A ceremony was held in Sisak on Saturday to commemorate children who had died in an Ustasha-run concentration camp there during the Second World War.

“This place must become a place of reconciliation between people who think differently,” Milorad Pupovac, the president of the Serb National Council (SNV), said during the ceremony at the Children’s Cemetery in the town’s Diana Budisavljevic Park.

Pupovac said he was pleased that the local Striegl Gallery had joined the SNV in organising this year’s commemoration.

Unlike the previous years, the ceremony was not attended by associations from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina because of the current coronavirus situation.

Among the guests were representatives of the Serbian Embassy in Croatia, Sisak mayor Kristina Ikic Banicek, Jasenovac Memorial Centre director Ivo Pejakovic and sisters from the Serb Orthodox monastery of Jasenovac.

The memorial service was led by the rector of the Serb Orthodox parish of Sisak, Veselin Ristic, who said: “With our prayer, we testify that these innocent victims are not forgotten. We are here not to judge anyone, but to bear witness to terrible events so that they would never happen again anywhere. We ask ourselves, how can anyone deny these deeds?”

On behalf of the SNV, those gathered were also addressed by Aneta Vladimirov, who read a chapter from a recently published book by Natasa Matausic about Diana Budisavljevic, an Austrian-born humanitarian who organised and provided assistance to mostly Serb women and children detained in the concentration camps in the Ustasha-governed Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state.

The chapter speaks about the efforts of Sisak teacher Ante Dumbovic in rescuing and providing home for Serb children from the local children’s camp. Thanks to him, valuable documents have been preserved, depicting the actual situation in the camp, while he himself was unjustly forgotten, it was said.

“Every year the survivors of the children’s camp return to Sisak, which speaks volumes of their vitality as well as of their love of life and their love of Sisak. Today, too, Sisak has strong people who are able to cope with this place and with the responsibility of remembrance and who continue the legacies of people like Ante Dumbovic, Diana Budisavljevic and the many nameless people who rescued the orphans of war,” Vladimirov said.

“The only thing that would be more terrible than a children’s cemetery is a children’s cemetery that no one visits and we are ashamed of,” she concluded.

About 6,500 children passed through the children’s camp in Sisak during the six months of its existence, of whom 1,152 died due to difficult living conditions and infectious diseases, according to research by Natasa Matausic.