Today, the Victims of the Holocaust, Genocide and Fascism Remembrance Day was commemorated by the WWII Genocide Victims Monument at Staro Sajmiste where the Justice Minister – Nikola Selakovic stated that it was our obligation to spread the truth so to resist the tendencies to have history revised and facts twisted, but also to fight against the always-awake Ustashism and Nazism.
At the ceremony, Selakovic emphasized that remembering the victims and such gatherings represented a guarantee that genocide would not happen again.
“We have more work to do: multiple execution sites to preserve and commemorate in a dignifying fashion, construct a museum commemorating the WWII genocide and the Holocaust, [fulfil our] obligation to spread the truth so to resist the tendencies to have history revised and facts twisted, but also to fight against the always-awake Ustashas and Nazism”, Selakovic stated.
The Minister noted that such sites were not only testimonies to the most horrific periods of the past, but also places to which to bring the children to explain to them how horrifying life could be if lessons from the past were not learned and how pointless life would be if we did not direct it towards the future.
As he put it, these sites were places where the Romanis, the Jews and the Serbs revised the lessons from the past, yet warned to be even more united in the future.
“The Serbian and the Jewish peoples are connected by the history of living [and co-existing] together, their destinies are tied to the destiny of the Roma people, but nothing has strengthened their friendships as the period of joint suffering and freedom fighting had”, Selakovic explained.
He [then] stated that today[’s] date was being observed in memory of the breakthrough of the Jasenovac concentration camp – the death factory which was “working” until its very end, aimed at murdering the remaining camp prisoners and destroying every trace and evidence of the NDH’s [Independent State of Croatia] existence.
Selakovic reminded everyone present that the camp prisoners had themselves, without waiting for the liberators, organised [to find] their path to freedom and that only 128 of them – living corpses, as he described them - had succeeded in doing so.
“Let us remember every day the value of a moment of freedom is worth and everything [and everyone] that tended to take it from us. They failed and will continue to fail as long as we continue gathering here, as long as we know that we are humans, guided by reason and strong will to make the country in which we live in, our Serbia, be a normal place of living for all its[her] children”, Selakovic stated.
The ceremony was attended by the ambassadors of Croatia, Germany, Israel, Bosnia&Herzegovina, the USA and other [countries], the survivors of the death camp, members of the victims’ families, representatives of the Union of the Jewish Municipalities of Serbia, the Romani National Minorities Council, the diplomatic corps, associations and citizens.
The City of Belgrade Assembly Chair – Nikola Nikodijevic, too, placed a wreath on the WWII Genocide Victims Monument.
The Victims of the Holocaust, Genocide and Fascism Remembrance Day is observed to commemorate April 22, 1945 when the Ustasha-run concentration camp in Jasenovac was broken through.
22 April was chosen as the observance date because on that date, in 1945, a group of 1,075 of the remaining camp prisoners marched through the Jasenovac concentration camp, only 127 of them having regained their freedom.
According to the estimates, made on the basis of the first exhumations performed by the state Committee of the FPRY and later verified by the “Simon Wiesenthal” Centre, 500,000 Serbs, 80,000 Romanis, 32,000 Jews and several tens of thousands of anti-fascists of different nationalities have been reported missing from Jasenovac camps.
The Croatian sources provide the names of the total of 83,145 victims, of which 47,627 were Serbs, 16,173 were Romanis, 13,116 were Jews, 4,255 were Croats and 1,128 were Bosniaks. Amongst the victims were over 20,000 children.