Η «ημιαναγνώριση» του Ολοκαυτώματος: Αναζητώντας μια θέση στη δημόσια μνήμη της Σερβίας για την εξόντωση των Εβραίων [‘Half-Recognizing’ the Holocaust: Remembrance of the Semlin camp in Belgrade since the 1980s]

Abstract

The chapter examines the memorialisation of a major site of Jewish suffering in Nazi-occupied Serbia, the Semlin Judenlager. In spite of its importance as a place of the Holocaust, the site of the Semlin camp played a marginal place in the memorialisation of the destruction of Serbian Jewry in post-war Yugoslav/Serbian society. The chapter examines the reasons for this and explores the ways in which, in the post-war period, the memory of the Holocaust tended to be assimilated within the dominant symbolic orders, first within multi-ethnic Yugoslavia and later within a post-Yugoslav ideological milieu dominated by Serbian nationalism and the preoccupation with Serbian suffering during the Second World War. In exploring the memorialisation of Semlin since the 1980s, the chapter also draws attention to the continuities and discontinuities between the Communist and post-Communist periods in the way in which the destruction of Jews is understood and remembered in Serbian society