DEFENDING THE TRUTH ABOUT JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP IN THE INDEPENDENT
STATE OF CROATIA
(Letter No. 3)
This letter is written and addressed to you by three Jewish survivors of the
death camp Jasenovac in the Nazi Independent State of Croatia during the Second
World War who are still alive in Serbia:
Cadik Danon,
the architect, who escaped from the Jasenovac concentration camp in 1942
Bozo Svarc
the retired colonel of the Yugoslav Army, who escaped from the Jasenovac
concentration camp in the same year
and
Josif Erlih
the retired major of the Yugoslav Army, who was held in Jasenovac to the very
bitter end and participated in the break out on 22 of April 1945 when the Croat
fascist guards started slaughtering all remaining prisoners
LITUCHY WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION
The three of us did not grant releases for our testimonies to be
publish in the book on the Conference on the Croatian death camp Jasenovac
which Mr Barry Lituchy promised now again, eight years since it was held at
Kings borough Community College in New York. The information, that we gave such
releases last year, spread by Mr Milo Jelisijevic on 11 March 2006 is totally
unfounded.
Mr Jelisijevic, a publisher and member of the Board of the Jasenovac Research
Institute (JRI), should have known that the releases we gave in 2003 were
recalled in 2005 because the CEO of JRI, Mr Lituchy, initiated a court action
against Dr Wanda Schindley and Mr Petar Makara, who created the Proceedings of
the Conference published in April of 2005.
We were outraged by the lawsuit filed by Mr Lituchy and his cronies Messers
Friendly, Mosic and Miletic against the first book, which contained the
testimonies of us and nine other Jasenovac survivors. It was offered to the
American and English speaking public, as the book on this subject promised by
Mr Lituchy was not published. We could not accept that the first book on the
Conference be banned by a lawsuit because of alleged copyright breach (and
really because of the hurt pride of a lecturer who did not want to or was not
able to produce it). Consequently, we withdrew the authorizations given to Mr
Lituchy in 2003 to use our testimonies. We have lost trust in him and welcomed
the book on the Conference made by people more diligent and more eager to
spread the truth about Jasenovac.
Messers Lituchy and Jelisijevic will receive the notification of our lawyers in
Belgrade that they do not have the permission to use our testimonies and
contributions made by several other active participants of the Conference. If
they do not respect our prohibition, they will face legal consequences.
Mr Lituchy could have avoided the danger of being sued if he had accepted the
advice given by another plaintiff, Mr Joseph Friendly, to approve the existence
of two parallel books on the Conference. Considering that Mr Lituchy’s death
threat against the videographer of the Conference Mr Bibic put the plaintiffs
on the defensive, Mr Friendly suggested softening of the settlement terms. He
made this suggestion in his letter sent on January 13, 2006 to Mr Lituchy’s
lawyer, Mr Kaplan. By exchange of releases, the existence of two books on the
same subject would have been accepted by both sides. Mr Lituchy did not approve
this suggestion and continued the litigation. While Mr Friendly was brave
enough to propose a conciliatory solution, he was not brave enough to cancel
his suit and quit the litigation.
The parallel existence of two books on the same event would expose them to the
judgment of the reviewers and the public and prevent Mr Lituchy and his cronies
from affirming that they undertook the court action against Dr Schindley and Mr
Makara because the book they produced is of such bad quality that it should be
banned. Only Nazis and the Gulag masters took the right to destroy books while
alleging poor quality or wrong content.
In an e-mail letter circulated on 09/03/06, Mr Lituchy called the Proceedings
book on the Jasenovac conference a “falsification of history book” which “is
factually inaccurate” without presenting any proof for his offensive
allegations. He did not analyse anything; he just threw a stream of slanders
against people he hates for the work they did and he failed to do. He wrote
that the presentations by the conference participants “were badly
misinterpreted in the book” so that most of them “asked that the book not be
distributed” - and he did not mentioned any name of such presenters unhappy
with this “amateurish and error filled book”. He only stated that “the book
misidentifies some 20 different presenters,” and they all remained anonymous
except Mr Eli Rosenbaum”. And even this gentleman did not point to concrete
errors, excusing himself that he had no time to write letters.
We would not suppose that the Proceedings book is free of errors, but Mr
Lituchy failed to demonstrate the “falsifications, errors, outright lies”
contained in the denounced book. In the manner of the Nazi propagandist
Goebels, he repeated the same accusations, convinced that after many
repetitions, they would be accepted as true.
Mr Milo Jelisijevic proceeded in the same way in his letter sent to the
president of the Jewish Federation in Serbia, Mr Aca Singer, on 25 of February
2006. He wrote that Mr . Makara and Dr. Schindley offered a book distorting and
misinterpreting the writing s of almost every historian who attended the
conference – Huttenbach, Rosenbaum, Berenbaum, Simpson, Tom Popovich and
Charles Allen, and he did not offer any proof for what he affirmed. In the
best of Nazi tradition, he declared that the book made by Makara and Schindley
“will vanish.”
The same letter of Mr Jelisijevic affirmed that the three of us “Messrs. Svarc,
Erlih and Danon have nothing to complain about.” He added, “Their testimonies
will appear in the authorized version of “Jasenovac and the Holocaust in
Yugoslavia” which will be published by the JRI in April of this year. They
signed releases last year”.
This is an outright lie. If Lituchy and Jelisijevic, contrary to our will,
publish our testimonies, they will have to confront us in court.
The Editor-in-chief of the newsletter of the JRI, Mr Aleksandar Mosic,
surpassed Messrs. Lituchy and Jelisijevic in explaining how the poor and
damaging quality of the Proceedings book prompted their court action. He
alleged that the book was negatively assessed by experts as a dilettante
product and did not name any such expert. Mosic declared that the Proceedings
book contains incorrect information but was able to name only one presenter who
complained, the already mentioned Mr Eli Rosenbaum. However, even Mr Rosenbaum,
as we said, did not offer examples of misinterpretation of his presentation.
In fact, in a letter of 26 February 06, Mr Mosic for the first time retreated
from his previous statements that the breach of his copyright motivated his law
suit. In a reversal, he attributed his motivation to the poor quality of the
Proceedings book. He affirmed that his signature on the suit was “a dam against
dilettantism which caused enormous damage” to the truth about Jasenovac. So, in
the line with Mr Lituchy and Mr Jelisijevic, he wielded the Nazi torch of
destruction of a book
In the recent past, Mr Lituchy scared many people by resorting to law suits.
Now, his last one against Schindley and Makara is proving to be a boomerang. He
lost his job as part-time lecturer at the Kingsborough Community College, which
he sued also for breach of copyright in respect to the Proceeding book; he had
to substitute his two expensive Madison Avenue lawyers with a single one from a
more modest part of New York, as by January 2006 he spent already $100.000 on
his court action; and he and his cronies are denied by the Jewish survivors and
many Conference participants the right to publish their contributions.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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