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April 4, 2003/Nisan 2 5763, Vol. 55, No. 32
'Forgotten' concentration camp
KATKA KROSNAR
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 Aleksandar Mosic, left, and Slavko Maksimovic stand outside the derelict building they want to convert into a Holocaust Museum on the site of a "forgotten" concentration camp in Belgrade. Photo by Katka Krosnar/JTA |
Mosic, a former board member of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, wants to recreate the Belgrade Fair exhibition ground and thus build a proper memorial to the victims of what he describes as "the forgotten concentration camp" - the Sajmiste camp that the site was turned into during World War II by the occupying Nazis.
Within six months of the camp being set up in December 1941, all 8,000 Jews from Belgrade, as well as from Austria and Czechoslovakia, who had been rounded up and imprisoned there had been transported to gassing trucks and murdered at the site. Most of these were women and children, as thousands of men had been shot dead earlier. None of the Jews sent to the camp survived.
What made Sajmiste unique was its location in clear view of Belgrade's residents.
"It is the only camp in Europe which was so visible; the inmates were not hidden from the view of the rest of the population and that was the intention; to intimidate other Serbs by showing them what was going on inside because Serbs were much more courageous in resisting the Fascists than other nations," says Mosic, chairman of the newly formed Old Fair Memorial Association and author of the book "The Jews in Belgrade."
The first phase of the project would see the surviving tower reconstructed and converted into a Holocaust museum containing documents, testimonies and photographs of lost Jews from Serbia.
"We want to rescue the memory of the camp and its victims," Mosic says. Anyone interested in helping to fund the project can contact Slavko Maksimovic at maksa@eunet.yu.