Courage to Resist

Review of Croatian History, 2015

During the First World War Jews suffered the same as other Croatian citizens. They were mobilized and sent to fight on all fronts, some died and were buried a long way from their homes, some were wounded or left permanently disabled. They effectively froze their social activities, and devoted themselves to volunteer work. At the end of the war, they were faced with many problems, impoverished (apart from a few individuals who made their fortune during the war), often the target of the “Green cadres”, whose looting and burning scared many Jews into migrating to urban centres or abroad. One of the Jews’ greatest problems was the collapse of Austria-Hungary, which left them divided among several newly-created states, which in turn forced further migrations, when the local Jews were unable to obtain Yugoslav citizenship, and were forced to either move back to their “home” countries, or migrate to other parts of Europe, or even America.

Holocaust survival stories continue to amaze and move us. Whether recounted in the media through memoirs and films or first-hand by survivors or their relatives, they share common characteristics but unique details. Yet most of those we know belong to the Jews of Western, Central, and Northeastern Europe. For until recently Western scholars largely ignored the specific characteristics of the Holocaust as it unfolded in the Former Yugoslavia. Yet according to Milan Ristović, fully 85% of Yugoslavia’s approximately 82,500 Jews perished there, most of them under the regimes of Pavelić’s Ustaša (which governed the NDH--Nezavisna Država Hrvatska--Independent State of Croatia) and Nazi-occupied Serbia and its puppet governments, the first headed by Milan Aćimović (May – August 1941), the second, the Government of National Salvation (Vlada nacionalnog spasa), by General Milan Nedić (August 29, 1941 – October 1944). Regarding the fate of Serbian Jews during this period, Walter Manoschek observes, “The Serbian Jews suffered one of the proportionately highest death rates of all European populations.” In fact, the brutal implementation of Hitler’s racial policy by the Nazi occupying forces all but destroyed Serbia’s Jewish community, approximately 16,000, of which between 13,600 and 14,000 died—close to 7/8ths of the total population. Given how successfully the Occupation met Hitler’s goals, we may wonder how the survivors eluded the insidious machinery so carefully constructed to destroy them. Fortunately, renewed interest in the issue has led scholars and community leaders to examine more closely the plight of Serbian Jews under Nazi occupation. Exploring both written sources for historical context and oral histories to distill a deeper sense of its human consequences, they have produced such collections as We Survived: Yugoslav Jews on the Holocaust (2005) and Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia: Analyses and Survivor Testimonies (2006). In 2010, Milan Ristović published “Jews in Serbia during World War II,” while museums and various interest groups have utilized new technologies to establish websites such as: www.ushmmm.org, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which features a section on Jasenovac; http://www.jasenovac.org/; www.semlin.info; www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance,html; and www.serbianholocaust.org. All of these serve as resource centers for written and oral eyewitness accounts from Jews and non-Jews, as well as photographs of family members and relevant persons, places, and memorabilia. And while scholars have begun to explore individual aspects of this phenomenon, I intend here a brief overview of the relevant history interwoven with selected synopses of survivor experiences. (final proof of article, minus Works Cited, appearing in Serbian Studies, Volume 27, Numbers 1-2, 2013, pp. 15-41)

INTRODUCTION In the short period from 1941 to 1945, the Croatian Ustasha* regime attempted to remove, through deportation, physical extermination and forced assimilation, the Serbian, Jewish and Roma minorities of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The Nazi-backed regime also attempted the first serious effort by any regime in the region to nationally integrate the large Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This endeavour of ‘demographic engineering’ in the Balkans in the 1940s was, as Stanley Payne rightly asserts, of ‘truly Hitlerian proportions,’ considering the fact that non-Croatian ethnic, racial and religious minorities constituted approximately one-half of the NDH’s population.1 Jonathan Gumz correctly attributes Ustasha policies to an agenda of a ‘nationalizing war’, that is, ‘the extensive use of military and political violence to reduce a multi-national state to a nationstate.’ 2 This war was another in the series of nationalizing wars that have plagued Balkan and Eastern European political life since the early nineteenth century. The principle of ethnic homogeneity was viewed by successive politicians in the Balkans as a corollary to political, social and economic modernization.3 Modernization implied centralization, and this in turn implied cultural uniformity......continue reading in ~

Polin

In interwar Croatia, among a diverse ethnic population, two minority groups were especially highlighted: Jews and Roma. Some scholars, in the context of the historical analysis of the position of minorities in Europe, designate Jews and Roma as “Outsiders” and define them as dispersed ethnic minorities, which differ from the others minorities because they are constantly persecuted. Also, these minority groups were often in history perceived as the “other”, foreign and non-domestic population of some European countries. The period between the two World Wars and during World War II was perhaps marked by the greatest persecution of these two groups in their history, and the leaders of these persecutions were the German Nazi authorities. Precisely for this reason, in this paper the analysis will also focus on how the central government in Zagreb, during the existence of the Banovina of Croatia (1939-1941, perceived and consequently related to the members of these minority groups.

Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies, 2013