The Death Camps of Croatia: Visions and Revisions, 1941–1945 . by Raphael Israeli, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013. xxiv + 201 pp. $36.71.
2020; The MIT Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/jcws_r_00918
ISSN1531-3298
Autores Tópico(s)Balkans: History, Politics, Society
ResumoHistoriographic literature on the Second World War in Croatia has focused on the atrocities perpetrated against Jews, Serbs, and Roma by the Axis Powers and their local collaborators—the Ustaše, both Croats and Muslims, and the Volksdeutsche, Yugoslav citizens of German ancestry. The Četniks, a remnant of the Royal Serbian army, primarily hunted the Jews. Historians as well as survivors were eager to expose the atrocities so that people around the globe would know what had happened. Although there is a plethora of historiographic literature on the machinery of murder in the Serbian and Croatian death camps, it is plagued by disputes over the number of victims. Moreover, much of it is written to defend one or another ethnic perspective. Thus, Raphael Israeli writes that he came “to the mixed conclusion that the horrors of Jadovno and Jasenovac have to be reported to the public in some nonpartisan way.” His intent to revisit the subject of Croatian death camps might seem a refreshing approach.Israeli's actual text consists of 194 pages, comprising a foreword, an introduction, and eight chapters: “The German Expansion into the Balkans”; “The Roots of the Ustaše Regime”; “The Jadovno Complex”; “The Middle East Connection”: “The Muslim Connection and Haj Amin al-Husseini”; “Jasenovac: The Routinization of Mass Murder”; “The Suppression of War Memories and Their Reemergence”; and “Summary and Conclusions.”Unfortunately, the book fails to provide new insights into the conflict between the Serbs and Croats, neither about the wartime atrocities nor about the number of victims. Because Israeli does not know Serbo-Croatian, his bibliography lacks primary sources, including diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews with those who experienced these years. The book is based essentially on secondary sources, predominantly books written or translated into English (pp. 191–193). Israeli's unfamiliarity with Serbo-Croatian also results in frequent misspellings of individuals’ names and locations.The Death Camps of Croatia loses focus on its stated subject when it ventures from wartime Yugoslavia and its concentration camps to present-day conflicts. In particular, by introducing a totally irrelevant Middle East connection with a follow-up on the Muslim connection and Haj-Aminal-Husseini, it needlessly confuses readers. Despite Israeli's intent to relate his subject to current issues, his chapter “The Suppression of War Memories and Their Reemergence” largely ignores the current situation in Croatia. Although Josip Broz Tito's regime restricted the use of official archives to a few select historians, the situation has long been much different. After the Yugoslav wars of separation in the 1990s, the Croatian state archives in Zagreb were opened to the public. Microfilms of all the Holocaust-related documents are available at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Scholars who are interested and know Serbo-Croatian or have local researchers are able to benefit from these materials.Moreover, Israeli frequently misstates or misinterprets passages from other authors. For example, he cites my book When Courage Prevailed (2012) in discussing the rescue of Jews by Serbs (pp. 41–42 n. 24); however, that book's focus is the rescue of Jews by Croats. Israeli provides no page number for his citation. Another note (p. 42 n. 11) cites an Internet link (http://www14.brinkster.com/philayu/SR/serbia3.htm) to a display of Serbian stamps, which is unrelated in any apparent way to the text, which compares Milan Nedić (the acute accent over the ‘c’ is missing in Israeli's book), a Serbian general in the former Yugoslav royal army whom the Nazis appointed to head occupied Serbia and support their plan to exterminate the Jews, to the Serbian Partisans who shielded the Jews (42 n. 11).These problems and scores of others lead one to wonder about what motivated Israeli, a professor of Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to “set straight” the historical account of Croatia's behavior in World War II? His primary intent seems to have been to link the current Croatian state to the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi collaborator Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Israeli should know that the historian's role is not to be judge and jury but to present, objectively and accurately, evidence to support his thesis. Yet, without citing any original documents, he tries to draw a direct line from the Ustaše regime to the present Croatian state by reviewing the failures of government, judiciary, media, and society to extirpate hatred, bigotry, discrimination, and persecution. For example, he criticizes the Croat reluctance or refusal to admit past sins and to seek reconciliation with wartime victims, the lack of interest in hunting down and prosecuting war criminals, and the failure to restore or provide reparations for confiscated Jewish and Serbian property (p. 175). However, Israeli ignores the fact that the state of Israel recognized Croatia on 16 April 1992 and established diplomatic relations on 4 September 1997. Moreover, on 10 October 2001, in a ceremony in Jerusalem, Croatian President Stjepan Mesić apologized to his Israeli counterpart, Moshe Katsav, for all those wronged by Croats during World War II and especially to Jews. On 15 February 2012, Mesić’s successor, Ivo Josipović, in another ceremony in Jerusalem, extended his apologies and those of his government to President Shimon Peres on behalf of the Croatian people for the atrocities and wrongs done to Jews by Croatia's collaboration with Adolf Hitler from 1941 to 1945.Israeli cites a survey showing that 40 percent of Croats today justify Ustaše crimes. Yet he provides no date for the survey and admits he did not verify whether it was conducted by the Zagreb newspaper Večernji list, which published the results. His source of information is not the editor of the Croatian newspaper but a Serbian historian, Cedomir Antic (properly Čedomir Antić), who mentioned it in the Belgrade newspaper Press (16 July 2008). Without any original research and in a roundabout way, Israeli asserts that Croatia—alone among earlier Axis states—did not undergo a process of de-Nazification—or in this case “de-Ustashization” (p. 176). Specifically, he claims that historical revisionism is still widespread in the new Croatia, revealing an attempt to cleanse the Ustaše past or at least to minimize its destructive impact. Israeli claims that Croatians are “denying or diminishing the fate of Serbians and Jews under the Ustasha [sic] rule, checked against overwhelming evidence … [shows an] intention to escape censure and condemnation, … and if Croatian deniers had lived in France [which has a law against Holocaust denial]… they could easily be indicted and convicted” (pp. 176–177). In fact, Croatia has such a law, too (most likely it was a prerequisite for joining the European Union).Israeli claims to know how many Jews and Serbs were killed during the war. However, many contradictory estimates of the number of those who perished in the death camps of Croatia have been put forward. Historians who have seriously examined the question of Jewish and Serbian deaths—for example, Gerald Reitlinger in The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939--1945 (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953), p. 358, and Antun Miletić in “Establishing the Number of Persons Killed in Jasenovac,” in Barry M. Lituchy, ed., Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia: Analyses and Survivor Testimonies (New York: Jasenovac Research Institute, p. 1—demonstrate that even today historians cannot agree on the number of victims who perished during the war. In the case of Yugoslavia, for example, Reitlinger explains that the problem begins with the lack of precise numbers of Jews who were present when the independent Yugoslav Kingdom was founded in 1918 and is compounded by unreliable data on the number of Jews who lost their lives in or survived the Second World War.In summary, Israeli spends too much of an already short book dealing with subjects that are not germane to the alleged subject of his book and for which he offers inadequate documentation. His book favorably compares Serbs to Croats in misleading ways. Any reader who picks up the book in the expectation of gaining insight into the lives of inmates in the two Croatian camps and their daily struggles to survive in the face of hunger, sleep deprivation, beatings, and various diseases will be greatly disappointed. Even though Croatia today is not totally free of Ustaše sympathizers, Israeli's attempt to place a “mark of Cain” on the new generation of Croats is an act of poor judgment and morality.
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