New York Times
November 14, 2001
Documenting a Death Camp in Nazi Croatia
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 - Officials of the United States Holocaust Museum
said today that they had discovered and preserved a cache of decaying
documents and artifacts from one of the lesser-known but most brutal
concentration camps of World War II. The camp, known as Jasenovac, was
operated in Croatia by the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet government.
The artifacts were found deteriorating in a building in Banja Luka in
the Serbian part of Bosnia last year, officials said. Peter Black, the
museum's chief historian, told reporters today that Jasenovac was crude
in comparison to the industrialized Nazi extermination camps like
Auschwitz. Mr. Black said there were no gas chambers or crematories, so
prisoners were murdered one by one with axes, guns, knives or prolonged
torture. Bodies were buried or thrown into the adjacent Sava River.
Jasenovac (pronounced ya-SEN- oh-vatz), actually a complex of five
camps about 60 miles from the Croatian capital, Zagreb, has been little
studied in the West, but the history has long resonated in the modern
Balkans, where analysts and historians have debated about how much of
the region's violence may be traced to historic ethnic enmities. Mr.
Black estimated that nearly 100,000 people had been killed in Jasenovac,
the largest number being Serbs, followed by Jews and Gypsies.
The camp was established by the Republic of Croatia to eliminate anyone
who was not an ethnic Croatian. Mr. Black said a combination of
factors, including the reluctance of officials to agree on what
happened, had led to its history's remaining largely hidden from
scholars until now.
The collection includes 2,000 photographs, many of atrocities; tens of
thousands of papers; and thousands of artifacts, like inmate crafts.
Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum, said the project
to save the documents and artifacts was especially significant because
of the cooperation of the government of Croatia, whose history is cast
in a poor light, as well as the governments of Serbia and Bosnia. Ms.
Bloomfield said the governments had cooperated despite "the continuing
sensitivity of all sides to this collection."
That sensitivity was on display moments after the museum's presentation
today when a diplomat from Croatia, Mate Maras, objected to the
assertion by museum officials that more than 300,000 Serbs had died at
the hands of the Ustasha throughout Croatia in World War II.
Mr. Maras complained to Ms. Bloomfield and Mr. Black that the number
was misleading because it included what he said were combatants
throughout Croatia and thus was comparable to the hundreds of thousands
of Croats killed in the war.
Mr. Maras said that while he thought the assertions of the museum's
personnel about Serb casualties were misleading, he agreed it was "a
good day for Croatia to open up these sad pages of our history."
Copies of the collection have been made and will be maintained at the
Holocaust Museum and in Israel, officials said. The original collection
will be returned to a museum in Croatia, where it will be put on
display at the site of the Jasenovic complex, officials said.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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