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The book by the Croatian historian, diplomat and professor Ivo Goldstein “Jasenovac”, published by the “Academic Book” of Novi Sad, has recently had a great echo in our public. This work is an update of more than 20 years of the author’s work on this topic, as well as the book he co-authored with his father Slavko Goldstein “Holocaust in Zagreb” and “Jasenovac and Bleiburg are not the same”. The complex of the camp presents in its entirety, talks about the mechanisms of the crimes and the criteria according to which the genocide was committed against men, women and children, about the forms of killing and the daily life of the camp, about the number of detainees and victims, on who were the perpetrators of the murders and who were their victims. reasons … According to the words of detainee Đorđe Miliša, Jasenovac was hell because there is no pain, torment or suffering that any man has experienced in him …
northWe have recently seen your name among those who support it claim (is Dubravka Stojanović about it the murder of Ante Pavelić “blood revenge”, and Nikola Samardžić was heard saying that “the Jasenovac genocide was a response to the government of Karađorđević”. What is it about??
I signed the petition not because someone will name a Belgrade street one way or another, because it is primarily a matter of internal Belgrade, Serbian politics, but because of how to settle scores with my colleagues and dear friends. There were harsh words and open lies in those attacks. I mean, the two of them didn’t say anywhere that there was no genocide! They said the street name should not be given to a man who takes justice into his own hands, even when the target is a war criminal.
Who was the victim, how and why in Jasenovac?
All Serbs, Roma and Jews were killed, without distinction, according to a genocidal plan, due to their race, nationality or religion. Croats, Muslims, Bosnians and everyone else died as opponents or were ineligible according to the criteria of the Ustasha regime. The number of Roma killed is good evidence of this genocide: according to the current list of victims, 5,688 Roma men, 4,877 women and 5,608 children under 14 years of age were killed. These ratios are only different in the details when it comes to the number of Serbs and Jews killed.
In Serbia, he is first criticized for estimating the number of victims of Jasenovac. After the war, some 700,000 people died in Jasenovac and there were more than a million victims. You say the death toll will never be final. How did you come up with the estimate of 100,000 victims, of which more than half are Serbs?
The number of 700,000 victims in Jasenovac entered the Yugoslav public space in an unknown way after the war and remained as such. In 1964, the Federal Statistical Office compiled the “List of Victims of the 1941-1945 War – Ustasha Camp Jasenovac”, in which, based on field investigations, 59,188 names of victims were collected, but the document was not published. In recent decades, it has been completed in Belgrade and Jasenovac, where similar data has been obtained: 83,000 – 85,000 per name. That should increase by 10 to 20 percent, and then we would probably approach the final death toll. Demographic analyzes and comparisons of the 1931 and 1948 Yugoslav censuses confirm these data. I could talk a lot about that, the chapter of the book dedicated to the number of victims is long and detailed, but it is only one of the 64 chapters. After all, many more Serbs were killed in the genocide in the Independent State of Croatia in places other than Jasenovac. In the end, some Serbian investigators cite similar data from the victims in Jasenovac as me, but their voice is not heard or does not want to be heard in the Serbian public.
What bothers you in Croatia when it comes to this issue?
Anything. First of all, let me insist that Jasenovac is spoken of primarily as an extermination camp. Others also arose from that general objection. Revisionists and nostalgic ustasha lament their supposedly miserable fate, claiming that they have no access to the media with the “truth.” In 2015, one influential participant in that debate even called it all the “goldsteinization” of Jasenovac. At the time, he was referring more to my late father Slavko, and only partly to me.
How much damage did the exchange of some criminals and Ustasha supporters, about which he also writes, do to justice?
The harm here is a relative term, because many on the partisan camp have remained alive, and in that sense the benefit is much greater. After all, the exchange of prisoners is a common practice in all wars.
You cite all four of Antun Miletić’s books as one of the best sources. What other data do you rely on during your twenty-year study of Jasenovac?
When researching and writing about Jasenovac, I used many sources from different sources: newspapers, memoirs, memoirs, various archives and collections of published documents, spoke with various witnesses, and then took data from books and articles already published. This list, printed in lower case, occupies 25 pages of the book.
It’s Jasenovac, as a Yugoslav taboo subject Serbian myth, was the truth about him suppressed in Yugoslavia or was it used to glorify the War of National Liberation?
Jasenovac has never been a taboo subject, because the former director of the Jasenovac memorial area, Jovan Mirković, recounted in 2000 that 1,106 books, 1,482 memoirs and study articles, 108 collections of documents about this camp had been published. Another thing is that Tito and his collaborators preferred to talk about the war and the victories in peacetime than to return to the traumatic events. It came back as a boomerang in the 1980s and later.
How was Jasenovac used for everyday political purposes after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, on the Serbian and Croatian sides?
Irresponsibly exaggerated data from the victims tried to show that Jasenovac was a huge factory of death for Serbs, Jews and Roma, which due to its size becomes an indictment against an entire nation accused of genocide. On the other hand, the cover-ups and silences suggest the image of Jasenovac primarily as a labor camp and an institution with a legal basis for the internment of proven opponents of the regime, which directly rehabilitates the genocidal policy of the Ustasha NDH. Noted journalist Viktor Ivančić claims it is about “itchy Croatian revisionism and Serbian sacrificial pornography.”
In addition to other books, which make Jasenovac exclusively a labor camp, you cite the work of former Croatian President Tudjman as revisionist. What is the essence of revisionism and how do historians use scientific methods to approach it?
The term revisionism and revisionists can be defined differently, but I call revisionists those who not only change interpretations of the facts in an unacceptable way, but distort their meaning or directly challenge them. It follows that revisionism is a rewriting of the past based on more or less open intentions to justify some narrower national or political interests or objectives. There are also revisionists in Serbia. In my opinion, all those who consider the Chetniks as a liberation movement are revisionists.
What does Jasenovac mean today?
Today it is a field of political propaganda, from various sides. And it should be a place of remembrance. Jasenovac must be seen as a segment of a series of sufferings in this area in 1941, 1945, 1991, 1995. Today in our countries we have memory cultures that collide and create new hatreds. Political elites in the region must commit to establishing cultures of remembrance that may be different but that help defuse tensions and reconciliation. That would be a big problem.
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