DEFENDING THE TRUTH ABOUT JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA
(Letter No. 4)
This letter is written and addressed to you by three Jewish survivors of the death camp Jasenovac in the Nazi Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War who are still alive in Serbia:
Cadik Danon,
the architect, who escaped from the Jasenovac concentration camp in 1942
Bozo Svarc
the retired colonel of the Yugoslav Army, who escaped from the Jasenovac concentration camp in the same year
and
Josif Erlih
the retired major of the Yugoslav Army, who was held in Jasenovac to the very bitter end and participated in the break out on 22 of April 1945 when the Croat fascist guards started slaughtering all remaining prisoners
BARRY LITUCHY CAUGHT IN PIRACY
Jasenovac Research Institute under the leadership of Barry Lituchy sued Wanda Schindley and Petar Makara who published a book on the death camp Jasenovac - the Proceedings book of the First International Conference on Jasenovac held at Kingsborough College in 1997. In the court documents, Lituchy and three other plaintiffs constantly refer to it as a pirated book.
They still have to prove this in court. In the meantime, on March 3rd 2006. they (JRI under B. Lituchy) were accused in the periodical of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia and Montenegro of having pirated a capital book on the Holocaust in the former Yugoslavia published by the Jewish Federation in 1952 in Belgrade.
JRI and B. Lituchy canceled what they were preparing to do. In the second issue of their periodical "Jasenovac Research Institute, Vol I, No 2. Summer 2005," on page 9, they proudly announced their “publication of one of the most important studies of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia - "The Crimes of the Fascist Occupants and Their Collaborators Against Jews in Yugoslavia" known simply as “The Black Book”. ("Zlocini fasistickih okupatora i nijihovih saradnika protiv Jevreja u Jugoslaviji").” They added: “It is generally agreed that this work is one of the two most important books on the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia ever produced….”
They did not mention that this book was published by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia many years ago and that the editor was Dr Zdenko Loewentahl. They failed to mention that also when they described the contents of the book. They only mentioned that this study first appeared 53 years ago in an edition officially listed as 4000 copies. . The reader is not informed about who created and published this book.
About the pirated book, they say: ”This edition, with a new preface by Aleksandar Mosic, Barry Lituchy and Danko Vasovic in English and Serbian, consists of three parts: the main text is 195 pages in Serbian; there is a very comprehensive English language summary of 53 pages; plus another 44 pages offer photographs and original documents with English and Serbian captions.”
Of all the listed components of the newly announced book, only the preface is new. Everything else existed already. It was not done by the JRI but by Belgrade Jews after the war.
Were you fooled by this JRI ad?
No, this edition contains basically NOTHING more than the original. Other than the short preface, the only thing new is that the cover of the "new edition" now sports a new owner: "Jasenovac Research Institute, Belgrade - New York 2005."
Everything else was simply photo-copied, including all the photographs and 53-page summary in English.
What we have here is the most blatant violation of copyright one can find. JRI simply copied without first obtaining any right to do so. They took other people's work, doing no work of their own, and stamped all with their own name.
Here is the reaction of the owner of the original work - the Jewish Federation. In their periodical "Bilten, Savez Jevrejskih Opstina Srbije i Crne Gore, broj 3," Belgrade, March 2006, on page 3, Mr. Aleksandar Lebl writes:
PIRATED EDITION OF THE "BLACK BOOK"
“A supposed new edition of a book, originally printed in 1952 and belonging to the Jewish Federation of Yugoslavia, appeared in United States…..The publishers of this edition is Jasenovac Research Institute, and the preface was written by Aleksandar Mosic, Barry Lituchy and Danko R. Vasovic.
“This begs a few questions. First, the Jewish Federation was not informed that there was an intent to reprint this book, let alone were we asked for a permission for such. If they asked us, we would have told them that the Jewish History Museum, in agreement with the President of the Jewish Federation, made a decision to publish a new edition after a most careful review of the original was finished…..
“Our Federation has to decide whether and what action to undertake against the publishers of this pirated edition.
“Second. The publisher claims that the original edition of the "Black Book" which consisted of 4000 copies was not distributed and that only less than 1000 copies were distributed…..The truth is though that the entire edition was distributed, a good part of it abroad, including to Yugoslav diplomatic and consular representatives. The book was hard to find for quite some time, and that was the reason the Jewish History Museum decided to print a new edition….
“Third. There is no organization with a name such as Jasenovac Research Institute registered in Belgrade, as is printed on the cover of the pirated book.
“Fourth. In a JRI periodical they say about the book, "It is an extraordinary work that will be reissued by the JRI in the future and will become the standard text in libraries, universities and Holocaust institutions around the world that it was always meant to be". That is simply NOT true. The "Black Book" has been for a long time now the standard text which can be found in libraries, universities and Holocaust institutions throughout the world.”
(End translation of Aleksandar Lebl’s article)
We do not have many comments to add. What Lituchy and Mosic did is evident: they stole other people’s work and tried hard to conceal it.
Tribute to the Proceedings book
The periodical of the Yugoslav immigrants into Israel “Most” (The Bridge) informed in the April 2006 issue its readers of the publication of the Proceedings book on the First International Conference on the Jasenovac concentration camp. It said that Dr Wanda Schindley and Petar Makara created the book on the basis of the testimonies of twelve survivors of the camp and reports made by about 20 active participants in the Conference.
“These large materials remained unprocessed until 2005 when Wanda Schindley and Petar Makara undertook this work and publish the whole material.”
“Most” reproduced the statement made by the 12 former inmates:
“The twelve of us who by miracle survived Jasenovac and were still alive in October of 1997 described at the Conference the horrors which we suffered or witnessed…..We are thankful to the authors for what they did. By publishing the Proceedings of the Conference, they helped in spreading the truth about Jasenovac, which had met many obstacles almost everywhere except in Israel”.
