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The Department of History, University of Northampton & The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

The Holocaust in The Independent State of Croatia: Genocide between Political Religion and Religious Politics

Guest Publication by

Matthew Feldman

[photos added to enhance the text]

[Please note that editorials posted in this section are the sole viewpoints of the individual author and do not necessarily

represent any collective opinion of the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, or the University of Northampton]

Horror at Jasenovac

Duro Schwartz, surviving what he called the ‘inferno’ of Jasenovac through circumstance and vocational utility, composed a detailed memoir about his travails in the Ustaše’s most notorious camp in 1945.  After witnessing a catalogue of scarcely believable actions savagely and ritually carried out over his eight months of imprisonment between Autumn 1941 and Spring 1942, Schwartz concluded:

‘If all those who had gone through the camp could join their voices and the despair in their hearts into one voice and one despair, the thunder and horror of the day of judgment would make itself heard’.  This chilling account, which could only be written due to Schwartz’s release on account of his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, was still bound to fall short in the eyes of the author, for ‘human language is not powerful enough to even approximate the reality of existence there’.[2]   

                                        Read more about Jasenovac [here]

Despite noting the necessity of trying to speak about an ultimately inexplicable horror – a paradox noted in the accounts of many Holocaust survivors – this did not stop Schwartz from recording, hiding, and later writing up his notes on everyday life at Jasenovac.  Another excerpt from his testimonial serves to evoke the brutality of Ustaša guards toward, especially, Jews, Serbs, and Roma and Sinti travellers:  

Read the full article here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/croationholocaust.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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