From: simic@pollux.ccsf.caltech.edu (Petar Simic)
Subject: Re: Irony continues in our history
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 16:03:53 GMT

	Josip Loncaric writes:
>>>
...the Holocaust.  The complicity of Serbia in this crime has been documented
even better than what happened in France, but some Serbians like Mr. Simic
still deny responsibility.

  This line of argument is very ugly.  Mr. Simic's selective memory distorts
what happened in an effort to justify Serbian aggression.  What I'm saying
is that we know (and Mr. Simic has told us many times) what happened in
Croatia in WWII --- but that he is glossing over Serbian complicity
in the Holocaust.  About half of the Jews who perished in Yugoslavia
in WWII had lived in Serbia --- but Mr. Simic is fond of forgetting.

<<<

  	My grandmother and her five kids had to flee Kosovo (southern Serbia)
 when the war started, because the local Albanians who took ower the province
 when Hitler came started killing the local Serbs (men), and my grandfather
 had to flee. She had some gold and house which she sold and they left for
 Kragujevac (average size town in Serbia proper). The family spent rest of
 the war there, accepting in their small house two Jewish families who where
 hiding from Nazies, and were eventually transfered to a safer place by
 the Serbian royalists. The story about these times passed to me by my
 grandmother and my mother is my personal insight into Serbia under Nazi
 occupation, and the predominantly friendly attitude of Serbs toward Jews.
 This is about personal responsibility part of your comment.

	As far as "selective memories" and "justifications", let me remaind you
 that we are discussing the historical facts, and it is not my intention to
 justify anything. Serbia proper was occupied by the Germans. Regular
 Serbian army was in the woods traying to organize anti-fascistic
 resistance. Irregulars (partisans) were in the hills doing the same.
 The overall feeling of the population was violently anti-fascist. The
 overal feeling toward Jews was traditionally friendly. The only organized
 killing machine were German divisions who executed several thousands of
 Jews, and deported to Croatia and Germany the rest. There, they were
 eventually executed by fascists. In Serbia, Germans also have executed
 many thousands of Serbian civilians in retributions for frequent guerilla
 attacks on them. Hundred civilians for one Germans solder was the Hitlers
 rule *for Serbia*. If there were cases of Serbs from local administration
 doing wrong to Jews, such cases were as rare as the circumstances would
 allow, and can not be  * by any strech of imagination *  (or available 
 historic documentation) compared to the share Germans have for attrocities
 against Jews in Serbia, or with what Croatian fascists did to Jews and Serbs
 in their Croatian independent state.
  
	On the other hand, Croats runed their own independent Croatian state 
 (NDH), they had their own and rather numerous fascistic army (ustashas)
 members of which fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Germans in as remote
 places as Russia, they had their publicly proclaimed policy of exterminating
 Serbs and Jews, and they had highly efficient state runed death-camps in 
 which systematic extermination of civilians (just because they are Serbs or 
 Jews) took place. Not by Germans, but, by Croatian fascists. Any credible
 historic document about the Holocaust in this region will testify to this. 


>>...Croats know what Ustashe had done, and reject it.  Some Serbs like
Mr. Simic have yet to begin to come to terms with their own ugly
history.
<<

	First, you do not seem to know, and reject you do, to accept. For
 example, last time you claimed that the "best available estimate" of the
 Serbian loss in the WWII was about 500,000, while the well known and
 numerous German, Italian and British documents, testimonies written by
 direct witnesses of the crimes, and schoolary studies by the main-stream
 domestic (YU) and foreign historians (partial list would be compiled and
 posted if requested), estimates the number to be over one million [*]. The
 lawish number of these were systematically murdered in the Croatian
 concentration camps. Not by Germans.

	Second, Croats have been mostly speared (by the Tito's communist as
 their way of keeping country together) from coming to terms with their
 crimes against the humanity (unlike Germans). The fact that some still invest
 enormous energy in trying to racionalize this self-denial makes me deeply
 sad.

	On the other hand, Serbs are generally proud of their history,
 and their massive anti-fascist rebelion and positive conduct in the WWII
 makes them even more so. Your phrase, "their own ugly history", I do not
 understand, and could accept only as an insult which comes from deep 
 ignorance (at best), or from pure hate. 

	[If the case you would insist, it would not be hard to compile and
 post here number of references on the Holocaust in Balkans during the WWII
 and let the documents speak for themselves]

	------------------------

	Petar.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish