DR. ESTHER GITMAN (PhD City University of New York) (New York City, November 28, 2017)
Reply to Daniel Ivin (Goldstein) and to Ephraim Zuroff in the article: ‘They are killing victims for the second time with their lies’ - Daniel Ivin, son of a Jewish librarian murdered in an Ustasa-run concentration camp Efraim Zuroff, who has spent more than 40 years hunting Nazis for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, describes Croatia as a country that has gone from being one of the cradles of the Holocaust to a “cradle of Holocaust distortion”. He groups Croatia alongside some of the Eastern European states that he says have selective amnesia about the wartime records of collaborators, quislings and local anti-Semites, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary and to some extent Poland.
Naturally some deniers of the Holocaust still exist in Croatia, Serbia and in other parts of the world. However, the deniers of the Holocaust in every country exhibit a frivolous conduct, when considering the mere fact that before WWII the Jewish population in Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina numbered approximately 40 thousand Jews, after the war, four years later a mere 9.5 thousands or 20 percent of the population survived. The Serbian population prior the war numbered approximately 16 thousands, after the war 1,600 survived 10 percent of the population survived. The Ustashi were brutal and mostly did it for monetary gain. Nazi Germany was clever when it promised Pavelić an independent state and in addition the assets of every Jew they kill. The zeal and the excitement of all these sudden blessings a state and financial solvency, transformed ordinary human beings into animals. The Nazis, who hoped to rule the world aimed to have a clean slate as far as the atrocities were concerned, they requested of the local regimes to kill and plunder, in short, do their dirty work. Even though the initiator of the crimes was Nazi Germany, it doesn’t absolve either the collaborationist Croatian regime or the Serbian regime of heinous crimes committed against the Jewish and Roma minorities. The Serbian regime, thanks to individuals like Ephraim Zuroff and Gideon Grief, over the years managed to exculpate themselves from all the crimes committed by Milan Nedić's regime and Draža Mihajlović's Četniks. But the archives throughout the world contain documents that cannot be easily removed or obliterated. The situation for the Croats was not so easy, they refused to disassociate themselves from the Universal Catholic Church and the Vatican, and thus Croatia was punished and doomed to bear the responsibility for all the crimes committed in the South Slavs against Jews and other dissidents. Despite the wrong that Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše thugs had committed no one has the right, decades later to incriminate the entire Croatian nation least of them Mr. Daniel (Danko) Ivin (Goldstein)! 1