On the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of the Jasenovac concentration and death camp system, the Republic of Serbia and the Republika Srpska decided to build a memorial center on the border with Croatia, in the area of Donje Gradina at the confluence of the Una and Sava rivers, opposite the central Jasenovac camp, that big flower, masterpiece - works by Bogdan Bogdanović, in my opinion the most moving monument in the world. Aleksandar Vučić said that it "should be an all-Serbian shrine in which we would invest a lot of money", stressing that "the Serbian people should not be ashamed of their victims". Of course you shouldn't, but I'm ashamed that the president of Serbia is using street language on that occasion, because "investing a lot of money" is not a phrase worthy of remembering terrible crimes. I am convinced that no one else in Serbia would boast that they will spend "a lot of money" to commemorate their parent or ancestor.
I have many rights to express my opinion on this occasion. I am one of the few living witnesses who remember the concentration camps, because I was in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. And in Jasenovac, my uncle Aleksandar Šomlo, my mother's youngest brother, and his family were killed. I only vaguely remember Šanji, as we called him, because he lived in Croatia. They arrested him together with his wife and two small children. He was one of those 147 Jasenovac camp inmates who organized a breakout from the camp on April 22, 1945. Only 11 of them survived, he was not among them. His wife and children were already dead. Shanji was thirty-eight years old at the time.
I am personally connected with that cursed Jasenov, but I will not participate in the bidding with the number of victims. Shameful games about counting victims are not only our specialty, they are also auctioned in Poland, the Netherlands or Germany itself. Every man killed, old woman or old man, girl, young man or baby, every violent death is equally horrible. There is no unit of measure for horror.
Often asked what I thought about the memorial centers dedicated to the victims of Nazism, I answered that, of course, I was interested in what was being done, but that they were not being built because of me, because even without those markers I know what happened. Aleksandar Vučić and Milorad Dodik decided that Serbia and Republika Srpska would build an "all-Serbian shrine" in Gradina, which would indirectly honor my uncle and his family, even though they were not Serbs. Thank them for that, regardless of what I otherwise think of them.
For now, it is only about the decision, about the promised "big money". I just hope that it won't come at the expense of the planned memorial centers at the Old Fairground, where my mom was dragged to her death, and the Cannon sheds, where my dad was taken to the execution ground. A law was also passed on the construction of those two centers in Belgrade, the only problem is that months, now even years, pass, that the law has already been broken, because it predicted exact dates for certain stages that have passed, but nothing has been done. I already wrote about it.
photo: Rade Prelić / Tanjug...M. Dodik and A. Vučić
WHEN TWO PLUS SIX EQUAL ZERO
Memorial centers have been built and are being built all over Europe, there are many places where mass crimes were committed. I think that when talking to new generations about mass crimes, one should not exaggerate, because any exaggeration can easily become counterproductive. But it is important to explain why memorial centers are needed in addition to museums, galleries and monuments. Two classes at the end of the school year in the third grade of high schools and gymnasiums dedicated to the Second World War in Serbia is practically nothing. In the meantime, even in Germany, which we praise for doing a lot when it comes to mentioning its own crimes, the number of classes devoted to that dark period of German history is decreasing. In Bavaria, for example, only 6 school hours are provided. Someone will say that it is three times more than in Serbia, and I say that in this case 2 plus 6 equals zero.
In Germany, there used to be an obligation for students to visit a memorial center at the site of the former Nazi concentration camps at least once during school, which was financed by the state. It turned out to be very convenient that the covid 19 pandemic interrupted that practice, which, in all probability, will not be introduced again, because there are no longer financial resources for it. At their own expense, of course, some teachers will take students to a memorial center. I saw two such groups in Buchenwald a month ago.
We know insufficiently about the situation in our country and the immediate environment, and almost nothing about the numerous memorial centers that are not popular, and I guess I am allowed to say, among other things, because they are not dedicated to Jewish victims, which Israel and Jewish networks take care of. not to say the Jewish lobby. I guess everyone alive knows about the largest labor camp and death camp in history - Auschwitz in Poland. However, who outside of Poland has heard of the memorial center in Katyn Forest, the largest monument to Polish victims, which was erected in Russia near Smolensk?
It is known that on the orders of the Politburo and Stalin himself, around 1940 Polish officers, doctors, professors, engineers and artists were killed in the spring of 22.000. In 1943, the Nazi army encountered a mass grave on its conquest campaign, Goebbels smelled the possibility of a propaganda coup, ordered the corpses to be exhumed and called on the public to learn about the "Bolshevik crimes". At first it seemed that he threw a boomerang: the Soviet side replied that it was a lie, that the Poles were actually killed by the Germans in the Katyn Forest and that they just wanted to attribute their own crime to the Russians. Acquainted with the atrocities in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau, the world trusted its ally Moscow. When the war ended, it was kept quiet for a while. Moscow was uncomfortable, and so was the Communist Party of Poland. It was not until the time of Gorbachev and Yeltsin that documents from the archives about the Soviet attempt to liquidate the Polish elite were published. Vladimir Putin invited the then Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and together they paid their respects to the dead in the dignified Memorial Center.
On April 2010, XNUMX, the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, despite the bad weather, insisted that his plane land in Smolensk, because he wanted to pay tribute to the victims in the Katyn Forest at the beginning of his official visit to Russia. The plane crashed, killing President Kaczynski, several members of the government, nine generals, union representatives, the president of the bar association and some other representatives of the new Polish elite.
A certain mystery still surrounds that Memorial Center in Katyn Forest. I easily found photos, but no information about who manages it, who bears the financial costs, whether it is visited by organized groups, whether individuals, tourists can do so, whether it contains an archive, detailed information about the victims, yes are scientific investigations of this and similar crimes carried out there. It seems as if the place is arranged only for state visits. It is certainly strange that for Poles the most important Memorial Center, the center of mourning for the loss of the national elite, is not easily accessible to the descendants of the people executed there and to all other interested parties, because it is located in a foreign country that they do not like.
TWO IN ONE
The Buchenwald Memorial Center near Weimar is also struggling with a serious, albeit different problem. After conquering the eastern part of Germany, the Soviet military authorities opened 1945 special camps and 10 special prisons for the Nazis at the beginning of the summer of 3. The locations of newly liberated concentration camps were quickly taken over, the largest was in Sachsenhausen, through which 60.000 prisoners passed. Buchenwald, "my" Buchenwald, received during the first five years of the Soviet occupation 28.000 prisoners, of whom 7000 died, mainly from hunger and disease. The percentage of mortality was very high, especially since it was exclusively about the male population between the ages of 13 and 60 and it was not directly killed.
Over 266.000 prisoners passed through the SS camp in the same place, and 38.049 of them died or were killed. At first glance, the percentage is much smaller, but the comparison is impossible, because Buchenwald sent the inmates to Auschwitz for the purpose of mass killing.
The Soviet authorities imprisoned mostly local Nazi officials, but also young people and some people based on denunciation. Major war criminals were not imprisoned in such camps, they were tried, many were sentenced to death, and even more were sent to Siberia. The camp under Soviet administration in Buchenwald was dissolved in 1950, after the communist German Democratic Republic was founded on October 7, 1949 in the former Soviet occupation zone.
The new East German authorities did not want to talk about those camps, especially not to create some cult of regret for the "victims" of the Soviet government. The simplest thing was to be silent. That is why the Buchenwald Memorial Center was founded, and I visited it as a translator for the then Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marko Nikezić. A series of monuments were erected in the socialist realist style, a tall bell tower, in front of it an arena for lectures and performances, the emphasis was placed on honoring anti-fascist fighters, much less on innocent victims. Of course, not a single word was said about the former existence of a Soviet camp for Nazis in the same place.
This attitude towards historical truth had to change after the unification of the West and East German states, in other words, since the West swallowed up the East Germany. The facts should have been recognized and marked, but it was necessary to avoid equating the inmates of those two camps, the perceptions of these two very different types of prisoners. The commotion of the Soviet military authorities, the simple takeover of the existing barracks and the infrastructure of the Nazi camps, became a problem for the new administration of the Buchenwald Memorial Center. A special memorial center was thus built on the slope of the Ettersberg hill, a new, gray-colored building with 300 m² of exhibition space next to the mass grave where the Soviet authorities buried their victims, which is marked by a series of wooden crosses. The other day, on September 18, around fifty interested people, still living prisoners and their descendants, gathered on the spot near those crosses, to remember the establishment and dissolution of that Soviet camp.
The administration of the Buchenwald Memorial Center regularly reminds of its existence. But there is little interest, contemporaries mostly consider it the "Soviet past".
MEMORY AND POLITICS
Even the largest and most famous memorial center, Yad Vashem, founded in 1953, is not without its problems. The crisis that arose around the appointment of a new director, which also meant a new, modernized program, had just been overcome. After the retirement of the long-time director Avner Shalev, the center was left without an executive management, and a financial disaster threatened, as visitors and income were absent due to the pandemic. The recent government of Benjamin Netanyahu appointed as the new director the famous Jewish nationalist Efi Eitam, who said that the Arabs (Palestinians) are "a cancer on the body of our nation", that the former leader of the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat, should have been kidnapped and hanged like Eichmann. His program would mean a deviation from the previous goals of the memorial center, turning scientific historical work into nationalist propaganda. After a large protest by the Israeli and international public, the decision was changed, the new government appointed a diplomat, the recent Consul General of Israel in New York Dani Dayan, a relative of the famous war hero Moshe Dayan, to head Yad Vashem. He says that the more time we move away from the Holocaust, the more important the center's work becomes.
Jews normally avoid the word Holocaust - holos means "all", "the whole", a Caustos "burned out". The ancient Greeks offered sacrifices to the gods by burning ritually killed animals for this purpose, and this does not correspond to the Jewish understanding of mass murder, because the sacrifice to the gods has some, even imaginary, purpose. They prefer to use the word shoah, which originally in ancient Hebrew means a sudden, all-destroying storm, in the latter usage it simply means disaster. I am in favor of the word shoah, because the holocaust has long been used in everyday speech for all possible events.
The role of the new director of Yad Vashem is certainly decisive for the appointment of new "righteous among the nations", a title with certain benefits that Israel grants to individuals who risked their own life and safety to save at least one Jew. So far, 27.921 people have been declared righteous, 139 from Serbia. Among the righteous, there are 90 people of the Islamic religion, and it was not until 1979 that an Arab, Dr. Mohamed Helmi, was posthumously honored for the first time, who hid in his apartment in Berlin, and later in a cottage , a four-member Jewish family, which was especially brave for him as a "non-Aryan". And because of those subsequently ascertained cases of people who deserved the recognition of the "righteous", the personality of the director of Yad Vashem is important.
Yad Vashem, with its full name "Yad Vashem, International Memorial Center for the Shoah", has, among other things, a central file on several million victims, a central archive, the largest specialized library and video library, with an adequate number of expert associates. There is also information about my parents, other murdered relatives, and they asked me, like all the survivors, for a description of my suffering.
Before the pandemic, Yad Vashem had more than a million visitors a year. Statesmen visiting Israel express their mail in the central hall with a dome, which is normally accessible to all visitors. In the literal translation, "jad vasem" means "name hand". Ruka can also be understood as a tribe, a people. The origin of the terms is interesting, but not really that important when you know what Yad Vashem stands for.
photo: marija jankovićAND WHAT ABOUT THE MEMORIAL CENTER "IN YOUR BACKYARD": The old fairground...
MESSAGE HERE AND NOW
I cited these examples to console myself and all of us: the future memorial centers at the Old Fairgrounds, Topovsko šupe or at the confluence of the Una and Sava will not be the only such institutions that will have to overcome many obstacles and find answers to numerous questions, if they ever are were built. Let me remind you: from the fall of 1941 to May 1942, Jewish children, women, and the elderly were suffocated little by little in soulless trucks, then a concentration camp was organized in the same place, from where most Serbs were assigned to labor camps or sent to die in Jasenovac. Auschwitz and other camps on the soil of Germany and occupied Poland.
After the war, our artists, painters, sculptors, writers moved into the pavilions, masterpieces were created there, literary evenings and theater performances were held, modern Serbian art was born. The future memorial center should show all that, devise a wise program, organize scientific work, architectural interventions should not change the external appearance of the pavilions that have been engraved in the memory. I am convinced that there will be no financial problems, funds will flow from Germany, America, Israel, and if everything is presented in the right way, surely also from domestic sponsors. As we have already said, Serbia has passed a special law, the greatest quality of which, for now, is that all commercial construction is prohibited in that area, although there would be ideal construction land on the river bank in the city center.
photo: marija janković...and Cannon sheds in Belgrade
I am personally connected to the past of that place. I already wrote about this, but I have to repeat it in this context: even though my mother was taken to her death from one of those pavilions, I visited artist friends in their studios at the Old Fairgrounds. This is exactly why I don't need any memorial center. It's not for me. And do my and all our grandchildren and great-grandchildren need it? I don't know. They have to decide that.
I have a message for them. I repeat it and will repeat it persistently, as loud as I can as long as my words are heard or published somewhere: Respect the past, but give all your energy, help and love to those who are suffering today. Today. This moment. Children who are born to die of hunger within six months. To their mothers and fathers. To people running away from somewhere, anywhere, regardless of why. Because otherwise they would be killed? Because they're just looking for a better country? Do not analyze, do not philosophize that it cannot be compared to the agonies of the past. For me, a child who drowns in the Aegean sea holding his mother's hand is the same as a child who entered the gas chamber holding his mother's hand.
Therefore, a special Serbian shrine will be built in Donja Gradina. He doesn't care that I'm excluded because, as Oskar Davičo sings, "I'm not from ić, from Kolenović". I feel like the Hungarian poet Endre Adi said about himself in his verses:
Not even an ancestor, nor is the descendant late
Not even a relative, nor a loud acquaintance
I am nobody's business,
I am nobody's business.
However, he succumbed, the last stanza reads:
That's why the torture and the song: diseases,
I would like someone to love me,
To be someone's,
I will be somebody's.
