Academic Ljubodrag Dimić believes that the original list with the names and surnames of 5,800 Serbian children rescued from Ustasha camps, which was published a few days ago, is an extremely important document, primarily because it convincingly denies the carriers of relativization Ustasha crimes.
Reminding that historians succeeded in reconstructing the activities of Diana Budisavljević, the Austrian woman who saved Serbian children from Potkozarje and from the territory of the Independent State of Croatia /NDH/, Dimić believes that the disclosure of the list is very important because in Croatian historiography and in circles close to the Roman Catholic Church there is a tendency to manipulate the number of those children and to create a story that it never even existed.
“This document is a very serious source that denies all those who want to reduce the extent of Ustasha crimes during the years of the Second World War,” Dimić told SRNA.
According to him, this document opens up the issue of children who were handed over to Ustasha families and trained as Ustasha in them.
“They were brought up in that narrative and those children were lost to the Serbian national corps, regardless of the fact that their number is unbelievably huge when it comes to that space. A good part of those children had not found out the true identity of their parents for the rest of their lives,” Dimić indicated .
That, as he pointed out, opens up another big topic that is inseparably connected with the morality of a society, which is why it is extremely important that the list appeared.
“That list should be made public and made available to everyone who wants to know the truth about what happened in the area of the NDH. But, on the other hand, it is only the first step in a much more serious story, which should explain the consequences of the crime committed in World War II”, Dimić believes.
According to him, this means shedding light not only on the conversion, but also on erasing the identity of the generation that lived their lives in socialism without awareness of who they are, what they are, where they are from, who their parents are and what kind of war victims they are.
The original list with the names and surnames of 5,800 children, who were rescued from the Ustasha camps by Diana Budisavljević, was presented to the public on Friday, April 21, by the director of the Museum of Genocide Victims, Dejan Ristić.
Source: srna.rs Photo: Zorana Jevtic