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Professor dr. Gideon Greif, a well-known Israeli historian, expert on the Holocaust and Jasenovac, among others, author of the book “Jasenovac – Auschwitz of the Balkans”, sent a letter to the editors of the “Los Angeles Times” in response to the criticism. from “A Gift from Jasenovac” by Robert Ables, released on February 4, the point of which is that this movie supposedly wants to “settle scores” between Serbs and Croats.
We are transmitting a letter from prof. Dr. Greif in its entirety:
History is a science based on facts and only on facts. Robert Ables’s article ignores many key historical facts, and that’s a great shame. Ables describes a completely distorted image of the Jasenovac death camp. There is no substitute for historical facts in historical-scientific research.
As someone who has been dealing with the history of Jasenovac as an extermination camp for many years, which was founded and run by the Croatian Nazi-Ustasha regime from 1941 to 1945, I contend that the Jasenovac camp was one of the most brutal and notorious. of eight death camps in World War II. There, 57 murder methods were carried out, based on the testimonies of survivors, available in many archives, from German military newspapers to statements of survivors from the camp, who at the time were children.
Jasenovac wasn’t just for Jews. In addition, he was in favor of all those who were not Croats and were opposed to the Ustasha regime. Their main objective was to carry out a genocide against the Serbs, as the Croats hated them obsessively and extremely.
Jews were killed in Jasenovac, as well as throughout the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, which was part of the Nazi-Croatian policy of conformity and submission to Nazi Germany, which the NDH not only imitated, but desperately tried to overcome in cruelty.
The “Croatian-Ustash Final Solution” carried out the murder of 75 percent of the Jewish population, including 57 rabbis, who were killed, along with Jewish women, children and men.
Božidarka Frajt (private photo archive)
The number of Serbs who died has yet to be determined. Apart from the brutal murders in Jasenovac, their number in this field is the subject of debate among historians. However, I look forward to an extensive investigation, published by Yad Vashem Professor Menachem Shelak, which determined that 700,000 were the final death toll in Jasenovac, of which at least 500,000 were Serbs deprived of life.
But most tragic was the infamous children’s camp, the only one in occupied Europe. About 20,000 Jewish, Serbian and Roma children in the camps were brutally murdered there, out of a total of 76,000 children who died in the “Ustasha final solution”, which began six months before the German Nazi final solution.
Diana Obekser Budisavljević saved some 12,000 children of the detainees, but most of those children lost their identities because they were forcibly converted to Catholicism and given up for adoption. A well-known case was that of the Yugoslav and Croatian actress Božidarka Frajt, who in 1974 only found out that she was a Serbian orphan from Kozara, that she was adopted and that she was raised with a stolen identity, as a Croat.
It’s a shame that the author of the “Los Angeles Times” article ignores basic historical facts, leading his readers astray. A serious and professional historian must stick to the facts. Everything else is a game of legends and myths. To conclude: Serbs, like Jews, faced total extermination, the actions of the puppet Ustasha government of the Independent State of Croatia. Thus, the largest number of those tortured, humiliated and killed in the Jasenovac death camp, as well as in the smaller camps within it, were Serbs, as well as Jews, Roma and those who considered themselves opponents of the Ustasha regime. I personally interviewed some of the survivors.
In addition, I would like to suggest that you read Erwin Miller’s book “Hell Called Jasenovac”, and in addition I would like to send a personal gift to the library of “Los Angeles Times”, the book “We cry without tears”, about the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and of course my book “Jasenovac – Auschwitz of the Balkans”.
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