Jasenovac – Croatia, the War, and the Future

Stumbling Stones In Croatia Should Symbolise Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust and Communist Crimes – A Historical Reality to Pursue?

October 27, 2023 by inavukic 7 Comments

On the chilly autumn morning of 25 October 2023 in the capital of Croatia, Zagreb, several residents, or rather leftist or pro-communist Yugoslavia political activists some of whose immediate family members were brutal aggressors and ethnic cleansers against Croats during 1990’s war of aggression, former President Ivo Josipovic and a handful of politicians of Serbian extraction, viz Milorad Pupovac and Boris Milosevic of the SDSS/ Independent Democratic Serb Party, as well as handful individuals evidently aligned with the communist past, huddled together on the pavement just outside the Hotel Dubrovnik that is situated on corner of the Ban Jelacic Square and Gajeva Street, to commemorate Svetozar Milinov and his family with the installation of a remembrance stumbling stone (or block). A Croatian Serb Svetozar Milinov was the original owner of Hotel Dubrovnik and he and his family were reportedly among the first Serbs killed in Croatia (1941) by the Ustashi regime and their deaths are considered by some political servants to be a part of the Holocaust. Indeed, it can safely be assumed that those present at this commemorative installation of a stumbling stone and those behind it are among those.

Natasa Popovic, director of the Croatian Centre for the Promotion of Tolerance and Preservation of the Memory of the Holocaust, said that “the stumbling stones dedicated to individual victims of the National Socialist and Ustasha regime indicate the moral duty to remember and take responsibility for what happened.”

Naturally I agree. However, there is a duty to remember and take responsibility for everything that happened, including the communist crimes’ purges of patriotic Croats. Popovic was not about to mention that! And that is so symptomatic of the pro-communist mindset still holding heavily onto the power reins in Croatia.

Known as “Stolpersteine”, or “stumbling stones”, the stone is a ten-centimetre concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution the installation of which started in Berlin in 1996. The stones were invented with the aim to commemorate individuals at exactly the last place of residency or work – which was freely chosen by the person before they fell victim to Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. There’s probably over 100,000 such stones installed on pavements across Europe. The stones represent a new vision of urban remembrance and unlike large monuments focus on individual tragedies.

It is my firm belief that everything possible needs to be done in order to make sure that remembrance preserves the dignity of the victims and, in this case in Zagreb, not much victim dignity appears to have been preserved. First of all, the stone in installed and commemorated by Serbs and former communists of former Yugoslavia! It is a historical fact that while those Serbs deny the fact that World War Two Serbia was among the first in Europe to declare itself “Judenfrei”/Jew Free, they keep pursuing the laying of guilt for WWII exterminations against Croatia.

The Jew Free status of Serbia was achieved by the killing of 94% of Jews in Serbia as early as May 1942 as its Milan Nedic government joined freely, and enthusiastically, forces in this extermination business with the occupying Nazi forces. Croatia was Nazi occupied also, but it never pursued a Jew Free status. If you depend on history as reported by Serbs or their allies you will never come across this absolute fact, which of course does not in any way excuse the terrible killings that did occur under racial laws. That is a historical fact. Hence, how can any dignity of victim Milanov be preserved when his stumbling stone of remembrance is installed by the descendants and political subscribers to the murderous communist Yugoslavia that murdered so many more!? It cannot – in the eyes of dignity and truth.

For me, stumbling over a piece of metal or concrete in the ground is anything but dignified. But at least it is a daily reminder of the past that was cruel to multitudes. In that light, were stumbling stones to be installed for the hundreds of thousands of victims of communist crimes as well as multitudes driven to emigration due to intolerable communist oppression and purges then, together with the stumbling stones dedicated to the victims of the Ustasha regime, Croatia would have stumbling stones installed at every step of pavements in cities, towns, and villages. Every victim of whichever brutal regime needs to be treated equally, with same piety and respect but not in former communist countries such as Croatia! Anything less does not preserve the dignity of victims because remembrance becomes a political spin seeking power, justifying one crime by condemning another. That is Croatia today. Communist crimes as opposed to those likened to the Holocaust are consistently ignored and even justified! Justified! For political reasons and no other!

In a controversial move, Stolpersteine or Stumbling Stones were banned by Munich city council in 2004. The decision was upheld in 2015, despite more than 100,000 people signing a petition in favour of them. In the summer of 2018, Munich introduced an alternative remembrance project, also placed before a victim’s last home, but presenting biographic plaques and photographs on stainless steel columns.

Every time I come across the installation of stumbling stones in Croatia I think of my late friend Helena S., a Croatian Jew who fled Zagreb with her family in 1939 and the family’s sizable property in elite and expensive parts of Zagreb, such as Pantovcak, confiscated by the Ustashe regime in 1941. The family settled in Australia and once communist Yugoslavia took the reins in May 1945, the family tried and hoped to have their properties returned. Decades of futile attempts for justice bore no positive fruit. The communists of Yugoslavia did not return the confiscated properties but gave them to communist party officials and operatives. Then the family embarked on attempts to have the properties returned from 1994, i.e., soon after Croatia seceded from communist Yugoslavia. To this day – no return; former communist operatives still live in those elite properties and have usurped as their own many of them! How can such people or their descendants be taken seriously when they go about installing stumbling stones to victims whose families suffered under their reins also!?

German leftist (or pro-communist) artist’s, Gunter Demnig’s stumbling stones project in essence asks people to take an active role in the reconstruction of the Nazi past of their own cities and localities. Demnig set stumbling stones in the pavement only on the invitation of local organisations or groups of citizens who have developed an interest in his project and who have researched the histories of the victims who are to be remembered with these stones. Placing these stumbling stones has sometimes provoked controversy. Some homeowners argue that a stone in front of their property may lower its value, a few city governments have refused to give the necessary permission, and some Jews have questioned whether stepping on the names of the victims is an appropriate way to remember them. Yet, Demnig’s project is constantly expanding. It seems that the “stumbling stones” has become a European project; examples of this “decentralised monument” can now be found not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, and other countries.

Hence, Croatia has not been exempt from this trend of remembrance, so a couple of years ago several such stumbling stones have also been set up in Zagreb. One of them, placed in Zagreb at the address Boskoviceva 28 mentions Miroslav Juhn, born in 1897, who was reportedly deported to Jadovno in 1941 and killed in August 1941. On the contrary, the online Jasenovac Memorial Site census states that Miroslav Juhn was born in 1897 in Podgorac and killed in 1941 in Jasenovac. So, already on the basis of the above mentioned example (and there are quite a few others), it can be clearly said that the stumbling stones project joined numerous other sources that denounce the online list of Jasenovac Memorial Site as a problematic source containing a number of false victims.

It is more than saddening that a similar project to stumbling stones has not been pursued for victims of communist crimes who were, in fact, more numerous than victims of the Holocaust. Europe had both murderous regimes in its twentieth century: the Nazi and the Communist and it had acknowledged this by officially condemning them in its parliament but chooses to stay silent at the relative lack of respect, justice, and human dignity for victims of communist crimes. Some would argue that by respecting both victims equally, diminishes the significance of the Holocaust and would fall under the politically invented term “Holocaust denial”. Well, to my vision, a human being never utilises politics or discrimination when it comes to victimhood because the very term “victim” is defined by an innocent human being falling as a target of brutal political regimes or criminals. There is no denying the crimes of totalitarian Communist governments, in Croatia under communist Yugoslavia in particular — mock trials and mass executions, forced labour camps, grinding oppression and several hundreds of thousands of patriotic Croats who rejected communism dead in over a thousand mass graves and pits as well as more than a million escapees fleeing to the West post World War Two. The purpose of memorials serves to remember and humanise the victims but should also stand as a reminder of the human capacity for evil from whichever corner of political pursuits, whether racial laws or political disagreements it comes from.

Both Communism and Nazism were genocidal regimes. No doubt about that! Analytical distinctions between them, that we come across rather too frequently, with the aim to make one look better than the other, devaluing the victims of one or the other, may be seen as important by some, but the commonality in terms of complete contempt for the bourgeois state of law, human rights, and the universality of humankind regardless of spurious race and class distinction is beyond doubt. Communism and Nazism contained all the political and ideological ingredients of the totalitarian order – party monopoly on power, ideological uniformity and regimentation, censorship, demonisation of the “people’s enemy,” besieged fortress mentality, secret police terror, concentration camps and/or hard labour camps, and, no less important, the obsession with the shaping of some “New Man.”

Renowned historian and political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, had drawn a moral equation between communism and Nazism, writing in her 1951 “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that both represented “absolute evil,” just two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Considering that and in light of my own moral persuasion no communist or Nazi sympathisers should be installing stumbling stones or other memorial symbols to any victims of any totalitarian regime because the lack of that non-discriminatory, filled with conflicts of interests, act takes the human dignity of the victims away. To boot, published in the late 1990’s the absolute international best seller, the Black Book of Communism, which documents communist atrocities, was very well received and opened millions of shut eyes. What The Black Book of Communism succeeds in demonstrating is that communism in its essence was from the outset inimical to the values of individual rights and human freedom. Despite communism’s overblown rhetoric on emancipation from oppression, the leap into freedom turned out to be an experiment in social engineering for the success of which murder and extermination of political opponents was compulsory. Paranoia regarding infiltration, subversion, and treason were enduring features of all communist political cultures, from Russia and China, to Romania and Yugoslavia (Croatia).

How long will it take for the world to repay the debt of civilisation to all victims, be they victims of Nazism or victims of Communism!? Ina Vukic

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Black Book of Communism, Communism, communist crimes, Communist Yugoslavia, Croatia, equality of victims, extermination, genocide, Hannah Arendt, Holocaust, Jasenovac, Jew-free Serbia, Miroslav Juhn, Nazism, similarities between Nazism and Communism, Stolpersteine, Stumbling Stones, Stumling Blocks, Svetozar Milinov, Ustasha

Croatia: Die-Hard Communists Keep Distorting History, Denial of Communist Crimes Must be Criminalised

October 1, 2023 by inavukic 6 Comments

After the Cold War, after the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, a new constellation of actors entered transnational European assemblies, organisations, and parliament. The newcomers’ interpretation of European history, which was based on the equivalence of the two ‘totalitarianisms’, Communism and Nazism – because they were subjected to both regimes and lived both at one time or another since World War Two began – directly challenged the prevailing Western European narrative, with no experience of living under a communist regime, that was constructed (by WWII victors including communist Stalin who had much horror to hide, i.e., Allies) on the uniqueness of the Holocaust as the epitome of evil. Regardless of such prevailing muscle that ripped away attention from perhaps worst crimes than the Holocaust was, communist crimes, if numbers of victims is any measure, the Nazi/Communist “Double Genocide” debate gained in significant momentum and speed for the past two decades, at least, and more vigorously so since 2010. The latter trajectory was prompted by a movement in Europe that believed and believes the crimes—morally, ethically—of Nazism and Communism are equal, and that those who don’t think they’re absolutely equal, are soft on Communism and condone its coverup of genocide while practicing double standards for justice to victims; all victims are not victims to them, just the ones who suffered by the hand pf their political opponents.

Indeed, in late 2010 the European Commission had rejected calls from Eastern Europe to introduce a so-called double genocide law that would criminalise the denial of crimes perpetrated by communist regimes; in the same way many EU countries on EU parliament recommendation ban the denial of the Holocaust. All sorts of excuses were dished out by the European Commission in its avoidance to place communist crimes on the same criminal list as Nazi ones during and post- World War Two. The most repugnant and hypocritical excuse, to my view, was the one that insisted that one cannot compare the people who built Auschwitz (Nazi Germany) with the people who liberated it (Russia). What an evil excuse this is when one looks the facts and truth in the face: Nazi Germany with its allies, who essentially became allies upon pressure of Nazi military occupation, left some 6 million victims while Soviet Communist Russia left over 30 million victims of the communist regime, around the same time! Similar ratios occurred everywhere in Europe where Nazi occupation took hold and communists ended up winning the war – many more victims of communist crimes than those of Nazi crimes (in Croatia the communists decided to label the latter as Ustashe crimes). But Russia was aligned with the Allies then, which was a most effective and strong way to cover up the crime of genocide over its people that was manifold higher in number than those of the Holocaust. If numbers do not count to define genocide, then certainly innocence of victims does, and both Holocaust and Communist Crimes are the grim reapers of same meaning and same gravity and same evil. Then the European Commission in 2010 also rambled on how Communists did not target minorities and Nazi’s did and, therefore Nazi and Communist crimes could not be equal! True, the communists did not target minorities just majorities – political opponents!

It was September 2019 when the European Parliament passed a resolution that equated communism with Nazism , and this led to a torrent of attacks by unhappy Communist Parties throughout Europe (e.g. Spain. Portugal, Greece, Italy). But of course, a resolution is not law, and it seems many more years will pass until that happens and denial of Communist Crimes will carry the same weight as Holocaust Denial has been for several years in many countries. But it is not just the Communist Parties that have vested interests in resisting full exposure of communist crimes and their terrible and terrifying toll of humanity because there are many historians of Jewish or other ethnic or religious extraction whose lifelong work appears to have been maintaining the rights of victims of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities, always placing them in importance above victims of communism even though the latter were more numerous and perished by equally depraved, evil and cruel methods of slaughter.

These people have come up with the term of “revisionisms” to try and repel historical research and truth-finding post Cold War, when many formerly forbidden for access communist government archives had been made accessible, is tantamount to horrific pursuit of lies for personal gain in my eyes. It often strikes one to believe that those who hold the Holocaust as the greatest evil committed in mankind’s history would not like it one bit if communism turns out, on account of deserved recognition of its evil, to have been greater evil than imaginable, even by the Holocaust standards.

Croatia has a number of such historians whose families were staunch communist operatives, who evidently received many favours and privileges because of that political loyalty to communist Yugoslavia; who stretch the falsities of history so far that they are prepared to invent things, horrible things, in order to corroborate what they are inventing as absolute truth. E.g., Ivo Goldstein is one such historian who has been persistently trying to downplay and justify communist crimes, justify the unjustifiable, in former Yugoslavia and support the gross fabrication of numbers of victims of Croatia’s WWII Jasenovac camp, the so-called Nazi crimes also labelled as Ustasha crimes, by inventing in his mind a bone-crushing machine that was, according to him, brought to Croatian WWII concentration camp by the Nazi-allied Ustashe regime so as to hide the true number of bodies, victims (2018 Ivo Goldstein book “Jasenovac”) (Goldstein’s claim of bone-crushing machines in World War Two Jasenovac was subsequently debunked by, among other facts, lack of any forensic evidence that would corroborate their use there)! How twisted and mean-minded one can get! It would seem, the fact that almost 94% of Croatia’s voters voted YES at the independence from communist Yugoslavia referendum in May of 1991 means absolutely nothing today to historians like Ivo Goldstein. They are staunch communist Yugoslavs and seem not to be able to tolerate well the fact that Yugoslavia is no more, that Croatia is independent – that seeking the truth is no revisionism. They stop at nothing it seems, and even invent concepts such as neo-Ustashism even though Ustashas were disbanded as organisation soon after end of World War Two and new organisation under that name has not been registered or formed since. But to people like that, this too is not important because with the word Ustashi they mean Croatian patriots and they cannot stomach those much – they are in heart and mind communists. And they know well the atrocities committed under the communist flag. And evidently they don’t like that truth, of course; so, to avoid their families being implicated in having committed horrible crimes against their own people in order for communism to thrive unimpeded, it’s easier to carry on with lies?

On Monday, September 25, 2023, Ivo Goldstein’s latest book, “Historical Revisionism and Neo-Ustashism – Croatia 1989-2022”, was presented in Zagreb. The book is reputed to be the final part of a kind of trilogy about crimes of deeds and crimes of words (but of course, not the communist crimes), which includes his books “Jasenovac” and “Anti-Semitism in Croatia”.

The author of that book points out in his writing that by exposing the historical revisionism that has gripped Croatia for the last thirty years, not only historiography is being defended, but also democratic civilisation. There you have it! The man presents as a total fake when it comes to history and democracy. The man is evidently afraid that the truth of communist crimes is coming out bit by bit, and his effectively poison-pen tries very hard to stop historical fact-finding by labelling it revisionism. In the light of government archives being opened for research once communist Yugoslavia crumbled after the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, there has been much research done into Croatia’s World War Two, and post it, history, and new mass graves, besides some 1700 of then already unearthed, that tell chilling tales about victims of communist crimes, are being discovered almost every month. One needs to look very hard, search with strong determination, to find references to these in Croatia’s left-faction-pro-communist mainstream media outputs. By calling legitimate and objective historical research revisionism Goldstein, it seems, wants to save democratic civilisation from the truth! Or rather, wants to wallow in the filthy history that was written by the criminal and cruel communist Yugoslavia regime, which included his late father Slavko.

It eludes both conviction and persuasion of a truly democratic and just person that someone like Ivo Goldstein could teach the world about democracy when he has spent his political and literary adult life keeping the flame of the totalitarian communist Yugoslavia regime alive, to this day!

At the book launch it was said that historical revisionism is first of all politics, that is, an attempt to gain political advantage through the manipulation of facts, that in Croatia it is most often associated with the Ustashism and NDH (WWII Independent State of Croatia) and named Franjo Tudjman as the most important progenitor of revisionism and neo-Ustashism (Neo-Nazism equivalent?)!

Historical revisionism in fact refers to any reinterpretation of recorded history. This fact may have eluded Goldstein and those practicing the “art of pointing fingers at revisionism that is not revisionism”. The fact is that the recorded history of Croatia (Yugoslavia) did not have records of communist crimes because these were hidden and forbidden for access even for research, and now that these have been available during the past three decades Goldstein calls the revealing of them historical revisionism instead of saying that they are correcting historical facts, or adding to historical facts, in order to reveal the truth. While allowing newly discovered evidence and facts to enter the historical record is undoubtedly correct and just, the interpretation of all facts to reflect contemporary morality then becomes a controversial aspect of the topic of revisionism. Many worry, rightly so, that historical facts, without having the benefit of all of them, are a distortion of history that must be corrected.

And so here we have it. Depravity and political prostitution has been the strongest at the expense of justice for victims of communist crimes! The history has recorded that almost 94% of Croatian eligible voters decided they want out of communism in 1991 and Franjo Tudjman led them to independence. But, Goldstein and his guests at the launch of his newest book, label him the progenitor of neo-Ustashism and not the progenitor of lasting Croatian freedom and democracy! Goldstein and his guests at this book launch, and generally, never acknowledge the fact that this historical revisionism they regurgitate about, did actually produce many admirable works of most credible research (including discovery of victims listed as having being slaughtered in Jasenovac camp by the Ustashe in Woorld War Two who in fact were killed elsewhere, some even by the communist hand… ) and books on historical truth they themselves should refer to when editing and correcting their books and writings into Second or Third Editions. But then, one cannot hold one’s breath until one sees such revised editions because to Goldstein and historians, who promote similar historical distortions, it would mean that they themselves are practicing revisionism of which they accuse truth-finders!

Perhaps we will see the day when, because of historians like Ivo Goldstein and numerous Communist Party operatives across the world, who paint truth about communist crimes into everything that it is not, the just world will deliver the long overdue laws that will outlaw denial of communist crimes just as there are ones that outlaw Holocaust denial. Wouldn’t that be pure justice, no politics involved, just facts! Perhaps we will see the day when Croatia will outlaw denial of communist crimes and the display of communist symbols in public. Ina Vukic

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: communist crimes, Croatia, denial of communist crimes, double genocide, equatng Nazi and Communist crimes, historical revisionism, Holocaust denial, Independent State of Croatia, Ivo Goldstein, Jasenovac, Nazi Crimes

What is the Holocaust memory in Serbia: suffering of Jews in Serbia or in Croatia?

October 10, 2021 by inavukic 10 Comments

This letter had recently been offered for publication in The Times of Israel, but the editors decided not to publish it. However, it asks a relevant question (in the title) and offers several links to important articles which may be unknown to the readers interested in the subject of Serbian misuse of the Holocaust. So, we offer them here.

The letter

On July 12, 2021, in The Blogs section of The Times of Israel, Mr. Ronen Shnidman reported from the Belgrade meeting of remembrance of the last survivors of the WWII Jasenovac camp in Croatia. The report is entitled “Serbia’s Holocaust memory and the ties that bind us” (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/serbias-holocaust-memory-and-the-ties-that-bind-us/). After reading the report I wondered what the “memory of Holocaust” in Serbia should have been: suffering of Jews in Serbia or in Croatia? Are the Serbs who perished in Jasenovac (Croatia) a part of the Holocaust victims, and if they are, are Croats and Roma also victims, as well as Poles and all other non-Jewish nations who perished in other concentration camps during the WW II? To answer these questions would perhaps be inappropriate from me as I am a Croat born after the WW II, and my ancestors had neither participated in the war nor perished in it, but Mr. Shnidman’s report indeed elicits several questions.

Starting “lightly”, Shnidman reports on the speech of Ms. Danijela Danon „Danon is the granddaughter of the Jasenovac victim Rabbi Daniel Isak Danon and delivered a speech at the Jasenovac Martyrs event held at the Serbian Academy of the Sciences and Arts.” If the family of Ms. Danon was from Serbia, how had Rabbi Danon ended up in Jasenovac, another state and hundreds of kilometers away? If they lived in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, how come that Ms. Danijela lives in Belgrade and talks – to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts? Why didn’t she, or anybody else at the meeting, remember the letter that Philip J. Cohen, the American publicist of Jewish origin and former advisor to the UN in Bosnia and Hercegovina, addressed to rabbi Abraham Cooper at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre on February 27th, 1992, in which Cohen pointed out that antisemitism has been deeply ingrained into Serb history. He also unmasked the propaganda of ‘Greater Serbia’, which at the start of the nineties accused Croatia of fascism and antisemitism.

Shnidman wrote: “Some 57 different documented methods of death were employed at Jasenovac. These were used in the killing of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs and tens of thousands of Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists.” However, “the methods of death” have no forensic evidence found so far. The evidence so far found does not point to the claim that, many, „tens of thousands of Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists” have been slaughtered in Jasenovac. Namely, Jasenovac is still a place wrapped in the fog of communist myths and lack of systematic investigation and, as such, a victim to Serbian anti-Croat propaganda.

Disputes apart, there are three things that are true and verifiable:

Three expert forensic investigations done at the sites in Jasenovac by the Yugoslav communist regime in 1964, indicated that allegedly most numerous mass graves contained a total of fewer than 500 skeletons of unknown origin.
The list of Jasenovac victims maintained by the Public Establishment Memorial Park Jasenovac (PEMP Jasenovac, approximately 84,000 names) has been unequivocally proven to have been made up (or fabricated) (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.11574.pdf): all lists of victims maintained by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington were analyzed on the years of birth of listed victims, and only the Jasenovac one came out as statistically impossible.
iii) Yugoslavian censuses before and after WW II reveal that, in comparison to the pre-war data, the post-war number of Croats had decreased, and the number of Serbs increased.

The Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade claims almost the same number of victims as PEMP Jasenovac, but the full list has never been either compared or aligned; at the same time, Jasenovac Research Institute in New York speaks about 600,000 Jasenovac victims, and Dr. Gideon Greif (mentioned as an authority in Shnidman’s text) of 700,000. How is it possible to have such great discrepancies in the number of victims?

Recently, Australian analyst Mr. David Goldman published an article in the Jerusalem Post (JP) under the title “This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop immediately” (https://m.jpost.com/opinion/this-disgraceful-mocking-of-the-holocaust-needs-to-stop-now-676707/amp?__twitter_impression=true), saying that Serbia used lies about Jasenovac to position Serb sufferings during WW II under the Holocaust. The acting director of the Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade, Mr. Dejan Ristić, sent a protest letter to JP (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/shame-on-those-who-seek-to-revise-history-of-the-holocaust-opinion-676992), and the article by Goldman was withdrawn. Ristić vehemently attacked Goldman as a “revisionist”. The editors did not know, I suppose, that Dr. Ristić at the same time denied genocide committed by Serbian forces in Srebrenica in 1995, and called upon all Serbian scientists to intensify investigations to prove that the Srebrenica massacre (around 8,000 victims) was not a genocide (http://www1.srna.rs/novosti1/922650/ristic-u-srebrenici-nije-bilo-genocida–incko-pocinio-pravno-nasilje.htm).

Serbian strategy of copying the Holocaust of Jews for Serbian WW II victims has been recognized and criticised before Goldman’s JP’s article (which was taken down by the JP a few days after publishing it):

https://haifaholocauststudies.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/holocaust-discourse-as-a-screen-memory-the-serbian-case/; https://haifaholocauststudies.wordpress.com/tag/dr-lea-david/
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-02-04/review-dara-jasenovac-holocaust-drama-serbia
https://variety.com/author/jay-weissberg/
https://forward.com/culture/463544/dara-of-jasenovac-serbian-oscar-controversy-genocide-holocaust-croatia/?gamp&__twitter_impression=true
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/erasing_the_history_of_the_holocaust.html (David Goldman’s article on Serbian strategy to invade the Holocaust with its Jasenovac victims that has not been withdrawn).

Serbian abuse of history has been notified long ago (Christopher Bennett. How the Serbs Abuse History. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition [New York, N.Y] 7 May 1999: A18.; Philip J. Cohen. Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press; 1996.). This abuse includes (mis)use of the Holocaust, which is outrageous! Philip Cohen rightfully called it desacralization of the Holocaust (Cohen, Philip J. 1993. Desecrating the Holocaust: Serbia’s Exploitation of the Holocaust as Propaganda. Philip J. Cohen.). I am afraid that Shnidman, Ristić and Greif, intentionally or not, support and/or follow that Serbian strategy. Mr. Shnidman’s report in The Times of Israel on Belgrade meeting “Serbia’s Holocaust memory and the ties that bind us” is in line both with abuse of history and desacralization of the Holocaust, in one sentence – “Serbian anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and exploitation of Holocaust as propaganda”, as P.J. Cohen spelled it out in 1992. If anybody would think that this is too harsh a judgement, I would like to see a milder one.

Matko Marušić

Split, Croatia, October 2021

About Matko Marušić: born in Split, Croatia, in 1946; he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Split, Split, Croatia. He was a Professor at Medical Schools (in Zagreb and Split) in courses of Physiology, Immunology, Principles of Research in Medicine, and of Research Methodology at postgraduate programs.He published 190 articles in scientific journals cited in Web of Science (H-index=28) and has around 150 publications including articles in scientific journals, books, book chapters, and a number of polemics and educational texts. He was a president of the Croatian Association of Physiologists, founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Croatian Medical Journal (1991-2009), Associate Dean of Zagreb University School of Medicine for School Branches in Osijek and Split, and Dean of the University of Split School of Medicine. He was one of the organisers and leaders of the humanitarian action ‘White Road for Nova Bila and Silver Bosnia’ (1993/94). He published many short stories and a collection of children stories ‘Snijeg u Splitu’ (The Snow in the City of Split) and ‘Plaču li anđeli’ (Do Angels Cry?). He also published the book of essays ‘Živjeti u Župi Radobilji’ (Living in the Radobilja Parish) and humoristic books ‘Škola plivanja’ (Swimming lessons), ‘Medicina iznutra’ (Medicine from Inside), and ‘Life of an Editor’. In 2018 he published his biggest literally work ‘Mi Hrvati’ (We Croats). (Brief biography and photo from University of Split website, October 2021)