Јасеновац

Abstract

There are some time and geographical points, determinants before which decency calls solely for silence and bowed head, before which words and our ability to understand grow weary or actually, they lose any meaning. Jasenovac is undoubtedly such a place. Our language has one horrifying word – stratište (a place of execution). Simply, it is a place where anthropological, diluvial evil destroys the most valuable – life. The place whose impeccably unmasked and inevitable horror has not been anywhere else so tersely defined, it seems, as in the words of a Serbian old man addressing his executioner: “My child, do what you must”. Why are we speaking today then, instead of being appropriately silent? Because the victims, the Serbs together with their fellow-citizens – the Jews and the Roma, those eternal culprits behind all evil, the disliked citizens of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), ask for a moment of remembrance. A moment of reverence. A bowed head before this place of execution called Jasenovac. It is because today we, not only as a nation, as a state, but as Homo sapiens, and finally as this scrap of civilization that remained for the mankind, do not have the right to be naive. We are obliged to recognize evil in its inception before it is too late, everywhere, far and wide. It is not the number of the murdered people (and the number is large) that determines the horror of Jasenovac, but the intention behind it. The executors of these crimes, with all the contempt that they deserve everywhere and in every place, were not the most horrible ones even in Jasenovac. The most horrifying is the political thought that sustains the deviance of perpetrators, the intention behind the idea of such places of execution, the pseudo-ideology of obliteration that justifies and redeems the sins of those intoxicated with blood. Nowadays, we do not point the finger at any nation or any religion. It would be an unpardonable simplification and primitivism beneath the dignityof this institution. We merely define ourselves in relation to the crime that happened, since it did happen. We do recognize it and remember it. With the ever present and often betrayed and unsuccessful idea not to let it happen again. To us, it remains to pursue the trace of Marko Miljanov’s mythical sentence, as we cannot offer anything better even nowadays, which reads that heroism means defending oneself from the evil in others, but also defending others from the evil residing in oneself. Vladimir S. Kostić