Jewish Affairs - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

More documents

Recommendations

Info

JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012The word jasen means ‘ash tree’.Estimates of the total numbers of men, womenand children killed at Jasenovac range from 70000 to 700 000. It will never be possible toestablish accurate figures. The Jasenovac regimeso far exceeded that of the Nazi camps in itsbarbarism and savagery that even German officialsclaimed to be shocked. Whereas an almostpredictable, factory-like, organised monotonyprevailed in the camps run by Germans, theJasenovac authorities specialised in vengefulunpredictability and ‘artistic’ variation andinventiveness in the application of torture andmurder. It might even be argued that in theirconcentration camps across Europe, the Nazisperfected a perversion of Taylorism in their preciseand impersonal organization of their ‘productionlines’ – the principal ‘end-product’ being the‘commodity’: death. In contrast, the Ustašeofficers and guards who ran Jasenovac vied torefine their methods of barbaric torture andinfliction of horrendous deaths with an enthusiasmtantamount to relish. One might even go so far asto suggest that they perfected a refinement of‘cruelty for cruelty’s sake’: that is to say, a kindof extreme sadistic perversion of ‘art for art’ssake’. Thus General von Horstenau, Hitler’srepresentative in Zagreb, wrote in his personaldiary for 1942 that the Ustaša camps in Croatiawere “the epitome of horror” and Arthur Hefner,a German transport officer for work forces in theReich, wrote on November 11, 1942: “The conceptof the Jasenovac camp should actually beunderstood as several camps which are severalkilometres apart, grouped around Jasenovac.Regardless of the propaganda, this is one of themost horrible of camps, which can only becompared to Dante’s Inferno.” 4The Ustaše worked in active collaborationwith Catholic priests and deployed BosnianMoslem guards as well as Croat Catholics Thosesystematically exterminated were Jews, Roma,Communists and Orthodox Christian Serbs. 5 Thefull story of the crimes committed at the Ustašaconcentration camp of Jasenovac is unlikely everto be told because of the razing of the siteimmediately after the war by Tito’s Partisans, aquestionable act whose spurious and hiddenpolitical motivation has been debated ever since.Nor has the scale of Jasenovac ever been fullyadmitted by successive government authorities,let alone systematically investigated, either duringthe post-war Tito era (1945-1980) or during thepost-Tito period when Croatia was still part ofYugoslavia (1980-1991). After the break-up ofthe Yugoslav Federation, obfuscation continuedunder the presidency of Croatian president FranjoTudjman (1991-2000), who was notorious for hisantisemitism, statements of Holocaust denial andrevisionism. Thus, deliberate and systematicattempts to shroud or whitewash truth, destroyevidence and make the site unreadable have beenmade by successive authorities and regimes.However since 2000, thanks in large part topressure on Croatia from the European Union,under the presidency of Stipe (2000-2009),a former Communist and the final president of theSocialist Federation of Yugoslavia, some progresshas been made in the direction of admitting thatthe crimes did take place.While, during World War II in Croatia, thepersecutors of Jews were Catholic Croats andBosnian and Albanian Moslems, in Serbia thesituation was entirely different. The persecutors,terrorisers and murderers were the Nazi occupiers,and in the south Bulgarian forces. There weremany Nazi mass executions of Serbs, Jews, Romaand Communists, for example nearly 3000 men,women and boys in and around the town ofKragujevac in central Serbia between 19-21October, 1941. 66 A brilliantly informative andsympathetic monograph on the way of life of theJews of Kragujevac.The extermination of prisoners by gassing,which was later applied in Auschwitz and otherNazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe, wasfirst tried out experimentally in Serbia. SerbianJews, many of them, women and children, weremurdered by Nazi military drivers on Serbianroads in specially designed transportation lorries.The detailed histories of the two concentrationcamps run in Serbia by the Nazis, Sajmište andBanjica, still need to be fully researched anddocumented, that is, if it is not by now too late todo so. 7The majority of Serbs, of widely varied andeven opposed political persuasions, ranging fromroyalist to Communists, detested the Nazioccupation and opposed it whether actively orpassively. Resistance by patriotic groupsbegan in July 1941, very soon after the Naziinvasion in April 1941 and before any Communistactions. The situation was extremely complicated,however and a relatively small sector of theSerbian population was involved in activecollaboration with the Nazis, including the rightwingnationalist followers of Dimitrije , theSrpski dobrovolja ki odred [‘Serbian VolunteerDetachment’].In 1989, a major exhibition entitled Jews inYugoslavia, toured the state capitals of Zagreb,Sarajevo and Belgrade. According to its catalogue,before the 1941 Nazi invasion 75 000 Jews livedin Yugoslavia. Of these, only 15000 survived,over half of whom later immigrated to Israel. But5000 Jews either fought as partisans or weremembers of resistance organisations, that is, 6-7% of the pre-war population, a marginally higherproportion than for the country as a whole. Thesefigures help not only to explain the high regardaccorded to Yugoslavia’s Jewish community from1945 until the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation(1989-1992), but also to give the lie to the myththat Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe simply wentlike lambs to the slaughter. Some Yugoslav Jewslater rose to high positions of power under Tito,28
JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012for example Moše Pijade from Serbia and theSlovenian Edvard Kardelj. Conversely, I havenever come across evidence to suggest that Jewssuffered more repression or violation of humanrights under Communism than anyone else,especially in Tito’s early years before the breakwith Stalin in 1948 and Yugoslavia’s expulsionfrom the Cominform.Facts that are not known, however, and remainto be researched, are the precise fates and numbersof non-Communists of all ethnic and religiousgroups who, though in no way collaborators orsupporters of either Fascism or Nazism, perishedat the end of the war during the period of‘liberation’ by Russians and Titoist partisans(1945). It is suspected that many thousands wereeliminated in this way. In Serbia, to my directpersonal knowledge, it has only recently becomeacceptable even to talk with any degree ofopenness about this insidious and largely invisiblepurge of all possible and potential opponents toCommunism.I believe that a proper understanding of therelations between Jews and speakers of Slavoniclanguages is unlikely to be achieved withoutdetailed deconstruction of the etymology andconcepts underlying the complex nexus of ideasembraced in the pan-Slavic word narod. 8 Thisword is interpreted as ‘people’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’.Such an analysis would need to include theenormously complex ways that Serbo-Croatian(i.e. Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian) words suchas narod and narodnost (meaning not simply‘nationality’ but also something approximatingto ‘ethnicity’, ‘ethno-religious group’ and ‘ethnoreligiousaffiliation’) have been socialized andinstitutionalised in individual consciousnessbefore, during, and after Communism. 9 In theformer Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the termsnarod and narodnost appeared in various legaldecrees, in attempts to delineate citizens’ rightsfor what we might now call ‘ethnic minorities’.Exploration of terms like these would presentinsights into the conceptual and linguisticunderpinning of attitudes about race in generaland anti- and philosemitism in particularIn post-Titoist Yugoslavia, where I lived from1987 to 1990, I never once experienced theslightest hint of antisemitism from anybody Icame in contact with. In that time, I lived mainlyin Belgrade, but visited all the Republics and thetwo autonomous provinces of Vojvodina andKosovo. At that time, Jews were fully integratedinto all aspects of civic, cultural and political life.Leading Serbian-Jewish intellectuals like the poetOskar (1909-1989), the scholar and actorEugen Verber (1923-1996), and novelists DaniloKiš (1935-1989) and Filip David (b. 1940) were(and still are) honoured and admired. 10 This kindof information is of more than incidental relevance.However, attitudes to Yugoslavia’s own Jewswere not necessarily consonant with those towardsIsrael. Along with other leaders like Sukarno(Indonesia), Nehru (India), and Nasser (Egypt),Tito had been a founder of the Non-AlignedMovement, whose first meeting took place inBelgrade in 1961. This movement was by-andlargesympathetic to the PLO. However, in the1980s, I believe that subtle and gradual shiftsoccurred in Yugoslav foreign policy. The firsttime I visited Yugoslavia in 1981, as a lecturer ona British Council summer course for teachers ofEnglish, I witnessed a large and noisy pro-PLOdemonstration in Marx and Engels Square in thecentre of Belgrade, following Israel’s response torocket attacks on northern Israeli settlements bybombing PLO positions in southern Lebanon. Inthe following years, as a British poet, I became aregular guest at the International October Writers’Meeting in Belgrade. In 1987, for the first timesince the foundation of that event in 1964, anIsraeli writer, Jakov Orland, was on the guest-list.In the following October, I met two more Israeliwriters, Abraham Hus and Aviv Ekroni. When itcomes to international relations, culturalfriendship-visits often precede politicalrapprochements. I am not knowledgeable enoughto comment on Israel’s accords with other Balkancountries, but believe that Israel would do well tocontinue fostering cordial relations with Serbia,as with other Balkan nations.Notes1 As a typical example, see the BBC report (consulted 26/8/2001): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_ own_correspondent/117628.stm2010.2 http://www.sina.ba/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=115:daily-reports-on-role-of-b-h-banks-in-terrorist-financing-&catid=39:archive-&Itemid=57, consulted August 26, 2010.3 Gradual Islamisation, with funds being poured in fromthe Middle East, is not of course confined to Bosnia. Ithas been happening for years all over Europe, not leastin the UK.4 See the website of the Jasenovac Research Institute,accessed August 2007.5 The testament of Braco Danon (2000), a prisoner whoescaped in 1941 at the age of eighteen, and then joinedthe partisans, is among the most sickening (and moving)accounts of the Holocaust I have come across (The Smellof Human Flesh, a Witness of the Holocaust – Memoriesof Jasenovac, tr. Vidisava Jankovi , published in bothEnglish and Serbian versions, Belgrade, 2000). Danon,the last known Jewish survivor of Jasenovac in Serbia,died in 2009. I was privileged to meet him in Belgradein 2007.6 A brilliantly informative and sympathetic monographon the way of life of the Jews of Kragujevac, which alsodeals with that community’s destruction in 1941, hasbeen written by Staniša and Millomir (Jevrejiu Kragujevacu [The Jews of Kragujevac], 2011). Seealso Richard Berengarten, The Blue Butterfly, SaltPublishing, Cambridge, 2008, especially pp. 114f7 A book entitled The Crimes of the Fascist Occupantsand Their Collaborators against Jews in Yugoslaviawas published in 1957 by the Federation of Jewish29
Page 6 and 7: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012A
Page 8 and 9: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012u
Page 10: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012D
Page 15: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012D
Page 20 and 21: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012e
Page 22 and 23: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012t
Page 24 and 25: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012T
Page 26 and 27: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012T
Page 28 and 29: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012O
Page 32 and 33: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012C
Page 34 and 35: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012h
Page 36 and 37: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 20121
Page 38 and 39: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012a
Page 40 and 41: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012H
Page 42 and 43: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012S
Page 46 and 47: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012o
Page 48 and 49: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012M
Page 50 and 51: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012s
Page 54: JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2012I

Jewish Affairs - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?