At Croatia’s Jasenovac Camp, Face-to-Face with Horror

Tens of thousands of names are written on the walls of the former Jasenovac camp complex. They are the names of the victims, whose old clothes are on display what is now a memorial site, reinforcing a sense of horror at the conditions in which they were forced to live and die.

The tools used to kill them - axes, hammers, knives - are also on display, testifying as to how they were executed. Photographs of mass killings and open graves clearly reveal what happened from 1941 to 1945 at the camp complex run by the fascist Ustasa movement.

Testimonies of camp survivors are displayed on four monitors, and if there is a bright spot in the entire exhibit, it is the fact that some did survive to testify about what they experienced, but also to continue with their lives.

The entire memorial area is dominated by the Stone Flower monument, rising towards the sky from the flat ground that was once soaked in blood. The path to the monument is made of railroad sleepers from the railroad that used to bring people, crammed into wagons, to their final destination.

Jasenovac is not a pleasant place, but it shows the scale of the crimes that were committed in Croatia during World War II in the name of the nation and the state.

Names of victims listed at the Jasenovac Memorial Site. Photo: Vuk Tesija.

The Ustasa movement called it a concentration and labour camp. But from August 1941 to April 22, 1945, Jasenovac was a death camp where men, women and children were killed because of their religious, ethnic or ideological affiliations, without charge or trial.

So far, 83,145 names of victims have been collected. At least 39,570 men, 23,474 women and 20,101 children under the age of 14 died at the Jasenovac camp complex. However, the...