Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac – Croatia, the War, and the Future

A Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Diaspora and Homeland/HAZUDD And Croatian World Congress Announcing Second Edition Of Esther Gitman’s “When Courage Prevailed – The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941 – 1945”

Esther Gitman (R) standing at the tomb of Blessed Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac in the Zagreb Cathedral; Photo: Ina Vukic

Esther Gitman’s “When Courage Prevailed …” – Second Edition Announced

The book that evidences the extraordinary courage needed for good deeds during World War Two in extraordinarily perilous times including those of Croatia’s Blessed Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac.

In the face of ugly falsification of history that we have all encountered to various degrees, there stand behind us many decades of long battles for the truth, which although the highest of values that can occupy a human mind and body, is the most difficult one to promote, or even find. This has been so because there will regretfully always be those who will for political or other reasons invent stories to nullify the truth. And that is why the world owes much gratitude to all those who work hard on historical research to reach the actual truth and display it to the world. And when more than twenty years ago Esther Gitman’s arduous historical research focusing on the rescue of Jews in the World War Two Independent State of Croatia (NDH), and the role in that played by Croatia’s Blessed Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac surfaced with exciting results, it was like a living testament to the words found in the Gospel of Mark:

“For nothing is hidden except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret except to come to light.” (Mark 4:22).

Personally, I am deeply proud to have been a part of the joint project undertaken by the

Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Diaspora and Homeland/HAZUDD and

Croatian World Congress

in preparing and publishing the Second Edition of Esther Gitman’s book originally published in First Edition in 2011. The book itself will soon be available in printed copies as well as in online free access pdf version (free of cost), details of which I will post as they arrive!

I am also very proud to have been asked to write a FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION and the following text represents that Foreword:

This book by Dr. Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945, was originally published in 2011 by US New York based publisher Paragon House and made widely accessible to readers across the world. Focusing on the paramount importance for historiography of Esther Gitman’s historical research findings, the book was subsequently translated into the Croatian language and published by Kršćanska sadašnjost (Christian Contemporaneity), based in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2019, viz. Kad hrabrost prevlada: Spašavanje i preživljavanje Židova u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj 1941 – 1945.

Since the original publishing of the book in 2011, among several lectures, essays, academic and scientific papers, Dr Esther Gitman has also written and published another major book, Alojzije Stepinac: The Pillar of Human Rights, 2019, on the role of Croatia’s World War II Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, also known as Blessed Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, in saving Jews and others from certain death during World War Two. These were times when racial laws were passed that led to horrific atrocities being committed against Jews across Europe, including Croatia.

In that environment of war and horror it is important to single out the courageous people who, despite deadly odds, embarked upon saving and rescuing thousands of Jews in a country (Croatia) in which the Ustaše (Ustashe), aiming for independence of Croatia from oppressive Yugoslavia, accepted the occupying Nazi ideology which held that no Jew deserved rescuing. Esther Gitman’s book can also be viewed as a compilation of genuine materials and documents that guide the reader and historical researchers to rescuers of Jews, in particular. Many of these rescuers were ordinary people, ecclesiastics, members of Partisan forces, members of the Ustashe forces and NDH regime, entire Croatian villages, but Blessed Alojzije Stepinac rises to the top of rescue efforts and associated sacrifices.

Individuals and groups who engaged in rescue activities did so at great risk to their own lives, endangered their families and friends, but also, serve as a reassuring fact that even in times of terrifying turmoil, there are people who manage to rise above circumstances that surround them to preserve the dignity of the entire humanity. This is such an important message that Dr. Gitman’s book also brings.

The need to make Dr Esther Gitman’s book When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945 even more accessible to readers and history researchers everywhere has grown increasingly in the past decade and, hence, the need to “comb” through the First Edition text with view to ascertaining any needed changes or additions for a Second Edition. This took some time and the Second Edition of this book, now before you, contains corrections of several grammatical, spelling, or other content errors. Corrections and additions include, for example, year of King Alexander Karadjordjevic’s assassination on page XVI of First Edition as well as the insertion on this same page historian Vladimir Geiger’s 2020 debunking of historian Slavko Goldstein’s claims regarding alleged plans in NDH (World War Two Independent State of Croatia) in relation to “thirds” in its Serb population contained in the First Edition. These corrections and additions are deemed important enough to justify the publishing of a Second Edition rather than a reprint or revised edition of the First Edition.

It is important to remind the reading public that Dr. Gitman’s book When Courage Prevailed is based on her extensive research in the State Archives of the Republic of Croatia where, from 2002, she studied some 30,000 original documents from World War Two. Utmost credibility ascribed to her historical research on the saving and rescue of Jews in Croatia is also demonstrated by the fact that she was a recipient of the prestigious Albright Scholarship in support of her pursuits of historical truth and facts. Indeed, the content of Dr. Gitman’s book When Courage Prevailed, based on factual findings in the historical archives is an eye-opening reversal of the distorted narrative about Stepinac’s conduct during World War II that the world had been served with since the War.

Dr. Gitman discovered more than four hundred letters written by common Croatian people sent to NDH officials appealing for the release of the Jews with whom they lived and worked. Thousands of people signed these pleas even though such interventions were forbidden under the law and could result in dire consequences. She also found documentary evidence that some Ustashe NDH officials who rescued 147 Jewish physicians and their family members by sending them to the mountain region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Furthermore, she found that the Ustashe NDH government had created rescue categories of Honorary Aryans and a group of about 100 Jewish individuals who were granted Aryan Rights for themselves and their family members. Also, the NDH authorities were flexible with respect to Jews leaving for the part of Dalmatia under Italian occupation where the Jews were safer than in the NDH because Italians did not transport them to concentration camps in Germany. In 1942 the Governor of the Dalmatian zone, Bastianini, had noticed that a large number of Jews was aimlessly wandering around and he then suggested to transfer all of them to the NDH. When Archbishop heard it he immediately took action. He called upon Abbot Marcone, the Vatican representative in the NDH and jointly they appealed to the Vatican to prevent it. Stepinac proclaimed that they had all been baptized in the Catholic faith (as a measure to save their lives) and about 5,000 of them were saved by allowing them to stay in the same parts of Dalmatia. Dr. Gitman and her mother were among these refugees, a thousand of which were transferred to the Island of Korcula under the protection of the Second Italian Armata, and in 1943, after the capitulation of Italy to Allied forces, with the help of the locals, they were transferred to the refugee camp in Bari, Italy, where they remained until the end of 1945. The second group of approximately 3,600 was transferred to the island of Rab, they were protected by the Italian army and fed by humanitarian agencies. After capitulation of Italy the Partisans came to their aid and enabled the young and the able to join the Partisans while the women the children and elderly were sent to the already liberated territories.

All that considered, Dr. Gitman justifiably assessed that the rate of antisemitism in Croatia was low and the survival rate of Jews in the Croatian territories of that time was among the highest in Europe.

The past two decades, or since the First Edition of Dr. Gitman’s book When Courage Prevailed, have witnessed tremendous progress in the study of archival records from World War II by several prominent historians in Croatia and it is certain the Second Edition of her book will also assist further research into historical facts immensely.

The result of careful and thorough research, this book has considerable appeal beyond the academic and historiography circuits. Dr. Gitman frequently uses actual historical documents discovered in the archives to illuminate rescue actions and motivations, all of which appear downright heroic. She has often stated that Alojzije Stepinac is already a Saint for her and deserves much wider recognition for his extraordinary rescue work during World War Two than he has received up to now. It is towards the latter end that this Second Edition of her book should greatly serve.

Ina Vukic, Prof. psych. (ZGB); B.A., M.A. Ps. (SYD), Vice President, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Diaspora and Homeland

COST–FREE ACCESS TO PDF VERSION OF THE BOOK CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://de.scribd.com/document/655273118/Esther-Gitman-When-Courage-Prevailed-2nd-Edition-2023-Open-Access

Croatia – Ten Years In EU, No Confrontation With Communist Past And Jerusalem Post Is Not Helping

Croatian Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac statue in Zagreb (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

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)