On 22 April 1945, 600 people attempted to escape the concentration camp in Jasenovac run by the Croatian Ustasha regime.
When dealing with the atrocities of the Second World War and the Shoah, camp complexes such as Jasenovac are often neglected due to a focus on the German machinery of extermination in Eastern Europe.
Both Friedländer and Hilberg devote only a few pages to Jasenovac, and the early efforts of Yugoslav historians to grapple with the crimes committed in one of the largest internment, labour, and extermination camps in Europe – in terms of prisoner numbers – seem futile in view of the historical revisionist tendencies in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Even the number of victims, although meticulously investigated by researchers, remains contested political terrain to this day. All symptomatic of a tendency that makes a mockery of any dignified attempt to grapple with this history.
At the beginning of the wars of secession, Jasenovac served to polarise both sides. Under Franjo Tuđman in the Croatia of the early 1990s, a number of Ustasha members, such as Mile Budak, were rehabilitated and stylised as fighters for an independent Croatia free of Serbs. On the Serbian side, the comparison of the Croatians to the Ustasha served to instil fear of a renewed genocide against the Serbian people.
In order to prevent such instrumentalisation, which is still taking place, the history of the Jasenovac camp urgently requires a European perspective. According to political scientist Ljiljana Radonjić, Jasenovac was the only extermination camp in Europe where murders were carried out according to plan without German involvement.
The Jasenovac Memorial has a list of 83,145 known victims (47,627 Serbs, 16,173 Roma, 13,116 Jews, 4,255 Croats, 1,974 others), a provisional figure, according to historians. These facts need to become a part of collective European memory in order to remove any basis for revisionist or nationalist aspirations.
