Croatia Commemorates Holocaust amid Divisions over WWII History

Croatia's Anti-Fascist League, which includes some groups of ethnic minorities like Serbs, Jews and Roma, held a commemorative gathering on Sunday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day - one of a series of events held in the country in recent days to commemorate the Holocaust and the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945.

The participants gathered at Zagreb's Victims of Fascism Square and symbolically laid 75 carnations - at the square and at a nearby building where the Ustasa surveillance services and the Gestapo were located during WWII - to honour all the victims of Nazi Germany and its allies.

Zoran Pusic, the president of the Anti-Fascist League, highlighted the dangers of avoiding dealing with the past.

"From the lesson of the Holocaust, it is known that in a society affected by the evil of anti-Semitism, the door is open to the persecution of other minorities, and from our experience, in a society where ethnic or other intolerance is stimulated, anti-Semitism is lurking in some obscure part of society and is potentially always there," Pusic said in his speech.

Zagreb City Assembly decided last year that the city will get its first memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, which will be installed by the main train station, and will focus on the six million Jews killed by the Third Reich.

Although the Anti-Fascist League supports the decision to build a monument, it believes that the memorial should also highlight the victims of the WWII-era Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state run by the fascist Ustasa movement.

"In circumstances in which there is an active policy of forgetting the victims of Ustasa terror and falsifying history, it is important to emphasise that the Holocaust did not...