Croatia has commemorated the victims of a World War II concentration camp where tens of thousands of people perished at the hands of the Nazi-installed puppet regime.
Croatian officials and representatives of Serb, Jewish, Roma and antifascist organisations attended the ceremonies marking 80 years since hundreds of prisoners attempted a breakout on 22 April 1945.
Only 92 people survived the attempt out of some 600 men, according to the Jasenovac memorial centre data.
Prisoners at the camp, known as the Balkan Auschwitz, also included women and children.
Slavko Milanovic, born in 1937, was just a child when he was brought to Jasenovac with his mother, aunt and sister. Milanovic still remembers how prison guards separated children from their mothers.
“When my mother saw that she covered me and my sister with cloths that we used to sleep on,” Milanovic said. “My sister was fragile, she died right there in my mother’s arms.”
Jasenovac, located about 100 kilometres southwest of the capital Zagreb, was the most notorious in a system of camps in the area where victims were rounded up, brutally tortured and executed.
Official Croatian data show that more than 83,000 people were killed in Jasenovac while Serbs say the numbers were much higher, possibly in the hundreds of thousands.
The ceremonies on Tuesday included laying of flowers and wreaths, lighting of candles and a commemorative programme.
Participants walked along a path marked with railway tracks that were used to transport the camp prisoners.
“Such crimes must never be forgotten and what is even more important, they must never be repeated,” said Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.
Plenkovic’s conservative government has in the past faced accusations that it was not doing enough to curb resurging pro-Nazi sentiments in the country, which led to a years-long boycott of the state-run Jasenovac commemoration ceremonies by the Serb and Jewish groups.
“I am extremely pleased that everyone attended,” Ognjen Kraus, who heads an association of Jewish municipalities in Croatia, said.
“The commemoration, after a long while, was as it should be.”
Croatia, now a member of the European Union, was part of the former, Communist-run Yugoslavia after WWII.
The six-member federation broke up in the 1990s in a series of ethnic conflicts, forming today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
