Page 37 - EXPOTIME!Sept2017

Museums in Eastern Europe Museums in Eastern Europe

The museum exhibition shows biografies of survivors with shtml Visited August 2, 2017
interviews, videos and objects. It does not show pictures 4 http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13679810.html
of the atrocities, the murderers and the deads. The offi- Visited August 2, 2017
cial statement of the museum direction is that it would 5 ibid.
unsettle children. It compares the exhibition with the 6 ibid.
standards in the Holocaust Museum in New York, USA and 7 https://hubwen.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/kardinal-
stepinac-und-die-ustascha-auch-ein-seliggesprochener/
Yad Vashem in Israel. But Jasenovav is not a memorial and Visited August 2, 2017
museum far away from the genocide but at the actual 8 http://www.serbianna.com/columns/michaletos/005.
place. Thus, the exhibition in Jasenovac can not be com- shtml Visited August 2, 2017
pared with a central Holocaust Museum but only with the 9 Marko Attila Hoare in "Was Franjo Tudjman a Holocaust
exhibitions in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen ‒ and Jaseno- denier?" wrote: "Tudjman was not a Holocaust denier, but
vac was even worse than Bergen-Belsen. he cast doubt on the figure of six million Jewish Holocaust
victims; went out of his way to portray Jewish inmates of
The reason for the lack of displayed horror in Jasenovac the Jasenovac death-camp as perpetrators rather than as
is not a lack of material. Dedijer published photos which victims; and relativised the Holocaust in a manner that
show Ustasha murderers who presented themselves with can only be deemed deliberately offensive and provoca-
the cut off heads of Serbian priests, mass graves in Jasen- tive toward Jews ‒ by comparing it to Israeli treatment
of the Palestinians." https://greatersurbiton.wordpress.
ovac, Serbian farmers who were forced to bury their own com/2009/03/06/was-franjo-tudjman-a-holocaust-de-
graves, an Ustasha beheading a victim with an axe or a nier/ and cp. http://www.hagalil.com/antisemitismus/os-
Serb whom the Ustasha took his heart out of the body teuropa/jugoslawien.htm Visited August 2, 2017
while he was alive. And they show more than the horror: 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide Visited August 2,
like the photos in the German “Wehrmachtsausstellung”, 2017
they proof that the Ustasha enjoyed to see their victims 11 For more information on Dedijer see https://en.wikipedia.
suffer and celebrated torture and slaughter. Thus, the org/wiki/Vladimir_Dedijer
general alignment “against violence” in the contemporary 12 http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13679810.html
exhibition in Jasenovac which does not directly focus on Visited August 2, 2017
the offenders and their ideological backgrounds could be 13 Dedijer, p. 25-30
easily used against the victims and the antifacsist resist- 14 Dedijer, p. 20
15
Dedijier, p. 180
ance and this is exactly what Crotian nationalists do: they 16 Dedijer, p. 168.
minimize the horror of the Ustasha and exagerrate the 17 Dedijier, p. 174
violence of the antifascist partisans who freed Yugoslavia 18 Dedijier, p. 184
from fascism. 19 Dedijer, p. 152-159
20 For a review of the 1991 war and post war history of the
How to heal the open wound? monument which included the preservation help of the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington see
In 2017, representatives of Croatia’s Jews, Serbs and an- http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6559
ti-fascists boycottet the official commemoration at the 21 http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6468
Jasenovac side with members of the Croatian govern- Visited August 2, 2017
ment as they did in 2016. One reason for the boycott was 22 ibid.
23
ibid.
that culture minister Zlatko Hasanbegovic joined it, who 24 ht t p://w w w.b a l k a ni n s i g ht .c o m/e n/a r t i c le/
24
is judged a fascist. Another reason to boycott the state plaque-near-wwii-concentration-camp-scandalises-re-
commemoration was a plague with an Ustasha slogan gion-12-05-2016 Visited August 2, 2017
which was installed in the near town of Jasenovac.
References
Therefore it is no surprise that the exhibition in the Jasen-
ovac camp museum does not show the perpetrators, their Vladimir Dedijer: Jasenovac - das jugoslawische Auschwitz und
ideology and atrocities, but mainly surviving victims and der Vatikan. Freiburg 2001
that Ustasha slogans are on official memorial stones near http://www.balkanalysis.com/blog/2005/04/20/western-me-
to the place where the Ustasha committed some of their dia-ignores-serb-us-memorials-of-jasenovac-death-camp/
most dreadful crimes. A critical Holocaust workup accord- http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatian-serbs-boy-
cotting-wwii-camp-jasenovac-commemoration-03-27-2017
ing to EU standards is extremely difficult in current Croatia. https://www.euractiv.com/section/elections/news/pro-na-
zi-nostalgia-flourishes-under-new-croatia-government/
Notes https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/12/
croatias-election-warning-nationalism-balkans-eu-govern-
1 http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=7127 ment-second-world-war-fascism
Visited August 2, 2017 http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13679810.html
2 http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/boycott-over-
shadows-memorial-for-croatia-wwii-victims-04-22-2016
Visited August 2, 2017 Editorial note: In respect for the dead, we have decided gener-
3 http://www.serbianna.com/columns/michaletos/005. ally not to publish pictures of murdered people and massacres.

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EXPOTIME!, issue August/September 2017