Monument to the victims of genocide at Sava river bank

Introduction

There is barely a hint nowadays that the buildings across from the most popular shopping mall in downtown Belgrade once housed the biggest fascist concentration camp in Serbia. Only the attentive observer will notice the derelict tower on the banks of the Sava with rundown modernist pavilions clustered around it. The pavilions are part of the former trade fair grounds (Sajmište). These days you can play soccer there, go out to eat at a restaurant, or even buy a car. The pavilion that once served as a camp hospital can now be rented out for various festivities. The squat barracks at one time provided a home for the city’s poor. Volunteer brigades moved into the abandoned buildings immediately after World War II, and later on, homeless people and artists moved in. Initiatives to establish a memorial site and exhibition like the kind set up in 1969 in Banjica, the other big camp in Belgrade, have all been fruitless. How can it be that all attempts to create an appropriate place of collective memory at this Holocaust site that was also the site of brutal repression against political prisoners and civilians from the whole of Yugoslavia have failed?

Historical context

With the invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, the territory of Yugoslavia was divided up between the fascist allies of Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. The site of the Belgrade international trade fair (Sajmište), opened just a few years earlier, was turned into a “Jew camp” by the German Gestapo, and in 1942, its inmates were murdered in mobile gas vans. Hence, Serbia was one of the first occupied countries where the so-called “final solution” was implemented.¹ The occupation authorities subsequently repurposed the empty pavilions into “holding camps” (Anhaltelager) for detaining members of the antifascist resistance along with civilians. Prisoners came from Serbia, from insurgent areas of the Independent State of Croatia, and finally from all of Southeastern Europe, the majority of which were later deported from Sajmište to Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and labor camps in Norway and Greece. The largest group of prisoners was made up of civilians from Bosnia who were captured during the German Kozara offensive against partisans in the fascist Independent State of Croatia.²

The following will show how state policies of remembrance and evermore powerful social groups have since dealt with the complex legacy of the Sajmište camp. Conflicting interests become evident in interpreting the history of the camp, effectively preventing any institutionalized memorial at the site.³ This text will serve as an overview of the changes in the official policies of remembrance in Yugoslavia and Serbia in terms of their relationship to the two most important ideological reference systems used in interpreting World War II: the narrative of antifascism and the narrative of the Holocaust. These changes took place in several stages. The decades after liberation, up until 1980, were marked by the unchallenged hegemony of the antifascist resistance as the reference point of commemoration. As of 1980, a new paradigm began to establish itself. It centered on the victims of genocide and was later instrumentalised for propaganda purposes with the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars; particularly, in the conflict with Croatia. From 2000 on, a new interpretation of World War II was institutionalized in Serbia. The establishment of a memorial site at the former Sajmište camp now seems close at hand.

World War II in the culture of memory of Yugoslavia

Socialist antifascism, which postulates “brotherhood and unity,” served as the foundation of the socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after liberation from the Nazis. The internationalist partisan movement’s “war of national liberation” against fascist occupiers was part of the founding narrative. Their struggle included resistance to those who collaborated with the Germans – the occupiers having set up fascist, or at the very least, anticommunist governments in all areas of Yugoslavia after the April War of 1941. In Serbia, it was the puppet regime of Prime Minister Milan Nedić, which was put into power by the Germans. Also fighting against the insurgent partisans were the monarchist Četnik movement led by Dragoljub Mihailović, which envisioned a Greater Serbia within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the Zbor fascist movement led by Dimitrije Ljotić. The Serbian areas Bačka and Banat located north of the Danube were divided between Germany and Hungary and policed by local ethnic Hungarian and German collaborators. The Srem region situated between the Danube and Sava fell to the Independent State of Croatia that was founded during occupation; and in this instance, Mussolini and Hitler had put the local fascist Ustaša movement directly in power, with Ante Pavelić as head of state.

The concept of antifascism in the postwar decades was inextricably linked to the experience of having fought together for the emancipatory project of a socialist Yugoslavia of brother nations. The socialist culture of remembrance was focused on the narrative of the combined resistance of the exploited class that neither ethnic nor religious differences could undermine. Until the late 1970s, Yugoslavia’s official policy of remembrance made reference neither to the Holocaust nor to the genocide of Roma and Serbs at Ustaša camps like Jasenovac, Croatia. The official commemorative ceremonies organized by SUBNOR, the Yugoslav veterans association, were always kept ethnically neutral. Only in exceptional cases were the number and identity of victims indicated on commemorative plaques.

The years of reconstruction in Belgrade after World War II were marked by a sense of optimism that was diametrically opposed to the horrors of the camps. Given its ideal location on the banks of the Sava right across from Old Town, the building contractors and volunteer youth brigades moved into the former camp grounds at Sajmišteand used it as their headquarters for erecting New Belgrade. The ambitious, though never fully realized, objectives of city planners from the 1960s and 1970s for the new city center (complete with a river promenade, museums, cinemas, and even an opera house), suggest that the memory of the horrors of war had receded into the distant past for the majority of the city’s population. Despite the energetic initiatives of former political prisoners in the veterans’ association which they presented to the Belgrade City Council in 1959, there was no plaque or monument identifying the site of the former Sajmište camp.⁴ The idea and hope of transcending the horrors of the past through art and culture is evident in the City Council resolution of 1951. When the building contractors moved out, artists were allowed to move into the fair pavilions, however poorly suited these facilities were for living and working in.⁵ Some of the artists, such as Olga Jevrić, made the unspeakable suffering of prisoners and the destruction and annihilation of the twentieth century the central theme of their work, thus helping in their own way to preserve the memory of this location.⁶ And yet, not until 1974 did an unknown hand place a commemorative plaque on one of the buildings.⁷ The plaque mentions the official figure of 40,000 victims, a figure arrived at by the State Commission for Investigating the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Accomplices (dissolved in 1948), but no further information is given about the reason for their murders. The perpetrators, on the other hand – the German Gestapo and their Yugoslav collaborators – are clearly identified. Neither the local Jewish community nor the former political prisoners section of the veterans’ association were asked to assist in creating the plaque.⁸

Discontinuities in the interpretation of the war of national liberation

New initiatives led to the declassification of documents at the State Commission for Investigating the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Accomplices, which had been kept under wraps for 30 years. A large-scale Yugoslavian research project entitled, “Yugoslavs in fascist prisons, detention centers and concentration camps, and the resistance movements of other countries in the Second World War” was launched in 1982. The project included research by historian Milan Koljanin, who worked with former prisoners and used the newly available documents to reconstruct the complicated history of the camp and to identify the various victim groups and transports. In his monograph The German Camp at the Belgrade Trade Fair Grounds, 1941–1944, he adjusted the previous number of estimated victims, arriving at a lower figure. Instead of 40,000, Koljanin estimated that the number of victims was somewhere in the range of 10,000.

A revived interest in the camps gave new impetus to the former prisoners, organized in the veterans’ association, who demanded that the Sajmištecamp be commemorated in a dignified way. Their commitment was reinforced by their aim to convey to younger generations the revolutionary antifascist tradition and oppose “the renascent [nationalist] movements of the counterrevolution,” as documented in a number of the association’s resolutions.⁹ The commemorative ceremonies held on 9 May, Victory Day over Fascism, in conjunction with the new memorial plaque in 1984 were, in retrospect, the last public manifestations of a communist-antifascist culture of remembrance. In 1987, the trade fair grounds were finally listed as a historical monument by the City of Belgrade, and a resolution was passed to create a clearly visible monument.¹⁰ The Sajmišteconcentration camp was to be turned into a memorial site of national importance like the one in Jajinci.¹¹ It took until 1995, however, for the massive bronze sculpture to finally be unveiled – and under completely different auspices.

A radical reinterpretation of the war of national liberation began to emerge in the 1980s among anticommunist intellectuals throughout Yugoslavia. A new concept of antifascism was taking shape among opposition forces in Serbia, one that was no longer exclusively linked to the activities of communist partisans. The role of Nazi collaborators was being reevaluated. The fight against communist partisans by parts of the Četnik movement on the side of the German occupying forces were now seen as truly “antifascist and patriotic” and no longer deemed “treasonous,” and the war crimes of Četniks against Bosnian Muslims were suddenly relativized. The decoupling of antifascism from communism paved the way, on a rhetorical level, for the nationalist revision of this historical period and was a boon to propagandists in the run-up to the Yugoslavian civil war of the 1990s.¹²

The discontinuities in the narrative of a collective antifascist struggle caused analogous discontinuities in the perception of the collective victims of fascism. The 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences in which the Serbian people are described as victims of Tito’s policies and the target of permanent genocide in Kosovo, fostered the creation of a myth of Serbian victimhood and its instrumentalisation by nationalist intellectuals. During these years, Yugoslav historians who were writing about World War II began to use the word “genocide” alongside such terms as “crimes” and “massacre”.¹³ Two years earlier, an increasingly radical-nationalist committee was founded at the Serbian Academy of Sciences with the aim of “researching the genocide against the Serbian and other peoples of Yugoslavia.”

In 1992, at the instigation of the same committee and with the support of the government in Belgrade, the decision was made to establish the Museum of the Victims of Genocide at the site of the Sajmištecamp. Museum representatives referred to it as a “Serbian Yad Vashem.” The fact that the camp set up and run by German occupation authorities was located on the opposite bank of the Sava, and hence on the territory of what was then the Independent State of Croatia, seemed proof enough for the museum’s founders that the Sajmište camp, like the Jasenovac and Jadovno camps, was a place of genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma by Croatian Ustaša fascists. This version also had the advantage of exonerating the Serbian collaborators of their shared responsibility for the Holocaust perpetrated against the inmates of the Sajmište concentration camp. The urgency of such a museum must be viewed against the efforts of Croatian nationalist historians and intellectuals to relativize, for their part, the genocide against the Serbs in World War II. Advocates of this version of history, laying the blame for the suffering of Serbs and Jews primarily at the feet of (Catholic) Croatians, found support in the ranks of the Serbian Orthodox church as well as the Society for Serbian-Jewish friendship.¹⁴
The museum was never opened at the site, but is officially housed at the Twenty-First of October Museum in Kragujevac, dedicated to the victims of reprisals carried out by the German Wehrmacht. Nonetheless, Sajmište became a public symbol for the suffering of Serbs in Croatia. In 1995, the aforementioned monumental sculpture, chosen in 1987 and dedicated to all victims of genocide, was erected on the river promenade. The fact that just a few days after the monument’s unveiling, on 1 May the Croatian military launched operation “Bljesak” to reconquer Slavonia (and with it Jasenovac, triggering the expulsion of Croatian Serbs), underscores the symbolic power and political explosiveness of this place of memory. The inscription¹⁵ on the bronze plaque, presumably a compromise between the former prisoners section of the veterans’ association and the director of the Museum of the Victims of Genocide Milan Bulajić, is exemplary for the selective use of history and for the conflicts and contradictions between victim groups. The text introduces a notion of “Serbs, Jews and Roma” still common today, in which the victims of the Holocaust are not distinguished from the victims of other genocides. The monument also commemorates victims who were not murdered at the Sajmište camp, but on Croatian or Hungarian-controlled territory. Croatian Ustaša and Hungarian occupiers thus became a focus of attention as perpetrators. Unlike the inscription on the plaque from 1974, Sajmište is not described as a German or Gestapo camp, but as a Nazi one. And there is no longer any talk of “collaborators,” “traitors” or “accomplices of the occupiers.”

The institutionalization of the new narrative after 2000

The last decade has seen the institutionalization of Serbian-Orthodox and nationalist-anticommunist historical revisionism. The overthrow of Milošević in October 2000 was followed by the social normalization of national and clerical values. New books were printed for history classes, relativizing the role of Serbian collaborators and Četniks in Nazi crimes,¹⁶ and veterans of the Četnik movement were rehabilitated, being given the same legal status as communist partisans.¹⁷ A break in its state policy of remembrance came with Serbia’s membership in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In recognition of it becoming a member of this international organization, in 2012, the Serbian Institute for Modern History organized the first major exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia with the support of various ministries and international institutions. The significance of this exhibit, which only ran for two months at the Museum of Yugoslavian History, can hardly be overestimated, as it was the first time the Jewish Holocaust was presented here as a singular crime, incomparable to other genocides. And yet problems of presenting history in a selective or suggestive manner were still evident. Thus, for example, the shared responsibility of the Serbian police and administrative apparatus for the Holocaust in Serbia was swept under the carpet, and the Jews were categorically described as the dominant economic force in society.¹⁸ This, notwithstanding Serbia’s joining the international alliance for Holocaust education and remembrance, marks the start of Serbia’s official policy of remembrance being integrated into the dominant Western narrative, focusing not on the antifascist resistance, but on the singularity of the Holocaust.

The struggle for the Sajmište memorial

The heated discourse about the Serbian victims of genocide has lost much of its explosiveness since the downfall of Milošević in 2000, especially considering that large parts of institutionalized historiography have now begun to identify the ethnicity of the victims. At the same time, the symbolic location of this struggle for recognition of Serbian victims, the Sajmište camp, has since become more attractive to investors and city planners. The emerging commercialization of the site in the late 1990s urged representatives of various social groups to formulate proposals for a memorial complex. In recent years, there have been several waves of initiatives at various levels of the city administration introducing concrete measures to resolve the legal and administrative hurdles to construction and renovation at the site. A specialist committee, convened by the city mayor, drafted a paper in 2013 on the proposed thematic and programmatic concept of the memorial site. With the change of government in Serbia, the program commission was disbanded and then newly-formed in 2014 under the leadership of Jovan Ćulibrk, a clergyman and member of the Jasenovac Committee of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Discussions about the memorial site have yielded a variety of different ideas, but each model shares the idea of an educational mission, including exhibitions, a library, a documentation center and seminar rooms. Strong differences of opinion exist with regard to which institution the “Sajmište Memorial Center” should be subordinate to. The concept of a non-state-run “Museum of Tolerance,” which the commercial broadcaster b92 and its former director Veran Matić propagated in the media for years (even introducing a logo in 2010 and an architectural design by Daniel Libeskind), has meanwhile fallen by the wayside. The memorial site will in all likelihood be founded at the ministerial level, giving reason to believe that the museum will be managed by the Museum of the Victims of Genocide, now in its twentieth year of existence. Another open question is what role the Jewish community will be allowed to play in the organizational concept. A major point of contention is whether the Jewish community can directly access funds from the restitution of Jewish property, should the law of restitution be passed. The current president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Serbia, Ruben Fuchs, has demanded that a Holocaust museum be set up at the site in its own separate building.

Whatever narratives the future memorial site will convey, the ideological reference system of remembrance predominant nowadays, which insists on representations of the ethnic, religious, national, sexual, etc. individuality of victims, will undoubtedly expose the difficult relationship between a majority in Serbian society and the minorities of Roma and Jews. It is a relationship marked by instrumentalisation at the political level and marginalization at the social level. The Roma, socially marginalized both now and then, and largely ignored by historians, have the greatest difficulty fighting for the representation of their victimhood. Though the inclusive paradigm of the Serbian discourse of remembrance might pretend that “all victims of genocide” are equal, the remembrance of their “own” victims clearly has priority. An approach to history that not only duly commemorates victims, but also takes the perpetrators into account as well as the antifascist resistance, while at the same time questioning the social circumstances that led to fascist crimes in the first place, remains the task of critical forces in society and independent research. 

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory

​“The action started early morning, like the previous day at Jatagan mala, at Čukarica and Žarkovo. Around four o’clock, the German army surrounded the entire area, after which the gendarmes and policemen went from house to house and took away the men, saying that they are going to a hearing at the local gendarmerie station after which they would shortly return home, or would be taken to Ada for felling trees. Although they found the majority asleep, some had already known they would be taken away, probably because news about the raids carried out the previous day in neighbouring areas had spread over Marinkova bara too. In those chaotic moments, some tried to hide under the bed or at a neighbour’s, but they too were found or snitched on and taken away by force.”

There is an alarming void in historiography when it comes to dealing with the Second World War: the Roma genocide. Apart from a few exceptional efforts and writings that mostly come from the Roma community, the general scientific community is united by a broad ignorance towards the suffering of the Roma during the Holocaust and Serbia in this regard makes no difference.

This problem and the history of the genocide against Roma in Serbia during World War II will be discussed by Milovan Pisarri during the presentation of his study “The Suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust”, which will be held on 26th of November 2014 at 12 PM at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, 45 Kraljice Natalije street.

The study about the suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust was published by the Forum for Applied History Belgrade  in Serbian and English language as part of the project “School of Remembrance”.

The research and publication were kindly supported by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southeast Europe.

A pdf of the English version of the book is available at: http://www.starosajmiste.info/blog/wpcontent/uploads/The-Suffering-of-the-Roma-in-Serbia-during-the-Holocaust-e-book.pdf

The Serbian version is available at: http://www.starosajmiste.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/Stradanje-Roma-u-Srbiji-za-vreme-Holokausta-e-book.pdf

The author: Milovan Pisarri (1980) received his doctorate in history at the University of Venice in 2011. His research interests are the Holocaust, the genocide against Roma, anti-fascism and the issue of the civilian population under occupation. He publishes articles in international journals and regularly participates in scientific conferences in Serbia and abroad. He currently works as an independent historian.

On March 23th 2014, an international symposium on the Holocaust in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was held at

After the keynote speech by Walter Manoschek (Wien) the morning panel moderated by Ivo Goldstein (Ambassador of Croatia in France) was dealing with Nazi policy and local actors. Milan Koljanin (Institut of Contemporary History, Belgrade) contributed a speech on the Jewish community and Anti-Semitism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1918-1941, while Emil Kerenji (Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington DC) gave a lecture on the racial policy of Germanisation in Slovenia. Alexander Korb (University of Leicesters) presented about the Ustaša’s mass violence against the Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Croatia and Eli Tauber (Cultural Counselor of the Jewish community of Sarajevo) spoke about the rescue of Jews in Bosnia Herzegovina
In the afternoon panel moderated by Xavier Bougarel (CNRS, Marc Bloch Centre, Berlin) aspects of politics and culture of remembrance were discussed by Jovan Byford (The Open University, Milton Keynes), Natasa Jovičić (director of the  Memorial Museum of Jasenovac), Rena Jeremić Raedle (Staro Sajmiste Memorial project, Belgrade) and Alexandre Prstojevic (Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage).

http://www.memorialdelashoah.org

In recent years, the Serbian government has recognized the importance of raising awareness about the extermination of the Jews during Nazi occupation and in early 2012 organized the first temporary exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia 1941-1944. The history of the Roma genocide in Serbia during the Second World War, however, is still insufficiently studied and widely unknown. The lack of a culture of remembrance of these events, the neglect of the Roma genocide in historical research and its absence from the curricula of school education have lead to the falling into oblivion of these events in the public.
The only systematic scientific research on the victims and perpetrators of Roma genocide conducted in the last three decades in Serbia was focused on the genocide against Serbian and Roma population in the Jasenovac camp in Croatia. Today we are faced with the problem that even if there might exist the wish to inform and educate about persecution and suffering of the Roma in Serbia, there isn’t enough material available to work with. Still, one of the main reasons for the lack of information and education on the persecution of the Roma, lies in the fact that in Serbia prejudices and racism against the Roma are part of everyday life.

Our activities aim to raise awareness about how important it is to work on the historical facts, with regard to the continuity of discrimination against the Roma, which could in a particular situation result in a repeated genocide. More than half a century after the end of World War II, in many parts of Europe the Roma community is target of Antigypsyism, delegitimization, human rights violations and systematic discrimination. For example, violent deportations of Roma refugees from Germany to Serbia and Kosovo are organized regularly according to the readmission treaty. But there is also resistance – as for example the initiative “alle bleiben” which fights for the rights of the Roma and against deportations.

For the above reasons, the two-year project “School of Remembrance” is designed so that it collects information and produces knowledge at several levels. While one focus is on the historical research on the Roma genocide, their causes and mechanisms is, another part of the project deals with Antigypsyism and systematic discrimination against the Roma today and asks how we can fight it.

The project “School of Remembrance” is supported by three organizations from Serbia and Germany, the Women’s Space from Niš, the Forum for Applied History from Belgrade and the Roma Center Göttingen e.V. and made possible by the generous support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southeast Europe and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – IHRA.

On 1 April, after more than two months, the exhibition “The Holocaust in Serbia 1941-1944” was closed. It has been roughly ten days since, therefore, I find it is time to exchange our impressions and opinions on how the authors addressed the Holocaust in Serbia, and ascertained whether it was presented in an appropriate manner to the wider audience. Being a historian dealing with the issue and the editor of the blog “A visit to Staro sajmište”, I believe it is my responsibility to share my reflections with you here.

Exhibition view “Holocaust in Serbia. 1941-1944” at the Museum of Yugoslav History, January 27th  – April 1st 2012. Photo: MIJ

The exhibition was opened in the Museum of Yugoslav History, on 27, January 2012, on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it was sponsored by the Government of the Republic of Serbia. The opening of such an exhibition was of great significance for at least two reasons: firstly, as it is first exhibition of its kind, that is, the first exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia, and secondly, as it publicly signified the official Serbian participation in the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF, www.holocausttaskforce.org). Additionally, three hours before the exhibition opening, on 27. January,a commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust had been held on the Staro sajmište site. It was attended by the President of the Republic of Serbia, Boris Tadić, the Mayor of Belgrade, Dragan Đilas, the Federation of the Jewish Communities of Serbia representatives, ITF Chair, Karel De Beer, Israeli and the Netherlands’ ambassadors to Serbia, and many other officials.

The material used in the exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia, as well as the accompanying texts, were chosen by historians Momčilo Mitrović PhD, Aleksej Timofejev PhD, and Jelena Petaković MA, all from the Institute for Recent History of Serbia. The exhibit was set up by architect Ozarija Marković Lašić. As it was quoted in the press releases, besides the Government and various ministries, ten other institutions both from the country and abroad took part and contributed in the production of the exhibition. One of these institutions was also Yad Vashem, the world centre for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust.

Exhibition view “Holocaust in Serbia. 1941-1944”: posters shown at the “anti-Masonic” exhibition from 1941/42. Photo: MIJ

The space at disposal was divided into several separate rooms, displaying the most important questions in relation to the Holocaust in Serbia: the position of the Jewish community prior to the World War II, anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish measures proclaimed in October 1940, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the occupation by German forces and the imposing of the Nazi racial laws, the beginning of the persecutions, the extermination of Jews in Serbia under German occupation and the concentration camp Sajmište, the posters featured at the anti-Masonic exhibition from 1941/42, the extinction of Jews in other parts of Serbia at the time under the occupation of the German allies (in Bačka, under the Hungarian rule, in Srem under The Independent State of Croatia’s rule, and in a part of Kosovo, under Italian rule), the people of Jewish origin who had survived the Holocaust, Jewish participation in the war, and finally, the state of the existing Holocaust memorials. Taking a stroll through these rooms, thevisitor finds other equally important segments of the exhibition, although of a somewhat different character: documentaries chronicling the accounts of the survived and presenting the Holocaust in Serbia, huge photographs of those who suffered and died, camp cell reconstruction from the camps in Banjica and Crveni krst in Niš, the names of Righteous among the Nations in Serbia, etc.

The abundance of the material exhibited and a vast exhibition space, implied, or so it seemed to me, a long-term work spreading over months, as it is usually the case with all the events of such proportions: starting with the search for the adequate material in the institutions in the country and abroad, up until its copying, arranging, writing up accompanying texts and taking advice from other experts with the aim of obtaining feedback information on one’s work, the before-mentioned cooperation with more than fifty institutions, and of course, quoting authors who dealt with the issue of the Holocaust in Serbia the most.

Due to that, the realisation of the exhibition had not been an easy task, and this is something that should be acknowledged without hesitation. The lack of initiatives of this kind in the past must have presented a severe obstacle to the authors, and it that sense, a great responsibility they had to cope with as well, in the course of material selection and its presentation to the wider public. It is exactly this awareness of responsibility which makes a historian ask himself the following questions while creating and working on his project: What is my aim? What issues do I want to address? What is my contribution to the subject? What is the direction of further research? And most importantly: What are the effects of my work?

Of course these questions are of great significance when it comes to creating a work intended for the trained eye and the expert, professional audience. However, they should be of even greater importance in each phase of the work’s presentation to the wider audience, since it is actually then that the social responsibility of the historian is demonstrated. In fact, when the exhibition in question is of historical and educational character, a historian must know that the people who will be seeing, listening or reading the work, in the majority of cases, will be acquiring a certain knowledge of the segments of history presented to them through the material selected and the methodology of the exhibition’s author for the first time. Therefore, the author must always bear in mind the responsibility he holds: since a person who enters an exhibition space with no previous knowledge of the topic, will come out with a huge amount of information, most of it being exactly those the author had consciously chosen to pass over.

In the case of the exhibition on the Holocaust, the author has to be aware of the fact that among the visitors who do not have a wider knowledge of the issues such as the Jewish suffering in Serbia during the World War II, the majority will be precisely made up of high school students, that is, young people in their formative years, when their views and opinions are shaped.

The problem of selective memory

The fact that the exhibition on the Holocaust is of remarkable importance stands to reason. There is also no doubt about the fact that the Jewish municipalities’ representatives are pleased that finally, seventy years after the systematic destruction of their families, friends, and their communities, the Government of the country they live in, has eventually chosen to do something about it. Nevertheless, it is evident that the exhibition, at least in some of its aspects, has endeavoured to save the honour and face of the Serbia then and now.

Having said that, I would like to draw the attention to the problem the exhibition, despite its outstanding merit, still holds. After the laurels it won, the exhibition deserves some criticism.

The problem lies in the fact that the message it conveys is clear, and unfortunately, in perfect accordance with the general messages sent out for years by all the countries where any kind of collaborationism existed: the Germans are held responsible for the Holocaust, and they are the only ones to blame and hold accountable. There had been some collaborationists (the authors of the exhibition put emphasis on Dimitrije Ljotić, whom the today’s Chetniks dislike and distance themselves from), however, one can conclude from the accompanying texts, that the authorities, police and individuals in this country had not played a more significant role.

The fact that the Germans are to be held responsible for the Holocaust goes without saying: however, since it is a well-known fact from a long time ago, we should stop hiding behind it for once and start talking about those who were their faithful allies in the execution of the genocidal plan and those who shared the same racial ideology and a sincere wish to have the Jews and Roma people exterminated.

We have to talk about and discuss the responsibility of our own ancestors, not only the Germans’ or our neighbours’ responsibility. To constantly talk about and discuss over and over again theirs, is not only ‘politically correct’, since it does not upset anyone, but it also stands for continuity between nationalist political speech and the historical revisionism, the two central factors accountable for general acceptance of fascist models in the social and economic relations.

To only talk about the others, and only occasionally and very vaguely mention the role of Serbian authorities at the time, means to apply a kind of selective memory, in other words, make a decision not to show certain points, knowing that a high school student visiting the exhibition organised by the Government, will find it hard to believe that some of his ancestors might have taken part in the Holocaust. How could a teacher, even if he would, deny the truth propagated by the state institutions? Is a regular teacher’s word worth more than the President’s, a minister’s or the word of someone who holds a PhD in history?

Actually, resorting to selective memory is evident in almost every exhibiting room.

At the beginning of the exhibition, any kind of explanation of the nature of anti-Semitic laws passed in October 1940 remains unmentioned. Nevertheless, a kind of excuse for the same laws and their introduction is cited: “The legal measures against Jews were established in the somewhat altered political situation. These measures pertained to various restrictions which were not always consistently practiced and adhered to.” The novelties of anti-Semitic character without any key explanations are mentioned – the explanations, which would show that although anti-Semitism and philo-Germanism were non-existent among the people, the same could not be said of the ruling political, economic and cultural elite. Naturally, not a word is spoken of the controversial figure of bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, whose writings contain anti-Semitic ideas, while his support of Hitler, as well as Dimitrije Ljotić, is very well-known, straightforward and public. Despite it all, in 2003, Serbian Orthodox Church proclaimed him a saint. Nothing was said of the responsibility of Pavle Karađorđević, who has been rehabilitated recently.

Coinciding with their decision to simply skip these problematic moments, the authors resolve to present the pre-war Jewish community in a way I find rather alarming. Namely, one of the first sentences goes: “As it happened, the Jews were predominantly bourgeoisie engaging in industry, trade and banking, where their influence was often dominant and crucial.”

It has to be stressed that such a categorisation of Jews is absolutely unacceptable. It represents a terrible stereotype which was the basis for Goebbels’ anti-Semitic propaganda in Nazi Germany. Additionally, one really wonders at the fact that the authors decided to present Serbian Jews to the public in such a way, placing the emphasis on class categorisation, when it is commonly known that the Jewish community in Serbia had been diverse, just as any other national community. For example, it is well-known that a lot of poverty-stricken Jews lived in Dorćol.

Class categorisation evident in the text is confirmed with the accompanying photographs, through which one gains an impression that the Jews were really the ones pulling the strings of Serbian industry and economy on the whole at the time.

Unfortunately, I have to stress that such an outset of the exhibition is extremely problematic, precisely because one should obtain the basic means for the comprehension of the material in the first room, in order to easily understand the material in all the other rooms. The visitor will therefore, enter the second room lacking the essential information, together with a distorted view of Serbian Jews.

In the course of the entire exhibition the role of the collaborationists – from Nedić’s authority to the Belgrade police force led by Dragomir Drago Jovanović, special police forces’ commissary Jovan Nikolić, and many others – is simply omitted, even when it is the Serbian police officers (and even Chetniks), who appear on the exhibited photographs.

There are numerous sources to show to what extent their role was crucial. Here we will cite but two: Olivera Milosavljević’s publication entitled Potisnuta istina. Kolaboracija u Srbiji 1941-1944, (Repressed truth. Collaboration in Serbia 1941 – 1944) which can be found here: http://www.helsinki.org.rs/serbian/doc/Ogledi07.pdf, and an article by Filip David Ćorave bake published in February edition of Jewish review (Jevrejski pregled), which can be found here: http://www.savezscg.org/files/jevrejski-pregled-02-2012.pdf.

As opposed to silence when it comes to the role of Serbian collaborationists, a kind of emphasis is certainly perceived when it comes to the role of other collaboration forces. In this way, there was enough space at the exhibition for Xhafer Deva, an Albanian from Kosovska Mitrovica, who openly supported the Nazis and played an important role in the persecution of the local Jewish community (however, even there, just like in the other regions under the German occupation, it was Germans who decided when and how to exterminate Jews, not Xhafer Deva). On the other hand, there is no mention of the fact that certain parts of Kosovo under the Italian rule were a safe region, not only for the local Jews, but also for those Jews who found refuge there, escaping various parts of the country looking for salvation. Additionally, there is no mention of the fact that in March 1942, in Priština, exactly in a situation where the Italian authorities had given in under the Nazi pressure and gave over the first group of 51 Jewish refugees, the Albanian Ministry of internal affairs intervened and saved the rest of the refugees.

Errors

The second great problem with the exhibition we have to direct your attention to is the large amount of errors in exhibiting the photographs and the accompanying texts. While the issue of selective memory is up to a point liable to discussion and different attitudes, in this case the errors are a fact and there is no discussion about it. The errors are simply there. Some of the major ones will be cited here:

Šoa – The first intolerable mistake is, as Nikola Radić Lucati has noticed, a misspelt word in Hebrew – ‘Šoa’ – it was written backwards.

Figures – The first number we come across at the very beginning of the exhibition tells us that prior to the World War II, there had been 39,272 Jews living in Serbia, out of whom 4,772 survived. However, between the first and the second room, it says that 33,579 Jews lived in Serbia, out of whom 27,024 were murdered, which leaves us with approximately 6,500 surviving Jews.

Kladovo transport – In the accompanying text, it is first said that men died during the ‘bloody march’ in September 1941, while later on we find out that they were shot in October 1941.

Crematory – Although it is the symbol of the Holocaust, in Serbia there were none. Jews were executed either by being shot (men), or killed in death vans (women, children, the elderly and the sick). A project to build a crematory in Sajmište and later on in Banjica, was a topic in 1943, that is, when the Holocaust in Serbia had already been finished. One cannot place a crematory project draft which says 1943, next to the photo of the concentration camp for Jews dating from 1941.

Intern photographs – One of the photographs shows the Sajmište interns. However, it is not Jews, but the interns of the detention camp in Zemun, that is, the camp for imprisoned partisans (at one point, for Chetniks, too), political prisoners and forced labourers, open from 1942 till 1944, situated on the same grounds as the Jewish camp before it.

The photograph of the camp authorities – As it is well-known, a photograph which was for a while presented as the photo of the Sajmište camp authorities, is actually not genuine. The original photograph, which shows the period of the camp after the Jew extermination, can be viewed here: http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/semlin/sr/sajmiste-anhaltelager.php.

Grammar mistakes and typographical errors – Since this is an exhibition of historical and educational character, I find it unacceptable to have grammar and typographical mistakes in the accompanying texts.

Conclusion

Organising the first exhibition on the Holocaust in Serbia is certainly an event of exceptional importance. However, precisely due to its significance, the exhibition should have been organised more meticulously, with a more mature approach to that historical period of the 20^th century, using the experience of other countries, following the trends in the contemporary perceptions of the Holocaust, and of course, clearly and explicitly pointing out the responsibility of the domestic institutions and individuals, since it is something not to be concealed.

To stay tacit about the role of Serbian collaborationists means to be placed in the position of those perpetuating the crime: selective memory which erases the responsibility of our ancestors loyal to Nazism, makes us all revisionists and does not allow us a peaceful confrontation with the past. Additionally, it also opens up a space for the same hate patterns to reappear in our society without any hindrance, since we are deprived of the possibility to recognize them, still thinking that only the Germans are to be held responsible for the Holocaust, racial ideology and socially accepted normalcy according to which, to kill innocent people, women and children above all, because they belong to a different nationality, or because we hold them responsible for the misery (real or imaginary), our people suffered, is not considered a sin.

Herby I invite all those interested to email us their impressions and critical views of the exhibition, as well as the mistakes you may have noticed. Advice to the exhibition’s authors and organisers, and anything else you might find important to mention is more than welcome.

I find it highly important that our opinions and the list of errors should be collected and sent to the authors of the exhibition, the President of the Republic and the Ministries which supported the initiative, ITF, Yad Vashem and all the organisations that have taken part in the making of the exhibition, hoping that the mistakes would be corrected and that the next event about the Holocaust will be organised in the best way possible.

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