This remarkable book about Yugoslavia gives genocide a human face
On 6 April 1941, Hitler's armies marched into Yugoslavia, responding to a military coup in which Serbian officers had overthrown a pro-Nazi government, thus endangering German strategy in the Balkans. In less than a fortnight the country capitulated, overwhelmed by the Germans' superior firepower. Peripheral regions of the multinational state were immediately gobbled up by neighbouring countries while the Germans split the core into two, reducing Serbia to a rump and bringing in an exiled fascist, Ante Pavelić, to rule over an enlarged, independent Croatia. The new state's two million Orthodox Christian Serbs, 30,000 Gypsies and 45,000 Jews had hitherto lived more or less peaceably alongside its six million Roman Catholic Croats. All this was about to change.
Pavelić, the self-styled "Leader", declared that Croatia had to be ethnically cleansed of these minorities, and recruited gangs of young, often unemployed men to form a paramilitary movement, the Ustashe, whose main task would be to carry out his drive for racial purity. Pavelić introduced racial laws, depriving the minorities, including the Serbs, of their civil rights. Then the Ustashe set about a campaign of genocidal violence that exterminated most of the Gypsies and Jews and brought about the deaths of an estimated 300,000 Serbs. Many of the victims were killed in atrocious circumstances, beaten to death with clubs and hammers, crowded into Orthodox churches that were then set alight, or forced into makeshift concentration camps where they died of malnutrition, or from deliberately introduced diseases, or from the nightly beatings carried out by the Ustashe.
The memory of these terrible events outlasted the regime and lived on into the 1990s, where they played a baleful role in the conflicts that broke out once more between Serbs and Croats during the dissolution of Yugoslavia following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe: 1941, in the words of the title of this book, is thus a "year that keeps returning".
The book's author, Slavko Goldstein, born in 1928 to Jewish parents in Sarajevo, grew up in the town of Karlovac, where his father kept a bookshop that became something of a cultural centre. Not long after the German invasion, when Pavelić had met Hitler and been given the green light for genocide, Goldstein's father Ivo was arrested and disappeared, eventually murdered by the Ustashe. Goldstein was saved when his mother enlisted him in the widespread and effective partisan movement that began operating in the former Yugoslavia within a few months of the invasion.
After the war he became a journalist, founded a publishing house, wrote screenplays, involved himself in post-communist politics, but above all researched in archives and libraries in a number of countries, interviewed many eyewitnesses, and tracked down numerous life-histories of those involved on both sides of the conflict, including former Ustashe members.
Unlike most such memoirs, his book does not focus solely on the sufferings of the victims, or treat their persecutors, torturers and murderers as anonymous, faceless or inhuman. The author knew many of the Ustashe butchers personally: he had played table tennis with them in his youth, or chatted with them in the street. In one personal history after another, the murderers appear as human beings, and in many cases as morally ambivalent rather than one-dimensionally evil. The police chief who helped Goldstein escape was also responsible for sending many to their death at the horrific concentration camp in Jasenovac – and was far from exceptional in this regard. It is this book's achievement to give genocide a human face.
Pavelić had proportionately about as much support in pre-war Croatia as Oswald Mosley did in pre-war Britain, and Goldstein makes clear again and again the reluctance, distaste and disapproval of the majority of Croats for his campaign of genocide. But it had its effect. In one of many telling stories, he recounts how the Ustashe descended on the village of Blagaj in early May 1941 and rounded up and shot 400 Serbs from the district, many from the neighbouring hamlet of Veljun, for their supposed part in a non-existent uprising against the regime. A small number of Croats from Blagaj assisted in the massacre. When the partisans attacked the village in September 1942, Serbian widows set fire to a third of the houses in Blagaj in revenge. In the following years myth and memory provoked continuing bitterness until Blagaj became identified retrospectively with the Ustashe, and Veljun with the Serb "Chetniks".
In 1991, conflict broke out again between the villages, part of the wider ethnic hatred and violence that was now gripping the area as the communist state of Yugoslavia collapsed. The inhabitants of Blagaj were expelled and most of the houses razed. In 1995, as the conflict between Serbia and Croatia reached its height, the same happened to Veljun. After an enforced peace returned, some of the villagers went back to rebuild their lives. But when the inhabitants of Veljun tried to hold a ceremony at the memorial to the Serb victims in Blagaj, a crowd of a hundred or so Croats turned up to block their way, while a Serb urinated on the mass grave to laughter and applause as the police looked silently on: 1941 was neither forgotten nor forgiven on either side.
Goldstein recounts many such incidents from the 1990s, detailing the desecration and destruction of memorials to the various victims of the conflicts of half a century before. Memory, often embellished or distorted, fuelled the desire for revenge. The advent of Tito's communist regime in 1945 did little to improve matters, since its attempt to bring the perpetrators of the ethnic violence to justice was subordinated to its drive to eliminate real and potential enemies of the Communist party. Further bitterness was caused by Tito's extermination of at least 70,000 alleged Ustashe troops and supposed Serbian, Slovenian and Bosnian collaborators at the end of the war. Not surprisingly, Goldstein rejects the view that Titoism, despite the fact that it broke with Stalinism in 1948, was "communism with a human face". And he indicts it forcefully for failing to confront the events of 1941, suppressing them rather than trying to exorcise them by bringing them out into the open.
While providing some details, however, Goldstein perhaps says too little about the role of the Catholic church in the events of 1941. Some Catholic priests and especially a few Franciscan friars encouraged the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs to their brand of the Christian faith, and a small number disgraced their religion by egging on the murder squads who butchered those who refused. Goldstein is too kind to Archbishop Stepinac, who was slow to distance himself from these events. At the end of the war, when Pavelić escaped across the border to Italy, he was sheltered by the Vatican before emigrating to Argentina. Seriously wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by an agent of the Yugoslav Communist party in 1957, he moved to Spain, where he was protected by Franco's dictatorship; he never recovered and died in 1959.
The Croatia he left behind is very different from the one he ruled. Ethnic hatreds incited by bitter memories of 1941 remain, but the efforts of men such as Slavko Goldstein to exorcise them through open and honest reconstruction of the events of the war are slowly bearing fruit. Scepticism and distance are the necessary weapons in this struggle. As he writes in conclusion, the 20th century was "the graveyard of great ideals. It taught us that ideals are most often a seductive chimera, and that doubt is not a fatal weakness but a necessary defence against fatal beliefs".
• Richard J Evans's The Third Reich at War is published by Penguin. Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.
On 6 April 1941, Hitler's armies marched into Yugoslavia, responding to a military coup in which Serbian officers had overthrown a pro-Nazi government, thus endangering German strategy in the Balkans. In less than a fortnight the country capitulated, overwhelmed by the Germans' superior firepower. Peripheral regions of the multinational state were immediately gobbled up by neighbouring countries while the Germans split the core into two, reducing Serbia to a rump and bringing in an exiled fascist, Ante Pavelić, to rule over an enlarged, independent Croatia. The new state's two million Orthodox Christian Serbs, 30,000 Gypsies and 45,000 Jews had hitherto lived more or less peaceably alongside its six million Roman Catholic Croats. All this was about to change.
Pavelić, the self-styled "Leader", declared that Croatia had to be ethnically cleansed of these minorities, and recruited gangs of young, often unemployed men to form a paramilitary movement, the Ustashe, whose main task would be to carry out his drive for racial purity. Pavelić introduced racial laws, depriving the minorities, including the Serbs, of their civil rights. Then the Ustashe set about a campaign of genocidal violence that exterminated most of the Gypsies and Jews and brought about the deaths of an estimated 300,000 Serbs. Many of the victims were killed in atrocious circumstances, beaten to death with clubs and hammers, crowded into Orthodox churches that were then set alight, or forced into makeshift concentration camps where they died of malnutrition, or from deliberately introduced diseases, or from the nightly beatings carried out by the Ustashe.
The memory of these terrible events outlasted the regime and lived on into the 1990s, where they played a baleful role in the conflicts that broke out once more between Serbs and Croats during the dissolution of Yugoslavia following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe: 1941, in the words of the title of this book, is thus a "year that keeps returning".
The book's author, Slavko Goldstein, born in 1928 to Jewish parents in Sarajevo, grew up in the town of Karlovac, where his father kept a bookshop that became something of a cultural centre. Not long after the German invasion, when Pavelić had met Hitler and been given the green light for genocide, Goldstein's father Ivo was arrested and disappeared, eventually murdered by the Ustashe. Goldstein was saved when his mother enlisted him in the widespread and effective partisan movement that began operating in the former Yugoslavia within a few months of the invasion.
After the war he became a journalist, founded a publishing house, wrote screenplays, involved himself in post-communist politics, but above all researched in archives and libraries in a number of countries, interviewed many eyewitnesses, and tracked down numerous life-histories of those involved on both sides of the conflict, including former Ustashe members.
Unlike most such memoirs, his book does not focus solely on the sufferings of the victims, or treat their persecutors, torturers and murderers as anonymous, faceless or inhuman. The author knew many of the Ustashe butchers personally: he had played table tennis with them in his youth, or chatted with them in the street. In one personal history after another, the murderers appear as human beings, and in many cases as morally ambivalent rather than one-dimensionally evil. The police chief who helped Goldstein escape was also responsible for sending many to their death at the horrific concentration camp in Jasenovac – and was far from exceptional in this regard. It is this book's achievement to give genocide a human face.
Pavelić had proportionately about as much support in pre-war Croatia as Oswald Mosley did in pre-war Britain, and Goldstein makes clear again and again the reluctance, distaste and disapproval of the majority of Croats for his campaign of genocide. But it had its effect. In one of many telling stories, he recounts how the Ustashe descended on the village of Blagaj in early May 1941 and rounded up and shot 400 Serbs from the district, many from the neighbouring hamlet of Veljun, for their supposed part in a non-existent uprising against the regime. A small number of Croats from Blagaj assisted in the massacre. When the partisans attacked the village in September 1942, Serbian widows set fire to a third of the houses in Blagaj in revenge. In the following years myth and memory provoked continuing bitterness until Blagaj became identified retrospectively with the Ustashe, and Veljun with the Serb "Chetniks".
In 1991, conflict broke out again between the villages, part of the wider ethnic hatred and violence that was now gripping the area as the communist state of Yugoslavia collapsed. The inhabitants of Blagaj were expelled and most of the houses razed. In 1995, as the conflict between Serbia and Croatia reached its height, the same happened to Veljun. After an enforced peace returned, some of the villagers went back to rebuild their lives. But when the inhabitants of Veljun tried to hold a ceremony at the memorial to the Serb victims in Blagaj, a crowd of a hundred or so Croats turned up to block their way, while a Serb urinated on the mass grave to laughter and applause as the police looked silently on: 1941 was neither forgotten nor forgiven on either side.
Goldstein recounts many such incidents from the 1990s, detailing the desecration and destruction of memorials to the various victims of the conflicts of half a century before. Memory, often embellished or distorted, fuelled the desire for revenge. The advent of Tito's communist regime in 1945 did little to improve matters, since its attempt to bring the perpetrators of the ethnic violence to justice was subordinated to its drive to eliminate real and potential enemies of the Communist party. Further bitterness was caused by Tito's extermination of at least 70,000 alleged Ustashe troops and supposed Serbian, Slovenian and Bosnian collaborators at the end of the war. Not surprisingly, Goldstein rejects the view that Titoism, despite the fact that it broke with Stalinism in 1948, was "communism with a human face". And he indicts it forcefully for failing to confront the events of 1941, suppressing them rather than trying to exorcise them by bringing them out into the open.
While providing some details, however, Goldstein perhaps says too little about the role of the Catholic church in the events of 1941. Some Catholic priests and especially a few Franciscan friars encouraged the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs to their brand of the Christian faith, and a small number disgraced their religion by egging on the murder squads who butchered those who refused. Goldstein is too kind to Archbishop Stepinac, who was slow to distance himself from these events. At the end of the war, when Pavelić escaped across the border to Italy, he was sheltered by the Vatican before emigrating to Argentina. Seriously wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by an agent of the Yugoslav Communist party in 1957, he moved to Spain, where he was protected by Franco's dictatorship; he never recovered and died in 1959.
The Croatia he left behind is very different from the one he ruled. Ethnic hatreds incited by bitter memories of 1941 remain, but the efforts of men such as Slavko Goldstein to exorcise them through open and honest reconstruction of the events of the war are slowly bearing fruit. Scepticism and distance are the necessary weapons in this struggle. As he writes in conclusion, the 20th century was "the graveyard of great ideals. It taught us that ideals are most often a seductive chimera, and that doubt is not a fatal weakness but a necessary defence against fatal beliefs".
• Richard J Evans's The Third Reich at War is published by Penguin. Reported by guardian.co.uk 9 hours ago.