July 2013 Croatia became a member state of the European Union.
When the Jerusalem Post publishes an article about Croatia it often appears as a regurgitation of Jewish-Serb collaboration lobby that relentlessly stands on its hind feet, desperately guarding from view the mass extermination of Jews in World War Two Serbia, shouting about Croatia’s World War Two history as the Holocaust culprit in that region. To my knowledge, one has never read or heard from Jerusalem Post anything about World War Two and post-WWII massive victims of communist crimes.
Such an appalling treatment of victims and victimhood is widespread in Croatia of today, also. Still, 32 years after seceding from communist Yugoslavia! Since year 2000 when former and then current communists took power in Croatia they work and act in the same ways as, say, evidently politically bent journalists of Jerusalem Post. Croatia today is still a bed of lies and a bed of denial of justice for all victims, regardless of which regime they were victims of. There are hundreds of thousands more innocent victims in Croatia of the communist Yugoslavia regime than of that of the WWII Croatian Ustashe regime. To talk of numbers and comparing numbers of victims is certainly not a just or fair way to approach victimhood by any measure. Even one victim is one too many. Croatia’s communist apologetics government and powers around it go even further – they permit celebrations of murderous communist former Yugoslavia regime, even participate in some while attempting to erase and denigrate the significance of victims of the Serb aggression in Croatia during 1990’s and the absolute importance of the Homeland War, which ushered Croatia into independence from communist Yugoslavia!
Official Croatia has not confronted itself with its communist past and at the same time employs all the “tricks in the book” to downplay and push away any scientific and historical research, based on historical records that used to be sealed and banned for access during the times of communist Yugoslavia, that expose the false Word War Two and post-War history of Croatia, written, of course, by the communists. So, official Croatia engages in what one might call confrontation with its past, selectively and while at it keeps breathing more lies into the already falsified history about the reported Holocaust in WWII Independent Croatia. Examples of this appalling protection of communist crimes can easily be seen in its ignoring of credible historical research by Esther Gitman (on Blessed Alojzije Stepinac’s rescue of Jews in WWII Croatia), Blanka M. Matkovic and Stipo Pilic (on camp Jasenovac, for instance, that remained open and functional after WWII and one can safely conclude that it was used as a killing field of Croats by Yugoslav communists), Igor Vukic (on historical documentation regarding numbers victims in Jasenovac camp during WWII), Roman Leljak (on horrific unearthing of mass graves of communist crimes victims), and many more.
On 7 April, 2023, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion article by Michael Freund “Croatia must confront its fascist past”. While there is no fascist past Croatia must account for because fascism was never a regime in Croatia per sé – not even during World War Two – there is a communist regime it must confront with and correct the purposefully wrong labelling of WWII Ustasha regime as fascist or Nazi. Michael Freund in his Jerusalem Post article claims that Croatia’s WWII Archbishop Blessed Alojzie Stepinac is” anything but blessed”! When one couples that with the fact that he, and Jerusalem Post, continue ignoring the fact that modern research (Dr Esther Gitman, who is of Jewish descent, in particular) has clearly shown Stepinac’s extraordinary engagement in rescuing thousands of Jews from sure death it is abundantly clear that Michael Freund’s opinion is saturated with anti-Croatian, anti-truth politics. One could easily dismiss his opinion as depraved and an attempt to promote sheer hatred.
In the above Jerusalem Post Michael Freund writes: “He (Alojzije Stepinac) served as the archbishop of Zagreb beginning in 1938 and was an ardent supporter of the pro-Nazi puppet regime established by Ante Pavelic, leader of the Ustashe fascist and ultranationalist organization in Croatia. Not once did Stepinac ever formally denounce in public the genocide perpetrated by the Ustashe against Jews, Serbs, Roma and others, and he keenly backed the forcible conversion of more than 200,000 Serbs to Catholicism.” Evidently, Michael Freund is parroting what his anti-Croatian Serbian and other mean-spirited friends have been saying, not even bothering to read historical facts that demonstrate that Alojzije Stepinac did on several occasions during WWII, to the threat of his own safety and life, speak publicly against the racial laws imposed in Croatia by the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. Michael Freund will tell you repeatedly that hundreds of thousands of Serbs were converted to Catholicism forcibly during World War Two Croatia but will not tell you the truth that such conversions were voluntary after Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac invited Serbs to convert from Orthodoxy to Catholicism (the same for Jews) in order to save their lives from persecution and peril. In the same “breath” Stepinac wrote that if the converted wished to revert to their religion after the danger of threat to their lives in the circumstance of Nazi Germany occupation, they would be free to do so!
These historical facts and truths have been well published in the past twenty years at least, including in original documents provided by Dr Esther Gitman’s books on historical research on this topic; but as sheer hatred would have it, such as the one Michael Freund seems to be enjoying dishing out, it is fair to say that Croatia cannot confront a past it did not have in the form Freund is trying to shove down our throats.
Germany based Dr. Josip Stjepandic has also written a reply to Michael Frenud’s Jerusalem Post article of 7 April 2023 and it was as follows:
“Michael Freund is the president of the Israel-Serbia Friendship Association. In this capacity, he sharply denigrates Croatia and Blessed Cardinal Stepinac in the article ‘Croatia must confront its fascist past’.
What appears to bother the author most is that Zeljana Zovko, a Member of the European Parliament, hosted a conference on Blessed Cardinal Stepinac, ‘Blessed Aloysius/Alojzije Stepinac – Testimony of Faith, Perseverance and Hope’, in the European Parliament.
‘Fascism, anti-Semitism, revisionism, evil regime, cruel distortion, obfuscate their country’s wartime role, neo-fascist songs penned by a far-right Croatian nationalist, Nazi salutes’ are mentioned here as examples of misbehaviour among the Croats. It can hardly be worse.
It is easy to see the extreme Serbs’ point of view in this article, for which Croatia and the Croats are to blame for everything. Such an article will probably make the author even more popular among Serbs, but it cannot in any way serve the interests of the State of Israel.
The facts paint a very different picture.
Croatia is an EU and NATO member and is fully integrated into Western alliances.
Almost 20 million tourists, including more than 60,000 from Israel, visit Croatia every year. No significant xenophobic or anti-Semitic incident is known to have occurred because Croatia is the country with the lowest crime rate in Europe. Other statistics also draw Croatia and Croats as very peaceful country and people to visit. It seems that the author had not done this. Otherwise, he would have seen that there is no trace of anti-Semitism in modern Croatia and probably wrote about Croatia quite differently.
The states of Croatia and Israel are now working together in many areas. Recently there is even a joint study of the University of Split and the Sapir Academic College, Hof Ashkelon, on ‘Democracy and Resilience in Modern Society’.
Unfortunately, the Holocaust also took place in Croatia, but in a completely different way from what the author portrayed. After Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, the country was divided. In Croatia and Serbia, Hitler installed puppet regimes and dictated the rule of power. This also included the persecution of the Jews.
While Serbia was declared free of Jews (“judenfrei”) in 1942, and Croatian government at the time did not pursue that goal and about 9,500 of Croatia’s 39,500 Jews survived. How this came about, describes the book ‘When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945’ by the Jewish-American historian Dr. Esther Gitman, who, like about 6,000 other Jews, owes her survival to the tireless efforts of Archbishop Stepinac.
Gitman draws a differentiated picture of the Independent State of Croatia: on the one hand, the terror imposed by the Nazis based on racial laws – on the other hand, 6 paths of humanity that led to the rescue of the Jews. As a result, every fourth Jew survived in Croatia, more than in almost any other country under the control of Nazi Germany. This is thanks to noble, brave Croats like Archbishop Stepinac. That would have deserved greater recognition in Israel, which unfortunately has not materialised so far.
Therefore, the State of Israel should thank Zeljana Zovko because she recalled this special merit of a Catholic bishop, who spoke out against the racial laws very early on and always repeated his opinion (e.g., New York Times: “CROAT ATTACKS GERMANS: Archbishop of Zagreb Denounces Their Theory of Race,” July 8 1943).”
Ina Vukic and Josip Stjepandic
(HAZUDD/ Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Diaspora and Homeland)
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