President Vučić opens exhibition "Holy New Martyrs of Jasenovac in the Light of the Resurrection" at the History Museum of Serbia

 

"If we want to explain today through warning, everything that happened on the territory of the tragic creation of the NDH from 1941-1945, perhaps it is best to do that with Hanna Arendt's thesis about radical evil, which has absolute power over the individual, to the point that it can make it superfluous. In the NDH, the radical evil was even more radical - it made an entire nation, the Serbs, superfluous, and no less the Jews and Roma as well. Being a Serb meant only one thing - that you were superfluous," said President Vučić, adding that the most terrible were the meticulousness and commitment, thoroughness, focus and obsession with this terrible job, from the laws implemented through the state apparatus, and even many church dignitaries. He also noted that the NDH managed to become the only Nazi state having camps for children. 

 

President Vučić pointed out that we take upon ourselves the right that belongs to us, the right to call things by their real names, the right to remember and warn, to say what really happened.

 

 

"And we are not only motivated by the frightening numbers of killed people, women, men, children. We are not motivated by the numerous execution sites from Jasenovac, Prebilovci, Gradiška, Jadovno, or all those pits, schools and churches that are soaked in the blood of the superfluous ones. No. The main motive is the words of the Nobel laureate, the Jew Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust in the Nazi camp, and who said that anyone who forgets those killed, he killed them once again," said President Vučić, adding that there was no reason for us to remain silent regarding the greatest sin committed against us, the sin of redundancy and extermination.

 

"Remembering that crime is not a call to hatred, but a warning showing that the only way to go is the path of life. Today, Serbia is on that path of reason and forgiveness. The day of remembrance of the most sweeping crime is important because of the future in which there will be no redundant people, in which children will look forward to the future days and will not have to survive everything they wrote and drew on their drawings," said President Vučić and emphasised that forgiveness is not possible if we forget what we need to forgive.

 

"Life and the Serbian people, regardless of what they went through, have won and will win in the future," concluded President Vučić.

 

 

His Holiness Patriarch of Serbia Porfirije said that innocent people were killed in Jasenovac in the "most monstrous ways", and stated that the perpetrators of these crimes "according to what they did, do not belong to any nation and do not belong to humans." 

 

"Those who did such things have written themselves out of any nation, they have written themselves out of humans," said patriarch Porfirije, adding that the exhibition of the nun Maria, from the nunnery near Jasenovac, which was opened today, emerged at the place where the innocent died.

 

 

The Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik, said that he had agreed with President Vučić to build a monumental park in Gradina, the largest execution site, which would mark that period of suffering.

 

"Jasenovac is a horrifying place of our life, our people, our existence and that is why it is very important at every opportunity, and it is certainly this one tonight, to gather in the collective memory and to pass on to generations that our struggle made sense," said Milorad Dodik.

 

Belgrade,

22nd April 2021