Camps and Festivals

By camps I mean concentration camps, and by festival I mean Zagreb Film Festival.

Today I went to a concentration camp in Croatia, on the border of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It's name is Jasenovac, and it was a working camp during WWII. Italy and Germany took over the entire region during the war. The Ustasha, Croat fascists, were allied with the Nazi's, and attempted to cleanse the then independent nation of Croatia of Serbs (first and foremost), Roma, and Jews. What was most fascinating there was the reason for killing jews: it was almost entirely imported in from the Nazi's agenda. The Jews weren't a people thought of as impure or something to be cleansed by Croat Ustasha (although there was some antisemitism in the area, and I am still unsure of how much of this I should believe). It seemed incredible to me to be standing in a place where an estimated 100,000 people died.

The camp was destroyed right after WWII. What remains is a huge field, with several mounds of grass, a small pond (where blasting happened to extract clay), and a huge Lotus monument. The monument, our guide explained, doesn't hurt the passerbys, rather serves to memorialize that space and that time. It was quite beautiful to be there: to look out into the mountains, to smell the sweet dew on the grass, see the water slowly move. It was hard to imagine that so many people died there. 10,000 Jews, 18,000 Roma, and 40,000 Serbs (plus others I won't forget to mention like Croats, Romanians, Austrians, Italians, Communists, a few Germans). It felt peaceful, but the ground screamed.

In the evening I went with 5 others (including Orli) to the Zagreb Film Festival, which is actually a 10 minute walk from my house. Films are being screened all week! We saw the most beautiful film--made in Israel, called "Jellyfish" by an Israeli couple who are both writers. It was their first movie. See it if you can, it's worth every second.

I would write more, but it's already midnight and I haven't been sleeping enough lately.

So much more to come.