Sarajevo is not the right place to organise a Holy Mass for those killed in Bleiburg in 1945 considering that the city lost about 80 percent of its Jews to the persecution during the time of the Nazi-allied regime of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), the founder of the Media Centre in Sarajevo told N1 on Wednesday.
The Holy Mass is taking place “at the wrong time and the wrong place,” Boro Kontic said, adding that the most important thing to consider is the fate of the Sarajevo’s Jews in the period between 1941 and 1945.
“This used to be a very strong and important group in Sarajevo,” he said, explaining that more than 70,000 Jews lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina before WWII and that between 12 and 15 thousand lived in Sarajevo.
“Nearly every fifth resident of Sarajevo was a Jew. But throughout the first two years already those people were nearly erased through persecution. It is believed that around 80 percent of those people were killed, taken to concentration camps or have disappeared,” he said.
“This is a group of people that characterised Sarajevo and today they are reduced to a marginalised group,” he added
Amid a Yugoslav army offensive aimed at defeating pro-Nazi and anti-communist forces, tens of thousands of mostly pro-fascist Croat soldiers and their families fled in 1945 toward Austria to seek help from the British army, only to be turned back by the Brits right into the hands of anti-fascists.
In and around the Austrian town of Bleiburg, thousands of the so-called Ustashas were killed. The Yugoslav forces saw the slaughter they committed as punishment for the tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and anti-fascists killed by the Ustasha during WWII.
After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Croatia began commemorating the Bleiburg victims with a large gathering near the Austrian town every year but it was cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The organisers of the event, the Honorary Bleiburg Platoon, said it will be held in different cities instead, among them in Sarajevo.
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