Memorial Park Institution "Kragujevac October" appealed to all fellow citizens that, in the spirit Christmas, a holiday of peace, togetherness and respect, show responsibility towards nature and the memorial area in Šumarice.
"In the run-up to Christmas Day, we ask citizens to refrain from cutting down young oak trees and to use only smaller branches of adult trees for the Christmas tree, in order to save our Memorial Park from unplanned and inappropriate cutting and to preserve its natural appearance," states the appeal of the "Kragujevac Oktober" Memorial Park Institution.
They remind that the "Kragujevac Oktobar" Memorial Park Memorial Complex is a place of lasting memory for the victims of the shooting on October 21, 1941, a place of silence, respect and admonition.
How is it Serbia went so far that an appeal is needed not to cut down the trees in the memorial park, at the place where the students were shot, so many people, of whom, what is particularly important to many, the vast majority are Serbs, historians Dubravka Stojanović and Srđan Milošević explain for "Vreme".
A society with lost values
Stojanović says that such a situation does not surprise her at all.
"In this country, history has been systematically revised for more than 40 years of the Second World War", says Stojanović.
He states that it started in literature, then the theater, then in the media and historiography, and was eventually formalized by laws and judicial rehabilitation of collaborators.
"It was necessary for so many decades after the end of the war to defeat the victorious partisans and to do everything possible to 'wash the biographies' of the defeated parties. So already in Milosevic's history textbooks, the Kragujevac massacre was reduced to only one paragraph, and after Milosevic's fall, in the textbooks published in 2002, only one sentence was found about that event. In both cases, it was only written that the massacre was carried out by the Germans, without mentioning responsibilities of Nedić's government and Ljotić's detachments", says Stojanović.
Don't send the bread tomorrow
He assesses that now the situation is somewhat better, but that it is known that the students are taken to Šumarice less and less, that there are no more excursions, that no essays are written on the subject, and that "Bloody Fairy Tales" is included in a few textbooks.
"When you deal so thoroughly with distorting the past and concealing its parts that do not correspond to the current political moment, and even when it comes to the most tragic events such as the shooting in Kragujevac, you get this result - a completely numb and value-lost society," concludes Stojanović.
No authentic compassion
Srđan Milošević points out that a large number of Roma died in Šumarice, as well as a number of citizens of other ethnic groups.
He says that the answer to the question of how Serbia got to the point where it has to appeal not to cut down the trees in the memorial park is "complex and goes much more into social anthropology or social psychology."
He notes that, given that such an appeal was made, it is obviously a matter of practice that exists, so such a warning followed.
"In ancient Rome, Cicero knew how to say: in the most corrupt state - the most laws. This is a topic that can be varied in different ways. I think, namely, that the scale of conspicuous and emphasized manifestation of certain phenomena, that flood of tradition, identity, alleged dedication to the people and their history an indication that all of this is not actually present in the way in which he truly spontaneously lives in society. If it is not clear to someone, self-evident, if they do not spontaneously think in such a way that a memorial park dedicated to the victims cannot be devastated for the needs of a national custom, then this is an indicator of lack of concern for the victims themselves," says Milošević.
He adds that the question is how much the tradition of Christmas Eve is really "lived", "if it is acceptable for you to simply go to a place of remembrance of a huge tragedy and cut down a tree, break off the branches".
"I don't know how pleasing it is to God. Going back to the victims, it seems that in this society they have a mostly utilitarian role, without authentic compassion. For example, to be used on another occasion when some stereotypical representations need to be argued - for example, about some kind of primal hostility between Serbia and The snow, especially Germany, in this case. "These are irrelevant trivia that have been following us for at least three decades," Milošević concludes.
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