A surprisingly great excitement was caused by the front page of NIN, which the President of the Assembly of Serbia, Maja Gojković, says represents "the most terrible insult for Serbia, as well as for all the victims of Nazism, the victims' families and their descendants..." Mrs. Gojković certainly has the right to speak on behalf of oneself, the party to which one belongs or the ruling coalition, but not "on behalf of the victims of Nazism".
The front page of NIN does not depict the victims of the concentration camps, but the cynical inscription on the gates of the Auschwitz and Dachau camps. I was in Auschwitz as a child a little older than 15 years old, I was taken under the gate with the inscription Arbeit macht frei. At the gate of Buchenwald, which I was also in, there is a cynical inscription to each his own. I wrote a whole book about that inscription, the novel Wrought Iron Letters, for several years I dealt with the topic of concentration camp gates.
Aleksandar Martinović, Ivica Dačić, Zorana Mihajlović immediately spoke, and there will be dozens more similar statements and tweets on that occasion. Dacic is disgusted that NIN is in foreign ownership; Mihajlović exclaims that it would have been better if they had attacked Boris Tadić because of the contract with FIAT, as if it had something to do with German concentration camps. Many naive, but well-intentioned contemporaries, in their desire to show and prove their anti-fascism, unaware of the society in which they found themselves, sing in the same choir. All this diverts attention from the problems expressed by strikes in Serbia in recent weeks.
New number of NIN on sale tomorrow!https://t.co/VQXe5KlHGh pic.twitter.com/tVJlw3Bz3n
- NIN (@NedeljnikNIN) July 19, 2017
For me, the Holocaust is not an unquestionable, unique holy place. This is not just my opinion, because every year, and sometimes twice a year, I am in the Buchenwald Memorial Center, this year I have already been there, in November I will be in Dachau, I know what my comrades, former prisoners of the camp, who are still lives.
I could cite dozens of examples from history when entire nations were killed. The first terrible example is recorded in the Bible in chapter 15 of the first book of the prophet Samuel, where he demands from the Jewish king Saul in the name of the Lord God to exterminate the Amalekites, to kill "... men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys". Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who happens to be a Jew who escaped the camps, cites three examples of the extermination of peoples.
Classical Athens, for many the concept of the first democracy, after it succeeded in conquering a competing state on the island of Milos, exterminated its entire population. During World War I, modern Turkey tried to exterminate the Armenians on its territory. Hitler's technique of extermination of Jews and Roma must be recognized by the Guinness record for the number of people killed and the introduction of gas chambers instead of individual murders. If I had to choose between gassing in Auschwitz or being slowly butchered by the Ustashas or Chetniks with a knife or hacked to death with an ax, I would certainly choose a faster death.
Based on my fate, I allow myself to be cynical and reject whining and pathos as unworthy of the seriousness of the subject. I often had the opportunity to speak about concentration camps in Germany and Austria, less often in Serbia. Based on that, I think that the generation of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of criminals and victims should calmly and concretely refer to mass murders, regardless of whether we call them Holocaust, genocide, Shoah or otherwise. Phrasing is counterproductive.
Attempts at anti-fascist education in Yugoslavia did not prevent concentration camps from being built again in Bosnia, nor mass murders with fascistic elements in the Yugoslav wars. These are fresher memories than leading the hostages from the Cannon Sheds to be shot, including my father, or driving Jews from the Staro sajmište camp through the center of Belgrade, including my mother, in trucks with soul-sucking trucks.
I would like the energy of the critics of the front page of NIN to be concentrated on the often promised resolution of the future of the location we call the Old Fairground. On the famous model of Belgrade on the water, the territory where the former camp is located is indicated by neutral green, and the famous tower that we are told will be renovated and will survive could be shown there.
NIN tried to warn about problems in Serbia, working conditions in foreign companies. The fact is that Serbia is advertised to foreign investors as a society with cheap labor, that there are often no collective agreements, that unions are weak, and that the first serious strikes have begun. NIN's front page would have done well to draw attention to that, and it failed, because it obviously served to falsely and hypocritically beat the chest with anti-fascism and divert attention from the topic of strikes that it wanted to point out. One can argue about its aesthetics, whether the metaphor is missed or not, but this moralizing would be funny if it weren't so sad.
It is interesting to anyone who thinks that, based on that front page, NIN compares today's Serbia to Nazi concentration camps. If I hadn't heard what Mrs. Gojković and the members of her choir had to say about it, it certainly wouldn't have occurred to me. And unlike them, I was in Auschwitz.
(DEUTSCH WELLE)
Bonus video:
