Јасеновац
Jasenovac
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 o...f
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
Keywords:
Jasenovac / The Independent State of Croatia / war crimes / genocide / concentration campsSource:
2017Publisher:
- Београд : Српска академија наука и уметности
Note:
- Српска академија наука и уметности ; књ. 686. Председништво ; књ. 7