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March 9, 2001/Adar 14, 5761, Vol. 53, No.23
Croatian concentration camp documents in D.C.
VLASTA KOVAC
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
ZAGREB, Croatia - Documents from Croatia's most notorious concentration camp, kept in a private home for eight years by a museum curator, are slated to be examined this month in Washington.
The artifacts from 19 tin boxes, now being stored at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, will be examined in the presence of Croatian Embassy officials and the director of the Jasenovac museum, Mate Rupic, according to sources in Croatia.
When the war in Yugoslavia started in 1991 and the Yugoslav army entered Jasenovac, Simo Brdar, a Bosnian Serb who formerly was assistant director of the Jasenovac museum, took the archives to his home in what is the Serb-run portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He kept the trunks with the documents in his home until September 1999, showing them occasionally to foreign news crews.
The trunks contain 2,500 books, 10,000 pages of documents and more than 6,000 letters, photos and postcards, according to Rupic.
During World War II, an estimated tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed at Jasenovac, known as the "Auschwitz of the Balkans."
Unlike most camps, Jasenovac was run not by Germans but by local Croatian fascists. The great majority killed were Serbs, but victims also included Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats.
After it became known that the documents were transported to Washington, the Serbian Orthodox Church issued a statement that "all the most important documents concerning Jasenovac have been removed and taken to a safe place in one of the Serbian monasteries."
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