The Archbishop of Zagreb, Cardinal Josip Bozanic, led a prayer event on Thursday in front of the Zagreb Cathedral to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Bozanic paid tribute to Holocaust victims, with members of the local Jewish community at the ceremony welcoming the cardinal’s move as a historic event.

During the prayer, a 60-metre banner was displayed on the cathedral facade, inscribed with Isaiah 5:56, reading in Croatian and Hebrew the following quote:

“Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.” (KJV)

Today, we are encountering the “secret of the evil,” Bozanic told the meeting, and we do not look at it only within the frames of the past but we are also aware of it in the present day,” said Bozanic, who added that the ideology of racism is aimed against God and human beings, and was “created based on the untruth about man and about Jewish people.”

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial marked on January 27 commemorating the tragedy of the Holocaust during World War II in which an estimated 6 million European Jews had perished. The date marks the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, by the Soviet Red Army, in present-day Poland.

The cardinal called for giving “special attention” to what had happened in Croatia during that time, and pointing out the truth, without any reservations, about the horrors in the Jasenovac death camp and other camps where innocent people lost their lives.

Around 80,000 Jews, Serbs, Roma, and anti-fascist Croats had been killed in the Jasenovac camp set up and controlled by the Croatian fascist Ustasha regime during World War II.

“We are here to recognise the evil, and hate speech, and to resist them, and to build together mutual respect and love, to the well-being of Croatian society and the whole of humankind,” Bozanic said.

Bozanic then went on to speak about the Jewish community in Croatia and especially in the city of Zagreb, and their contributions to the life and culture of the city. He said that according to available data fewer than 2,000 Zagreb Jews had survived World War II, out of the 11,000-strong pre-war community.

He said that he sympathised in his thoughts and prayers with the Jews who survived and who have borne the burden of their personal experiences of human cruelty, and he also extended his sympathies to the entire Jewish people.

“Christianity excludes any hatred towards the human being and other people,” Bozanic said.

The Zagreb Archbishop also added that the descendants – children and grandchildren – of the perpetrators of war crimes should be mentioned in prayers, and that they also need “purification by truth.”

The head of the Zagreb-based Hatikva Jewish Information and Education Centre, Julija Kos, sad that Thursday’s event front of the cathedral was of extremely great importance.

“Each sentence of the cardinal’s speech has a message about what we should do to make our society healthy,” she added.

Some descendants of the perpetrators are aware what their ancestors did, and some are not aware, and they are not to blame for that, she added.

Kos said that only a small portion of the descendants of perpetrators in Croatia still glorified their ancestors. There are only few of them but they are loud, she added.

In attendance at the ceremony were also Parliament Speaker, Gordan Jandrokovic, as well as envoys representing top state officials.

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