Remembrance day for World War II victims in Serbia

Health Minister Slavica Djukic Dejanovic laid a wreath on behalf of the Serbian government at the Old Fairgrounds, the site of a WWII Nazi death camp.

Wreath were also laid by representatives of death camp survivors and association of victims’ families, the Association of the Jewish Municipalities in Serbia, the Roma ethnic minority, Head of the EU Delegation to Serbia Vincent Degert, diplomatic representatives of Israel and Germany, and representatives of the city government.

Lazar Krstajic, aged 88, who was incarcerated at the camp between May and September 1943, told reporters that the thing he remembers most were the mornings, when the dead bodies would be thrown into the river.

Israeli Ambassador to Serbia Yossef Levi said this is one of the places of greatest suffering of Jews, Serbs and Roma in Serbia, noting that most of the victims at the Old Fairgrounds camp were women and children. From this site, prisoners were transported in special vehicles with gas chambers, suffocated in transport and buried on the outskirts of Belgrade, in Jajinci, recalled Levi.

Remembrance day is marked in Serbia on the day of the liberation of the Jasenovac concentration camp, one of the most horrific death camps referred to by historians as the Serbian Auschwitz, formed by the Croatian Ustase at the time of the Independent State of Croatia, a WWII puppet state of Nazi Germany.

April 22, 1945 was the day when a group of 1,075 remaining prisoners tried to break out from the camp, with only 127 finding their way to freedom.

The death camp network in the Independent State of Croatia comprised some 80 camps in the territory of the present-day Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the biggest of which was Jasenovac.

Based on early exhumations, a state commission in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia estimated that 500,000 Serbs, 80,000 Roma, 32,000 Jews and tens of thousands of anti-Fascists of different nationalities went missing in the Jasenovac camp. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has since confirmed these estimates.

Around 100,000 prisoners were held at the Old Fairgrounds camp, also located in the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. Of this number, 20,000 – mostly Jews – were killed at the camp, and another 20,000 at execution sites in the vicinity of Belgrade.

Tuesday 23 April 2013

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