holocaust
Six former Yugoslav states are planning a memorial site in Auschwitz
An exhibition and memorial site is to be set up in the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. photo
© Kay Nietfeld/dpa
In 1963, a “Yugoslav pavilion” was set up as an exhibition in Auschwitz. However, after the collapse of Yugoslavia, it was dissolved. A memorial should fill the gap.
Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Montenegro want to jointly create an exhibition there about the deportation and murder of Jews and other victims from their region during the Nazi era. Some of these states broke away from Yugoslavia in the 1990s after bloody wars.
In April 1941, the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia was occupied and dissolved by Nazi Germany and its allies. The deportation and murder of Jews began there in the summer. According to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, 66,000 of the 80,000 Yugoslav Jews were murdered.
Most of the approximately 20,000 people from this region who were deported to Auschwitz arrived in Block 17, which prisoners had to build. In 1963, a “Yugoslav Pavilion” was set up in this block as an exhibition. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, this exhibition was closed in 2009. In 2021, Austria opened a permanent exhibition there.
“This historic agreement (of the six states) fills a gap, a lack of memory in the very place where these horrors took place,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement. As the UN organization responsible for education about the Holocaust and genocide, UNESCO is the custodian of this agreement.