DEFENDING THE TRUTH ABOUT JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA
(Letter No. 9)
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
Lituchy’s aid in Belgrade dismissed
The Jewish Federation in Serbia and Montenegro dismissed Aleksandar Mosic, Lituchy’s main Belgrade assistant, from his post of President and member of the Memorial Commission of the Federation. Mosic takes part in the Board of the Jasenovac Research Institute (JRI) and is paid Editor in Chief of the JRI’s periodical.
Together with Antun Miletic, who is Chairman of JRI’s Honorary Advisory Board, Mosic plays a pivotal role in the law suit initiated by Lituchy against the editors of the Proceedings book on the First International Conference on the death camp Jasenovac in Croatia. Among 32 active participants, Mosic and Miletic were the only ones who registered copyright on their short presentations included in the Proceedings book and sued the editors for infringement. On the bases of this two individual suits, the Eastern District Court of New York ruled for a preliminary injunction of the Proceedings book.
The alleged unauthorized use of their papers of a total of 11 pages in the Proceedings book thus deprived the English reading public in US and elsewhere of the description of the horrors of Jasenovac provided by 12 survivors on 159 pages of the Proceedings book.
The dismissal of Mosic was decided on the 14th of May by the Executive Committee of the Federation, which includes representatives of all Jewish ommunities in Serbia and Montenegro. All members of the EC voted for the decision except one. In passing it, the Executive Committee declared that the truth about Jasenovac should be spread around the world and that Mosic harmed the achievement of this objective.
Jasenovac death camp, consisting of several separate units in eastern Croatia, was run exclusively by the Croat cleric-fascist Ustashas who established the Nazi “Independent State of Croatia” with German support during World War Two. In Jasenovac alone they murdered about 23,000 Jews, nearly 70,000 Romas and several hundred thousand Serbs in the most brutal ways. Jasenovac was more gresome than Auschwitz where the Nazi Germans did the mass killing in an ndustrial way. The Croatian Ustashas were killing mainly manually. They used knifes to slit the throats of their victims or blunt instrument, mallets and iron rods to brake their skulls. Only occasionally would they use bullets and furnaces.
After the war, there was a conspiracy to hide the horrors of Jasenovac. The Vatican and émigré Ustashas who escaped with its help used every device to conceal what happened there. An early book on the horrors of Jasenovac, written by the survivor Djordje Milisha after the liberation, was prohibited in Coatia on the request of the representative of the Vatican. The Croatian communist and the Yugoslav leader Tito, of Croat origin, did not do enough to induce the Croat population to face the full truth. Instead of it, they promoted a policy of reconciliation under the slogan of “Brotherhood and Unity,” which failed at the end. A monument on the site of Jasenovac was erected with considerable delay, and Tito never visited the camp. Franjo Tudjman, the president of the secessionist Republic of Croatia, established in 1991 with the support of Germany and USA, dismissed Jasenovac as a myth created by the Serbs and the Jews. His election campaign was financially helped by Ustasha émigrés.
After all this, nobody should wonder why many Belgrade Jews and informed Serbs consider that Barry Lituchy committed a moral sin by suing people who produced the Proceedings book on the First International Conference on Jasenovac, after his failing to do it during eight years. The Conference was held in 1997 at the Kingsborough College in New York. Lituchy was one of the organizers, and he collected some papers, promising a book which never appeared, not even by this very day in May, although he announced that it will e on the book shelves in April 2006.
Lituchy did not accept our offer for a peaceful solution which we made on the 4th of April of this year. We proposed that Mosic and Miletic give permission for the inclusion of their presentations, in the Proceedings book of Wanda Schindley that is under injunction, in exchange for the permission of the three of us to Lituchy to include our testimonies in the book he announced. The Proceedings book would thus be liberated and the second promised one could be distributed without restrictions from our part. We would have two books on the Jasenovac Conference. However we have none now. Our offer expired after 35 days on May 8th. Only one of the Plaintiffs, Joe Friendly, representing Memory Films Production, applauded our offer and declared at the day of the deadline that he shared with us the vision of two books on the shelves of stores and of all litigation stopped. Lituchy and the two Belgrade bulwarks of his court action, Mosic and iletic, did not accept our offer.
Mosic paid for it by his dismissal from functions in the Jewish Federation. Twentyfive Belgrade Jewish survivors appealed in vain to him to withdraw his suit. He earned their disdain. They consider his siding with Lituchy’s court action to the very end as immoral and as dishonoring the victims of Jasenovac.
By the act of dismissing Mosic, the Jewish organization of a whole nation condemned Litchy and what he did.
At the same meeting of May 14th, the Executive Committee decided to sue Lituchy’s JRI for pirating a book of capital importance that was published by the Federation in 1952 and 1957. It described and documented the crimes against the Jews committed in Yugoslavia during WW2 by the fascist occupants and their collaborators. JRI made a reprint of the book without asking and obtaining permission from the Federation. JRI’s only contribution to the reprint was a new foreword. Everything else was copied from the edition in 1957, made by the Federation. It will not ask an injunction of the reprint. It will sue JRI for compensation.
