doiSerbia

Sajmište, Jasenovac, and the social frames of remembering and forgetting

Karge Heike (Chair for the history of Southeastern and Eastern Europe Regensburg University, Regensburg, Germany)

The article discusses the reasons for the construction, in the 1960s, of memorial to the victims of the former camp in Jasenovac in Yugoslavia, although no such memorial was built at the Sajmište site. How should we explain and understand this difference and what do these two sites stand for in Yugoslav discourses about the past? I will argue that the memorial project for Jasenovac was, due to certain developments, seen as a substitute for similar plans at nearly all the former camp locations in Yugoslavia. Because of this substitution, after the mid 1960s none of the other concentration camp sites in the country benefited from federal financing and thus all of them were excluded from having a real chance at being made into a proper memorial site.

Keywords: World War Two, Jasenovac, Sajmište, concentration camps, memory, Yugoslavia, survivor organizations, SUBNOR, war veterans