Croatia commemorates victims of WWII concentration camp where tens of thousands perished

JASENOVAC, Croatia — Croatia on Tuesday commemorated the victims of a World War II concentration camp where tens of thousands of people perished in the hands of a pro-Nazi puppet regime at the time.

Top Croatian officials and representatives of the Serb, Jewish, Roma and antifascist organizations attended the ceremonies marking 80 years after hundreds of prisoners attempted a breakthrough on April 22, 1945.

Only 92 people survived the breakthrough attempt out of some 600 men, according to the Jasenovac memorial center data. Prisoners at the camp, known as the Balkan Auschwitz, also included women and children.

Slavko Milanovic, born in 1937, was just a child when he was brought to Jasenovac with his mother, aunt and sister. Milanovic still remembers how prison guards separated children from their mothers.

“When my mother saw that she covered me and my sister with cloths that we used to sleep on,” Milanovic said. “My sister was fragile, she died right there in my mother's arms.”

Milanko Cekic, who was also imprisoned as a child, was pushed into a freight train with his family and brought to Jasenovac. "I don't remember ever being hungry ... but we drank water from a lake with dead bodies floating in it,” he said.

Jasenovac, located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest from Zagreb, the capital, was the most notorious in a system of camps in the area where victims were rounded up, brutally tortured and executed.

Official Croatian data show that more than 83,000 people were killed in Jasenovac while Serbs say the numbers were much higher, possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

The ceremonies on Tuesday included laying of flowers and wreaths, lighting of candles and a commemorative program. Participants walked along a path marked with railway tracks that were used to transport the camp prisoners.

"Such crimes must never be forgotten and what is even more important, they must never be repeated,” said Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.

Plenkovic's conservative government in the past faced accusations that it was not doing enough to curb resurging pro-Nazi sentiments in the country, which led to a years-long boycott of the state-run Jasenovac commemoration ceremonies by the Serb and Jewish groups.

“I am extremely pleased that everyone attended” on Tuesday, Ognjen Kraus, who heads an association of Jewish municipalities in Croatia, said. “The commemoration, after a long while, was as it should be.”

Croatia, now a member of the European Union, was part of the former, Communist-run Yugoslavia after WWII. The six-member federation broke up in the 1990s' in a series of ethnic conflicts fueled by a revival of nationalism in the troubled Balkan region.