the town of Jasenovac in a tannery, Kožara. In the village of Uštice there was camp five, Reserved exclusively to Roma. Installation six, built around Serbian villages of Mlaka and Jablanac west of Jasenovac, held exclusively women and children up to the age of fourteen. The prison seven had been placed in the old Austro-Hungarian fortress of Stara Gradiška. Field eight, in Donja Gradina exactly opposite to the field 3 across the Sava River, it was a fence of 125 hectares mainly used for mass eliminations.

In those installations and other minor ones, From the 1941 al 1945 they were killed about a million human beings: forty-five thousand of them were women and children. The barbarism of the camp left them astonished German allies, in the absence of advanced technical equipment, the Ustasha handled the killings with hand tools. The weapon mainly employed it was called Ustasha kama and it was a half moon shaped blade, sharpened on both sides, tied to the wrist with a leather bracelet. It allowed him to slash tirelessly without backlash in hand.

Field 8, Donja Gradina RS.
The green waves under the trees are mass graves.

This place is unknown to most of the European public. Like they were able to hide this terrible reality?

Croatia,Jasenovac, Field 3.
The rounded shape indicates where the brick factory was located,
Brickyard, in whose ovens they incinerated the bodies of prisoners.

Convenience politics and prudence towards the Vatican: Jasenovac had been directed by a Catholic friar, Miroslav Filipović Majstorović, nicknamed From Satan. During the his war crimes trial, the friar had admitted to being personally responsible for the deaths of at least forty thousand beings humans. Another religious followed the direction of the camp. at least 120 Franciscan friars had engaged in persecution of the Serbs. The Vatican had every interest in spreading a rent veil over the existence of that tragic place. This ignored tragedy he had allowed Pope John Paul II to beatify the primate Croatian since then, Alojs Stepinac, the one who had blessed the Ustasian regime of Ante Pavelić and ignored little violence Christian of his subordinates, as we read in the extraordinary book by Marco Aurelio Rivelli: The Archbishop of the Genocide.

Tito too he had wanted to stifle rancor to favor the unification of the Yugoslavia after the war and imposed oblivion on this painful one page of their history. Perhaps improvised decision, not having allowed catharsis between Croats and Serbs will cause other tragedies after his death.

Field 8, Donja Gradina,
the vessels used to transform prisoners into soap.

in 2011, as a member of the Jasenovac Field International Commission, I visited the camp 3 and Jasenovac, in Croatia, and I stayed amazed and outraged by the beauty of the place, it looked like a tennis court golf. All traces of the life of the prisoners were deleted. Next to the ponds full of reeds and wild flowers some rounded and circular shapes, covered with grass, indicate the place where the brick factory stood, Brickyard, in whose ovens hundreds of bodies had been cremated. No sign of the barracks, nothing that remembers life, the job, the punishments, the suffering of the victims of the fascist regime of Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha. Just vast fields of swaying grass, a clean train with the HDZ plate on one side, a huge, heavy monument. Nothing else!

Field 8 and Donja Gradina. The large marble slab
draw the map of the field,
the squares match
to mass graves.

On the other part of the Sava river the field 8 remained in the territory of the Republic of Srpska. Here, too, there are only expanses of floating grass and a huge marble slab where the map of the place is engraved. The drawing shows many squares arranged in a U shape, with the curved part facing the Sava River, are the mass graves. About seven hundred thousand bodies, men women and children lie together, united without barrier of race or religion. Walking along the paths, the visitors see under the trees waves of green grass covering the rest of these forgotten victims: are the mass graves. To this view rises an enormous sense of rebellion and anger towards those who could committing such crimes unpunished and likely to repeat, because he believes he has the right. These inhabitants of the waves greens await justice.

In Jerusalem along the Way of the Cross she was placed in 2019 a marble plaque with a Latin inscription in memory of the visit in 1937 of Beato Aloys Stepinac, Cardinal Archbishop of Zagreb and Martyr. It is not ironic?

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