Memorial Day for victims of Jasenovac concentration camp

The Memorial Day for the victims of Jasenovac marks the date of the liberation of this concentration camp run by the Ustasha, one of the worst death camps in World War Two Europe, which some historians have dubbed the Serbian Auschwitz.

April 22 was picked as the Memorial Day because a group of 1,075 prisoners tried to break out of the camp on that day in 1945. Only 127 got through.

There were around 80 death camps in the so called Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

According to estimates made after the first exhumations by a state committee of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and confirmed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, around 500,000 Serbs, 80,000 Roma, 32,000 Jews and tens of thousands of antifascists of different nationalities perished in Jasenovac.

The NDH succeeded in outdoing the Nazis in one thing, it was the only country that had special camps specifically for children, Sisak and Jastrebarsko, which saw some 33,000 prisoners, and where nearly 20,000 children up to 14 years of age died.