4-25-05, 8:48 am

The following remarks were made at the unveiling of a monument at the Holocaust Memorial Park in New York City on April 17, 2005. The monument, honored with a plaque by New York City, commemorates the final uprising by the Jasenovac concentration camp’s few remaining survivors and its liberation and is dedicated to all who suffered and perished at Jasenovac in what was then the fascist puppet state of Croatia. Jasenovac was the third leading murder camp in Europe.

There were many speakers at the gathering, including concentration camp survivors and Partisans John Ranz, Eva Costabel, Alexander Mosic, and Anna Beck and others, and representatives of the governments of Serbia, Bosnia, and Israel. A young spokeswomen for the Roma community (Gypsy is the common term although Roma people consider it pejorative) also spoke movingly about both the genocide directed against the Roma people and the continued and, since the fall of socialism in many East European nations, sharply growing discrimination that they face.

To my surprise and delight, Barry Farber, the old New York radio personality whom I had liked in my youth, but who had moved sharply to the right on a variety of issues in recent decades, made both an impressive and progressive statement at this meeting. The founders of Holocaust Park, Pauline and Ira Bilus, who won the battle against an enervated New York bureaucracy to create this small plot to honor the victims of genocide also spoke. The Jasenovac Research Institute, led by my good friend Barry Lituchy, who has fought against great odds and against the destruction in the 1990s of Yugoslavia to bring the story of Jasenovac and the larger holocaust in Yugoslavia to the attention of people in the US and internationally, was honored by the Public Advocates office New York City for its contributions. Barry’s speech particularly stressed both the anti-fascist struggle of the war and the ongoing struggle to gain recognition and restitution for the victims of fascist genocide in Yugoslavia.

The was also a moving religious ceremony led by Father Djokan Majstovoric and a choir from his St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in New York. Rabbi Dr. Ephraim Isaac, a leader of the Yemeni Jewish community in the United States said both a Yemeni Jewish prayer and the Kaddish, the traditional prayer honouring those who have passed away. Candles were lit by representatives of all the communities who perished at Jasenovac.

The Jasenovac Research Institute has just published a translation of the Yugoslav government’s postwar investigation of 'The Crimes of the Fascist Occupiers and their Collaborators against Jews in Yugoslavia' on its website in Serbian with an English introduction and summary. The theme repeated over and over again by all of the speakers was the solidarity and unity of all who suffered at the hands of the fascists – the Serbian, Roma, and Jewish peoples, their bonds of brotherhood, and the need to fight against fascism and religious ethnic hatred and division everywhere in the world. The following constitutes to the text of my remarks.

We meet here on the 60th Anniversary of the most destructive war in human history – a war where the civilian deaths greatly outnumbered the military ones. The numbers for World War II have been sharply revised upward in recent years. What was formerly counted as 20 million dead in the Soviet Union is now 27 million; the 30 million who perished in the European war now nearly 40 million, the 20 million who perished in Asia is now also revised upward. We meet like a character in the 1960s film Bye Bye Braverman running through a Jewish cemetery, shouting, 'We Beat Hitler.'

We too are in a cemetery, but we are also here to commemorate a great victory for humanity. There is the tragedy, the unspeakable tragedy, but there is also the triumph against Hitler Fascism, the Croatian Fascist Ustasha, the Mussolini’s Italian Fascist state, Father Joseph Tiso’s Slovakian Clerical fascist state, the Romanian Iron Guardsman, Horthyite Hungarian dictatorship and the big businessmen in Germany and Italy who bankrolled this unprecedented horror, and those in England and the United States who did profitable business with it. That triumph cannot be erased by the New Order of the NATO states and their globalization ideology, by those who today see themselves as the champions of Hitler’s New Order did in 1941, as the wave of the future.

The Hitlerites always sought to divide and conquer, to break up countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia as they played Slovaks against Czechs, Croatians against Serbians. The Nazis created in Europe, as the rationale for their enslavement of Europe’s people the organization of the continent on racist principles that colonialists used to carve up Africa, and they committed atrocities on an unimagined scale in the name of a New Order in Europe, with the conquered resources of all of Europe and some of the most advanced technologies in the world. We must remember that it took unprecedented heroism and unity, expressed in the slogan of the Yugoslav Partisans, Unity and Brotherhood, to defeat the fascists to make possible a world where human beings could once more strive for peace, equality and social justice.

The genocide carried out against the Jewish people, central to fascist ideology, is well known through the world. The Jewish people of Europe symbolized for reactionaries everything that they hated—secularism, humanism, liberalism, an emphasis upon integration into societies while maintaining their cultural rights as Jewish people.

The industrial mass murder carried out at Auschwitz, where millions were literally brought in human cattle cars and slaughtered as animals are in slaughterhouses is well-known, even though both old and new Fascists seek to either deny or trivialize the reality of Auschwitz. But Jasenovac, a complex similar to Auschwitz, where perhaps as many as 700,000 human beings perished is largely unknown in the United States, although it was the third largest murder camp in Europe. Along with Jewish Yugoslav and other Jewish victims, Roma Yugoslav (Gypsies) and captured anti-Fascist fighters of all backgrounds, the overwhelming majority of those who perished at Jasenovac were Serbian Yugoslavs, who were as much the victims of racist genocide as their Jewish and Roma brothers and sisters in Yugoslavia and throughout Europe. The Serbian people were hated also by the great imperial powers because they refused to be permanently dominated by the Ottoman Turks, and fought to create a state of Southern Slavic peoples that would be free of colonialism and imperialism. They had been a thorn in the side of imperialists who made the Balkans a battleground for their own power struggles and then blamed the people of the Balkans for deserving their fate Like the Jewish people of Europe they were hated because they refused to keep their place in a repressive and reactionary social order. To make Jasenovac invisible, a minor footnote to the war, is to give Hitler, the Nazis, and their willing Ustasha 'brothers' a posthumous victory at a time when the events of the last two decades have created a Balkans and an Eastern Europe, with a dismembered Soviet Union, a dismembered Czechoslovakia, and a dismembered Yugoslavia, far more like the New Order map of 1941 created by the Hitlerites than that of 1945.

Although they have been demonized outrageously in recent years because they, unlike the Soviet and Czechoslovakian peoples, fought back against the internal leaders and foreign powers that dismembered their country, the people of Serbia have much to be proud. Those who destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s literally turned history on its head, portraying the descendants of victims of and fighters against fascism (including many older who participated in that struggle) as war criminals and portraying the political and ideological descendants of Croatian Ustasha, the Bosnian and Albanian Waffen SS and other Fascist killers (whom the Tudgman government named streets after in Croatia) as both victim of 'genocide' and fighters for democracy.

This is perhaps the most powerful example in recent history of Voltaire’s comment that history itself as a pack of tricks played on the dead.

But the fight is not yet over, for Serbia, for Europe, for our own American people and the peoples of the world, as it wasn’t in 1941, when the Swastika flew over much of Europe, the Fascists he dismembered Yugoslavia and were marching toward Moscow, and Joseph Goebbels said, we have put an end to 1776, 1789, and 1917, meaning the American, French and Russian Revolutions. Four years later, the New Order of the Fascists lay in rubble.

Hitler called his movement 'national socialism' but everyone not blinded by propaganda knew that it had nothing to do with socialism, just as those not blinded by propaganda today know that the military interventions of the NATO states in Yugoslavia in the 1990s or the Bush administration invasion and occupation of Iraq have nothing to do with democracy. Democracy though is a good starting point to tell the story of Yugoslavia and its struggle.

In the name of a war to make the world safe for Democracy, Woodrow Wilson’s not so honest term, a group of new nations were created in Eastern Europe. The reality was that the new nations were supported to quarantine the Soviet Union, and also to balance the Germans, only two, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia deserved to be called democracies, and these were the least important because they were the least anti-Soviet.

Much earlier the people of Serbia, freeing them from the oppression of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, had fought through the 19th century to create a state of the Southern Slavic peoples, to free these peoples from both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

In 1914, they had faced the fury of the Germans and Austro Hungarians, who had used the assassination of Arch Duke Francis Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb teenager, itself an event of no greater importance than the assassination, hypothetically, of Prince Charles by members of the IRA would be today, to launch World War I. Francis Ferdinand, like Prince Charles today, was merely the heir to a constitutional monarchy, a figure without any real power. With enormous casualties and with the support of the victorious allied powers, the people of Serbia created a Yugoslav state. When in the 1930s the 'free nations' of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary had become satellites in the Nazi German orbit, the Yugoslavs had resisted. After Czechoslovakia was betrayed in 1938 at the Munich conference by England and France who preferred to do business with Hitler than form an alliance with the Soviets against him, only Yugoslavia stood as an anti-Fascist state in Eastern Europe, although Hitler had designs on the rightwing military regime in Poland

By the spring of 1941, the Nazi occupiers and their fascist allies, collaborators, and puppets were forcing themselves on the last remaining independent states. When the Yugoslav anti-fascists, led by the Serbian people, resisted joining the Fascists anti-Comintern Pact, which their government had decided to do because of the hopelessness of resisting the Axis powers militarily, they invaded and dismembered the country, aided and abetted by their Utasha Quislings.

A clerical fascist puppet state was created in Croatia and Bosnian territories annexed to it and Serbia became an occupied region. In August 1941, the Jasenovac complex began under the command of the Croatian 'Security Service' or Gestapo. Like Auschwitz, Jasenovac was a complex of camps, in including a woman camp Gradiska. Perhaps as many as 700,000 people were to be murdered there until the war ended. The Croatian Fascists during the war boasted of their genocidal campaign. In a banquet honoring the 'efficiency 'of the murderers, Vjekoslav Luburic, commander of the camps, the Ustasha Eichmann on October 9, 1942, boasted 'We have slaughtered here more people than the Ottoman Empire was able to do in its occupation of Europe….' The killers even had pools as to who would kill the most. When orders were given on August 29, 1942 to carry out mass executions (Serbian males had been seized by the tens of thousands from areas of Partisan activity in an effort to keep the Partisans from the people by slaughtering the people) a murderer named Peter Brizica (in some of the sources which I have read, he is referred to as a former Catholic priest) won the 'contest for who would kill the most, cutting the throats of 1,360 people in a night of butchery. For this he received a gold watch, a silver service, and a meal of Roast Pig and wine.' And he was named by his fellow murderers the king of the cutthroats.

The Yugoslav partisans weren’t defeated. Their strength grew and their importance to the war effort, where they were in 1942 and 1943 fighting more Axis troops than the British and Americans were in North Africa and in the early stages of the Italian campaign grew massively. Their triumphs even led the anti-Communist Churchill government, always maneuvering to find a way to bleed the Soviets in Eastern Europe and restore their sphere of influence in the Eastern Mediterranean, to recognize them for military reasons.

As Partisan troops approached the camp in April 1945, the Utasha fascists who had boasted of their mass killing earlier sought to blow up the camp and cover it up. A last heroic uprising by the ravaged people still alive in the camp then took place. Although most perished as the Ustasha machine guns shot them down, more than a hundred made their way to freedom, and the post war Yugoslav state, founded by the Partisans was to bring to the peoples of the regime the greatest progress and independence that they had known in their history. Just as the horror of Jasenovac can never be erased, the monster fascist Ustasha state can never be covered up, so the Federated People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, which rose from the ashes of Jasenovac and brought admiration and respect for Yugoslavs from the peoples of the world, can never be forgotten.

What we can learn from both the tragedy and the triumph is to continue to fight Fascism in all of its manifestations to honor all of its victims and take seriously the old slogan of the Partisans, Unity and Brotherhood, perhaps adding Sisterhood to Brotherhood as an updating.

In that spirit, let me conclude with a tribute to a woman who perished at Jasenovac about whom I have read on the website of the US Holocaust Museum. In terms of religion and politics, this woman was very different than I am. Her name was Jovanka Bubonovic. She was the wife of a wealthy Serbian Sarajevo businessman in the Yugoslav constitutional monarchy, involved in the work of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and in local charities, particularly in the improvement of churches in poor Serbian communities in rural Bosnia. With the Nazi invasion, her husband and one of her two sons were imprisoned, because they were leaders of the Serbian community. She stayed with her sister and daughter in Sarajevo. In 1944, she was arrested by the Ustasha.

Perhaps because of her class background, my speculation, her captors gave her the choice of converting to Roman Catholicism. She refused, was shipped to Jasenovac, and murdered there. Although her world-view may have been different than the Partisans, in her heroism she and all those fell at Jasenovac stood with them, with the Serbian Chetnik forces, with all who refused to be conquered by Hitler, Mussolini, their Ustasha henchmen in Yugoslavia, and their henchmen throughout Europe.

In this regard and in her honor I would propose that the new Pope, who will be chosen soon, excommunicate posthumously all of the Ustasha leaders, marchers, perpetrators of genocide. In 1937, Pope Pius XI excommunicated all Communists born in the Catholic Church, including many throughout Europe who would give their lives in the struggle against fascism. Not even Adolf Hitler, who was born into the Church, was formally excommunicated. It is time that the Catholic Church which since Vatican II has improved relations with Jewish communities confronts the atrocities in the name of both racism and religion that were committed against people of the Serbian Orthodox tradition by the clerical Fascist Ustasha regime.

Postscript

The choice of an arch-reactionary from Bavaria, the right-wing dominated German state that nurtured the Nazi movement in the 1920s before it became a mass force throughout Germany with the coming of the depression, makes any denial of the Catholic Church’s denial of the its complicity in the Yugoslav Holocaust less likely.



--Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.