THE HOLOCAUST AND THE UNITED NATIONS OUTREACH PROGRAMME

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since 1945 Sajmište has attracted the interest from experts in the
fields of architecture and urban planning, as well as from city and
state officials who viewed its future mainly in terms of the urban
and economic development of Belgrade. In fact most plans for the
site’s development since 1945 sought to incorporate it into the urban
matrix of the capital city, largely ignoring its tragic history. Sajmište
was, and still is, widely regarded as a piece of land that is simply too
valuable to be “just” a memorial museum, or a heritage site.
On the other hand, in the 1960s Sajmište came to be recognized
as an important symbolic space and place of historical significance.
Since then, its tragic fate has been the subject of official, institutionalized,
albeit not always particularly widespread or public remembrance.
The post-war history of Sajmište was largely determined by
the interplay of those two perspectives — i.e. by the clashes, but also
efforts to find a compromise between those who were keen to commemorate
the site’s tragic history, and those who viewed the fate
of Sajmište solely in the context of Belgrade’s urban development.
The fate of Sajmište after 1945 was made more complicated by the
fact that even among those who sought to transform this space into
a memorial complex, there were (and still are) differences of opinion
about what it is that Sajmište symbolizes. Put differently, for
much of the post-war era, Sajmište was a contested space not only
in terms of whether or not it should be a memorial site, but also in
terms of what is memory-worthy about its past. Only for the local
Jewish community, which has traditionally had little say over the
site’s future, has Sajmište always been, first and foremost, a place
of the Holocaust. Others, however, did not see it this way. During
the communist period, like elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Jewish
victims of the Holocaust were subsumed under the category of ‘victims
of fascism’, and remembered only in the context of the broader
memorialisation of the People’s Liberation War, anti-fascist resistance
and, in the case of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Revolution which
coincided with the Second World War. In commemorative ceremonies
held at Sajmište, as well as in the official historiography of the