Holocaust historian Dr. Gideon Greif wrote “We Wept Without Tears : Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz”. Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes was inspired by that book and created the film “Son of Saul”. It won the 2016 Academy Award for best foreign language film.
Dr. Greif’s Holocaust research continued to Jasenovac. Through his extensive research, he discovered 800,000 Serbs and 40,000 Jews at Jasenovac (instead of the 80,000 that Mr. #JayWeissberg cited.) He published a book titled “Jasenovac, the Auschwitz of the Balkans”. Though fewer people were killed at Jasenovac than Auschwitz, the Croatian Ustasha were more brutal than their Nazi allies. For instance, Nazi General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau supervised Jasenovac. He was so horrified by the Ustasha brutality and compared it to Hell in Dante’s “Inferno”. General von Horstenau’s quote published in “Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia” by Barry M. Lituchy.
Most people don’t know about Jasenovac as only about 80 people out of 840,000 survived. For instance, Egon Berger was a Croatian Jew who survived and wrote “44 Months in Jasenovac”. Mr. Berger wrote the following.
“German massacres will enter the annals of history, but the Ustase passed them. While the Germans poisoned their victims, and then burned them, the Ustase tossed live humans into the fire.” (Berger, page 30)
Mr. Weissberg referenced the “wanton sadism” of the Ustasha and their camp commander Maks Luburic. Mr. Berger also witnessed 1,200 prisoners killed in an instant by machine gun fire Luburic promised to free some prisoners. Dr. Greif noted that the Ustasha had “57 different ways of killing the victims.” The Ustasha designed weapons like the “Serb cutter” to cut throats and unborn babies out of the wombs of pregnant women.
Instead of references to Serb nationalistic propaganda and "kind of corny", Mr. Weissberg may want to focus on the real suffering that @darathefilm tries to convey. Thank you. #NeverForget @bbykajmak @notebookmubi @majorfilmevents @variety #genocidedenial @JasenovacRI #darathefilm @theacademy #Oscars #gideongreif
