Task Force For International Cooperation On Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research

Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in Croatia

International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012:

The official commemoration was held on 27 January in the Croatian Parliament where the posters of the competition Keeping the Memory Alive were displayed. Boris Sprem, the President of the Parliament, honored the victims in his speech, and told that their suffering revealed „how short the distance is from contempt and discrimination to hatred and crime". On 25 January, Ivo Josipovic, the Croatian President, opened the Shoah Academy established by the Jewish Community of Zagreb, and on 27 January gave a lecture to high-school students in Zadar.

Education and Teacher Training Agency organised its annual seminar Teaching about the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity, for Croatian primary and secondary-school teachers, 25-27 January, in Zagreb and Jasenovac Memorial Site. Senior officials attended the opening. Zeljko Jovanovic, the Minister of Science, Education and Sports, Andrea Zlatar Violic, the Minister of Culture, and Zrinka Vrabec Mojzes, the representative of the Croatian President, accentuated in their speeches the importance of educating the youth about the Holocaust and genocide in the process of the development of democratic culture and the respect of human rights.

The annual seminar is an excellent opportunity for Croatian teachers to broaden their knowledge, learn how to deal with the issue of Holocaust in their teaching, become involved in international projects for schools, and share and connect with others, nationally and internationally. This year, besides teachers from Croatian schools and national experts (dr. Ivo Goldstein, Naida Mihal Brandl, Loranda Miletic), several international experts took part in the seminar (dr. Chava Baruch, Yad Vashem, Emma O'Brien, Institute of Education of the University of London, and dr. Wolf Kaiser, House of the Wannsee Conference). For this occasion, the protocol of the Wannsee Conference was translated and published at the Education and Teacher Training Agency web site. The 2^nd day of the seminar took place in Jasenovac Memorial Site, where the curators guided the group through the permanent exhibition and the camp area, and held workshops and lectures, according to the program.

Education Centre of Jasenovac Memorial Site organised an exhibition of posters made by school-children that was the result of the cooperation between Education and Teacher Training Agency and Yad Vashem. The participants were eight primary and secondary vocational schools - the teachers and students who accepted the invitation to participate in the Poster Project - as a part of their extra-curricular activities in school. Some of the posters dealt with local history, not only suffering but also friendship and the saving of children and adults during the Holocaust, some were related to the issues of Jewish property, and some of them very successfully presented Jasenovac as not only a place of suffering, but also a symbol of hope and reconciliation. The exhibition will be displayed later in Zagreb, during the Jewish Film Festival in May 2012.

The Education Centre also opened the exhibition Awakened Flower, and displayed the materials related to the construction of the Flower Monument in 1966, with the original sketches by Bogdan Bogdanović, an architect and author of the Monument, including photographic materials made later, and students' works made during their visits to the Memorial Site and the Education Centre. The Flower Monument, dedicated to the victims of genocide and the Holocaust, and the antifascists who perished in Jasenovac during the Second World War, was illuminated, and ad-hoc photographing of the Flower Monument took place.

The posters of the competition Keeping the Memory Alive are displayed in the Croatian State Archives, and the exhibition will stay open to the public by the end of February.

Croatia began its cooperation with the Task Force in 2001. In November 2005, during the Chairmanship of the Republic of Poland, the Republic of Croatia became a full member at the plenary session in Krakow.

Acquiring full membership of the ITF was a great acknowledgement to the Republic of Croatia for all the efforts that it is undertaking in fostering democracy, tolerance and the fight against antisemitism.

With its membership of the Task Force, the Republic of Croatia has significantly advanced its activities in the field of research, remembrance and education about the Holocaust. Through projects in the fields of research, museology and education, strong cooperation has been established between institutions in the Republic of Croatia and Yad Vashem (Israel), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USA), the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (USA), the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USA), the Anne Frank House (The Netherlands) and numerous other institutions in countries that are Task Force members.

This cooperation has increased the number of projects related to research, remembrance of and education about the Holocaust, which is evident from an ever-increasing number of annual project proposals from the Republic of Croatia that apply for co-financing with the Task Force.

We are confident that our participation in the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research will continue to have a positive effect on promotion of human rights and democracy in the Republic of Croatia.

Education

Although since World War Two, pupils and students have learned about the Nazi and Ustasha regimes in History curricula in primary and secondary schools and universities, teaching was significantly enhanced with the adoption of the National Programme for Human Rights Education in 1999. It defines the aim of teaching about the Holocaust as not only to learn about and preserve the memory of the period of unprecedented suffering but also to reflect on what each individual should do to prevent Antisemitism, intolerance and any crime against humanity.

Holocaust education was additionally enhanced by the 2003 Decision of the Ministry of Education and Sports to establish the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity which calls for the commemoration of January 27th and cross-curricular teaching on the topic.  Since 2004, around 500 teachers have been trained at national (on January 27th), regional and international seminars and some 200 at different US Holocaust Museums including the Jewish Foundation of the Righteous in New York, as well as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and in different Council of Europe member states.

Education in Croatia

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The Ministry of Science, Education and Sports and The Education and Teacher Training Agency, in co-operation with different international organisations, have developed, distributed to schools, and made available on The Ministry's website (www.mzos.hr) additional teaching materials on the topic of the Holocaust:

• ITF Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust, 2005,
• Teaching about the Holocaust, a resource book for educators, USHMM, 2005,
• Guidelines on how to commemorate the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, and the OSCE, 2006
• Posters, the stories on the Righteous among the Nations: "Traits that Transcend" and the manual for teachers, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, New York, 2007
• Lessons based on survivors' video testimonies, the Shoah Foundation Visual Institute, 2008
• Teaching materials on Antisemitism, the Anne Frank's House Museum, and OSCE two sets of teaching materials on Antisemitism, 2007, 2008.

Remembrance

Remembrance in Croatia-Jasenovac

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The Jasenovac Concentration Camp was a place of imprisonment, forced labor and executions, primarily of the Serb Orthodox population, that in order to create ethnically clean territory was to be completely eradicated from the Independent State of Croatia, as well as for Jews and Roma, who were discriminated against on the basis of racial laws. A large number of Croats were killed in the camp as well - communists and Anti-Fascists, members of the People's Liberation Army of Croatia, as well as members of their families and other opponents of the Ustasha regime.

The Jasenovac Memorial Site was established with the task of compiling, scientifically processing and exhibiting museum and archive material concerning the Ustasha Jasenovac Concentration Camp, to care for the memorial site and the mass graves of the former Ustasha camp and, by telling the truth about what happened to the victims of the Jasenovac camps, to build an attitude of respect for human differences among young people today.

The Jasenovac Memorial Site is a place for meditation and study, a place for building personal attitudes towards evil and crime, towards the value of  human life, and towards moral principles, on the basis of which each of us can contribute to the building of a more humane future.

The activities of the Memorial Museum include co-operating with survivors, projects involving exhibitions and publications, as well as organising commemorative events to honour the Jasenovac victims.

Remembrance in Croatia

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The main purpose of the Jasenovac Memorial Site is honoring and remembering all victims of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp, condemning all the motives for the formation of the concentration camp, and condemning all the crimes committed there so that they are never repeated.

Research

Research in Croatia

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There are several research and academic institutions that have contributed to Holocaust research: Croatian State Archives, Croatian Institute of History, several Croatian universities, particularly Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb, as well as Jewish communities, including Jewish Community of Zagreb and the Jewish Community Bet Israel of Croatia. The most significant issues discussed by the AWG include the state of the Holocaust-related material in public archival institutions of member countries, the issue of accessibility of public archives and the availability of the holdings to researchers.

In such circumstances two Croatian national reports were prepared: "Report on the Holocaust Related Research in Croatian Public Archives" and "Holocaust Related Archives in Croatia - Report No. 2," presenting an important overview of the field (compiled for the AWG meetings in Prague, 2007). Important resources for Holocaust researchers to be consulted in Croatia are kept in the Croatian State Archives, as well in the Research and Documentation Center for Holocaust victims and survivors (CENDO).

The Jasenovac Memorial Area Public Institution catalogue "Jasenovac Memorial Site" was published in 2006 on the occasion of the opening of the new permanent exhibition, and contains relevant information on the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia. It also contributes to broadening knowledge about the period. A number of publications in the field should be mentioned, among them "The List of Names of the Victims of Jasenovac Concentration Camp 1941-1945" published in 2007 by the Jasenovac Memorial Area.

With the aim of gaining a broader insight into Holocaust research in Croatia and the world, the Croatian Government has, especially after acquiring full membership in the ITF, encouraged even more strongly and financially supported international cooperation as well as exchange of researchers. The accessibility of archives holdings from World War Two as well as the The Cooperative Agreement between the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Croatian State Archives, signed in 1995, have certainly contributed the objectives of the AWG and above all to the role of the ITF and the Croatian Government in supporting tolerant societies.