Croatian Pupils to Learn about Holocaust in Israel

The holocaust cannot be compared to current events from the viewpoint of politics, the minister said, evidently alluding to Gaza.

ZAGREB, CROATIA – The issue of holocaust cannot be compared to today’s events from some daily political views – Croatian Education Minister Dragan Primorac said opening a seminar for teachers about teaching about the holocaust and preventing crimes against humanity. 

- I often go to Israel and I wish to personally take there a group of pupils from Croatia so they can see the Yad Vashem – the minister said. We will put forward a written proposition to the Israeli government when the parliamentary elections are over there. We will organise a trip for out students by the end of this year and the arrival of Israeli students by the end of the 2010. It is my great wish that they see how much we have done here in Croatia regarding education since we started the project in 2004, at the beginning of my mandate, he said.

Croatia made most progress in the region 

During the past five years, 500 Croatian teachers underwent education about the holocaust and another 160 were educated abroad – in the United States, Israel and the European Union. Today they are educators for teachers in neighbouring countries. Israel also has a signed bilateral agreement on scientific cooperation and student exchange only with Croatia, America and Germany.

The seminar for the teachers will last until February 4. The first of 16 lecturers, among several from Israel and the United States, was Ivo Goldstein, a renowned historian and member of the Jewish community in Croatia. In his lecture about the Independent State of Croatia (NDH, 1941-1945) he stressed that it was “a notorious historical fact” that after the state was proclaimed, most Croatians realised it was not a state they wanted.

- Most Croatian citizens were at first satisfied and accepted Yugoslavia’s defeat in the war and the establishment of the NDH in the sense of establishment of an independent Croatia and they believed that the brief April war avoided the bloodshed that was in other countries in Europe. There is no doubt that soon they were disappointed and had less sympathies for the newly established state. The first great shock for the Croatian national feeling were Roman agreements on demarcation between Italy and NDH from May 18, 1941, with which Italy got almost the whole of Dalmatia, large areas of the Croatian coastal region and parts of Gorski Kotar, although the population in those areas were exclusively Croatian. At that time Stories went around Split that all the land to Karlovac would be Italian and from Karlovac German.

Goldstein: Pavelic was a mayor of Zagreb without suburbs 

Professor Goldstein cited to the public, which also included the Israeli Ambassador to Croatia,

Schmuel Meirom, numerous reports, statements and quotes proving that the NDH regime soon caused disgruntlement by Croatians and in its first year brought about high inflation, a high rate of unemployment and food shortages. “That government’s minister, Mile Bodak, admitted that when he said in his speech in Gospic in 1943 ‘There is not enough food here!’”

Numerous Croats, Goldstein said, opposed The Ustashi persecution of Jews and Serbs.

- The estimates were that in 1942 Ante Pavelic had the support of only two percent of the population in Croatia, and a report from 1943 says: “when it comes to the governing and power of Ante Pavelic, he is merely the mayor of Zagreb without suburbs” – Goldstein said.

In the end he stressed that the destruction of Jews in the NDH had been carried out systematically and that the genocide had achieved its goal – after the war, the Jewish community could not be renewed.