In July 2022, a diplomatic row erupted between Croatia and Serbia after the Croatian authorities blocked an ostensibly private trip by the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, to the Jasenovac memorial site commemorating the victims of the Second World War concentration camp of the same name. The majority of the camp's victims were Serbs murdered by the Croatian fascist Ustaša regime. The Croatian authorities accused Vučić of attempting to exploit the proposed visit for his own domestic political purposes, while some Serbian tabloids compared the current Croatian government to the Nazi-aligned Ustaša regime. The incident not only epitomized the poor state of bilateral relations between the two Balkan countries but also served as a reminder of Jasenovac's relevance to contemporary memory politics.
The Jasenovac concentration camp was in reality a system of camps erected between August 1941 and February 1942 and operated by the Ustaša authorities until April 1945. It was one of the largest concentration and extermination camp networks in eastern Europe, where between 80,000 and 100,000 people, mostly Serbs, Jews, and Roma, were killed between 1941 and 1945. Outside the former Yugoslavia, however, Jasenovac remains relatively under-researched. In the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, principally in Croatia and Serbia but also in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it remains a subject of controversy and contested memory.
The contributors to this interdisciplinary collected work—originally published in Croatia in 2018 as Jasenovac—Manipulacije, kontroverze i povijesni revizionizam (Jasenovac: Manipulations, Controversies and Historical Revisionism)—examine several aspects of Jasenovac's history but particularly the post-socialist debates, controversies and memorialization efforts in the Yugoslav successor states. The editors argue that Jasenovac was instrumentalized from the beginning for political and ideological ends. In the socialist period, it served as a symbol of supra-national unity; it was represented, as the editors note, as “a place of unity in suffering, as a universal lesson against internecine violence addressed to Yugoslav people of all ethnicities and nationalities” (xvi). Jasenovac was also one of the most visited memorial sites in socialist Yugoslavia. However, in the late 1980s and 90s, during Yugoslavia's violent disintegration, Jasenovac re-emerged as a contested symbol of victimhood. Shaped initially by grievances, flawed democratic transitions, and semi-authoritarian regimes, historical scholarship on Jasenovac in Croatia and Serbia was informed by and often served the prevailing nationalist discourses in both countries. The situation improved somewhat after 2000 as local historians drew more readily on international Holocaust and genocide scholarship. There has been regression over the last decade, however, as regional scholarship is still often informed by political and nationalist considerations.
The book is organized thematically into three sections: Naming, Counting, and Describing. Naming refers to the characterization of the crimes perpetrated at Jasenovac and consists of four chapters. Counting denotes the debate surrounding the number of victims and has three chapters. Finally, Describing speaks to the debates related to memory politics and has three chapters. Several essays stand out. Danijel Vojak's informative chapter addresses the under-researched genocide of Roma in Croatia and draws on archival material, although the discussion of Jasenovac forms only a small part of the chapter. Jovan Byford's chapter on the campaign for the Museum of Genocide Victims in Serbia and manipulations surrounding the Sajmište concentration camp is equally insightful. In 1941, the German occupation authorities in Serbia established Sajmište in Zemun (now part of New Belgrade) as an internment camp for Serbian Jews, most of whom were murdered by mobile gas vans in 1942. By 1943, Sajmište's principal purpose was as a concentration camp for political prisoners and (mainly Serb) civilian detainees used as forced labor in the Third Reich. In May 1944, the German occupation authorities transferred the camp to the Ustaša regime, which closed it later that year. For much of the socialist period, Sajmište served to memorialize the suffering of the Yugoslav peoples, but in the 1990s it was increasingly appropriated to commemorate the genocide of Serbs in Jasenovac and elsewhere in Ustaša Croatia rather than its principal victims, the Jews of Serbia. As Byford argues, Sajmište became “a lasting reminder of the extent to which the controversial politics of memory from the 1980s and 1990s still defines the attitude towards the past in Serbia” (49). In a similar vein, Vjeran Pavlaković analyzes the attempts of revisionist scholars and some politicians in Croatia to re-cast Jasenovac and its meaning, either by minimizing the number of Serbs killed in the camp or by misleadingly claiming that, in 1945 and immediately thereafter, Jasenovac was the site of mass atrocities perpetrated against Croats by the Yugoslav communist authorities. Pavlaković shows how Croatia's war of independence and societal perceptions of victimization at the hands of Serbia have influenced how Jasenovac and the Second World War are remembered there (245–46). Likewise, Ivo Goldstein's chapter explores the connections between Jasenovac and Bleiburg, a small town in southern Austria where the remnants of the retreating Ustaša military surrendered to the Yugoslav Partisans. Many of them were subsequently murdered in extrajudicial killings. Goldstein demonstrates how Croat nationalists have constructed their own Bleiburg myth as counterpoise to Jasenovac, further muddling the politics of memory in that country.
This wide-ranging collection of essays deals less with Jasenovac the concentration camp—its administration, the perpetrators, the regime that created it, or its victims—than with the memory and representations of and debates surrounding Jasenovac. Therefore, the book is most likely to appeal to students of the politics of memory. Nonetheless, it should be of interest to scholars of the Holocaust, the Second World War in the former Yugoslavia, and the legacies of the Jasenovac concentration camp as an unremitting reference point for collective suffering in Serbian and Croatian memory politics.
