How Holocaust Memory was Hijacked in Post-Communist States

The buildings are crumbling, some have turned into small businesses - there is a car mechanic shop, a bodega, a storage facility of some kind, an abandoned, overgrown and depressing-looking children's playground, and an office of the ruling political party. The shiny new Usce shopping centre glitters through the treetops. The story of the Semlin camp, as well as that of the larger Holocaust in Serbia, remains almost entirely outside of Serbian public memory.

And yet, Holocaust imagery is everywhere. In 2014, the Historical Museum of Serbia put on a highly-publicised exhibition entitled 'In the Name of the People - Political Repression in Serbia 1944-1953', which promised to display new historical documents and evidence of communist crimes, ranging from assassinations, kidnappings and detentions in camps to collectivisation, political trials and repression.

What the exhibition actually showed, however, were random and completely decontextualised photographs of "victims of communism", which included innocent people but also many proven fascist collaborators, members of the quisling government, right-wing militias, and the Axis-allied Chetnik movement.

But the most stunning visual artefact was a well-known photograph of prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp, including Elie Wiesel, taken by US soldier Harry Miller at the camp's liberation in April 1945. In the Belgrade exhibition, this canonic image was displayed in the section devoted to a communist-era camp for political prisoners on the Adriatic island of Goli Otok. The exhibition described the display as "the example of living conditions of Goli Otok prisoners".

Even after this misrepresentation was exposed, the Buchenwald photograph remained on display when I visited the...