| New expanded Jasenovac Memorial opened
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President Stipe Mesic of Croatia ( R ) and Croatian Prime minister Ivo Sanader at the glass wall bearing the names of concentration camp prisoners at the newly opened museum in Jasenovac
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JASENOVAC (EJP)--- Several Croatian government officials and Jewish, Serb and Roma representatives attended Monday the ceremonial opening of the expanded memorial at the site of the former infamous Jasenovac concentration camp where almost 70,000 people died during WWII.
Massive glass walls are bearing the names of the 70,000 concentration camp prisoners — among them 18,812 children under the age of 14 - were killed in the camp located 80 km east of Zagreb. “The objective is to give back identity and dignity to each victim,” said Natasa Jovicic, director of the Memorial.
Mirjana Radman, a Jew, who was 10 years old when detained here, could not hold back her tears after she toured the memorial whose entrance is a simple wooden fence — as it was in the camp. "It's just like I was there again. Dark, scary, painful."
“They killed Jews only because they were Jews, Serbs because they were Serbs, Romas because they were Romas, Croatians only because they were anti-fasicsts and opposed to the regime,” said Vladimir Seks, president of the Croatian parliament.
The official ceremony was broadcast live by the Croatian tv.
“This memorial serves as a lesson about what happens to people and peoples when they forget that no goal can justify the crime," Croatian Prime minister Ivo Sanader said.
"Today's Croatia does not want to stay silent about the dark pages of its past."
Croatian President Stipe Mesic said future generations must learn that the pro-Nazi regime was "a cronicle of mad, but organized, orgy of killings."
The Jasenovac concentration camp was founded by the pro-nazi Ustashi regime as a place of imprisonment, forced labour and the mass execution of Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croats, Communists and anti-fascists between 1941-1945, all those who opposed the regime.
A memorial was first built on the site in 1966. The “Flower Monument” by Bogdan Bogdanovic was erected in memory of all the victims killed in the concentration camp.
Bogdanović said about his monumental sculpture: “The design as a whole, the selected elements and their correspondence with each other should not evoke a picture of horror and terror, but the monument, through its basic metaphor, should express a noble, eternal human truth that life is indestructible, that it is stronger than death. And so the basic symbol is precisely a flower, the symbol of eternal renewal.”
New work on the center was financed by the Croatian government with support from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
The 1990s nationalist government of the late President Franjo Tudjman sought to diminish the Jasenovac crimes and revisionists put the number of those killed there at 35,000. Some Serbs claim 700,000 of them lost lives.
Independent researches today estimate between 56,000 and 97,000 died at Jasenovac.
Arthur S. Berger from the Washington's Holocaust Museum, said the government's efforts on the new memorial show that is starting to honestly face its past.
In October 2005, the Republic of Croatia became a member of the ‘Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research’, while the Croatian ministry of culture appointed the Jasenovac Memorial Site to be responsible for the project of including educational content in the education system of Croatia.
The memorial also contains an education centre for teaching about genocide, the Holocaust and every form of racial, religious and other type of intolerance. “It is part of the active, international cooperation with other similar memorials and museums in Europe and the USA,” says Natasa Jovicic..
“Teaching about genocide, the Holocaust and the suffering of anti-fascists is the starting point for working with schoolchildren in order to help them understand and learn to accept differences, and in that way overcome xenophobia, racism, sexism, ethnic or religious exclusivity,” she adds.
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