The »Menorah in Flames« Memorial by Nandor Gild has since 1990 commemorated the approximately 9,000 Belgrade Jews who were murdered by SS and army units or deported to concentration camps under the German occupation between 1941 and 1944.
History
In 1941, the Serbian capital Belgrade was home to over 9,000 Jews. Jews had lived in Serbia since the 16th century and they were well integrated into Serbian society. The German Wehrmacht occupied the Serbian heartland in April 1941. The German occupation authorities immediately began persecuting the Jewish population: Jews were gradually excluded from public life, they were registered and forced to wear a badge on their clothes. In the summer of 1941, when resistance against the Wehrmacht formed, the Germans decided to take »retributive actions« against the Jews: For each killed German soldier, the Germans killed 100 Serbian men; for each wounded soldier, 50 Serbs were shot. The occupiers mostly chose Jewish men as victims of their »retribution«. Jewish women and children were initially spared. However, in the winter of 1941 they were deported to various camps, first and foremost to the Sajmište concentration camp at the Belgrade trade fair grounds (German: »Judenlager Semlin«). At the beginning of 1942, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) deployed a gas van to Belgrade. The Germans murdered about 6,500 prisoners of the Sajmište camp with motor fumes. Most of the victims were Jewish women and children. In the summer of 1942, the Belgrade commander of the security police and security service Schäfer sent the following report to his superiors at the RSHA in Berlin: »Serbia is free of Jews«.
Victims
Only few of the over 9,000 Belgrade Jews survived. Before the war, Serbia was home to about 12,500 Jews; all but 2,000 of the Jewish men, women and children were murdered by German units.
After the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbia became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929, King Alexander I (1888–1934) from the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty established a dictatorship with the overall support of Serbian officers. The state was now known as Yugoslavia. In April 1941, it was occupied by German troops and their Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies and split into a number of annexed and occupied territories serving as puppet states of the Nazi regime.
The Bačka region of Serbia was occupied by Hungary and southern Serbia by Bulgaria, with the remaining Serbian territory falling under German occupation. The resistance was led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (partisans) and the royalist Serbian militia (Chetniks) led by General Dragoljub Mihailović (1893–1946); there was also fighting between these two groups. From autumn 1941, the German military administration extended its campaign against these underground groups by launching a full-scale war against the civilian population. A hundred Serbs were to be killed for every murdered German soldier and fifty for every wounded German soldier. Within a few weeks, Wehrmacht soldiers had killed nearly all of the Jewish men and thousands of male Roma in these »reprisal measures«. The communist resistance in Serbia was also destroyed or driven out, with the result that the Chetniks now fought alone against the enemy regime.
The Red Army entered Serbia in October 1944, closely followed by units of the »People’s Liberation Army« led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). Serbia became one of the six states in the new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As the communist leader of Yugoslavia, Tito had tens of thousands of former opponents and civilians – including Chetniks – persecuted and murdered. State commemoration of the Second World War focused on the partisan campaign. Monuments to the partisans were put up all over the country, also at the sites of mass shootings of civilians such as Kragujevac. At the same time, Tito used national commemoration to bridge the differences between the various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia as well as between different forms of resistance, terror and collaboration. The memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust and the mass murder of Roma is still incomplete.
After the death of Tito, and especially under the regime of President Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) between 1989 and 2000, the »Croat« Tito fell out of favour in Serbian memory. Monuments dedicated to Tito and his communist partisans were removed and streets were renamed. Instead, there was a strong revival of support for the royalist Chetniks and their leader Mihailović, who had been shunned since 1944-45. In summer 1991, whilst the break-up of Yugoslavia was still underway, the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian People’s Army launched a war against Croatia, which was to last until th e end of 1995. During this war, the Croatian memorial site at Jasenovac was occupied and badly damaged by Serbian troops and the museum was looted. January 2009 saw the first Serb-organised seminar on the history of the Holocaust. This event was held in conjunction with a commemoration at which Christians and Jews remembered the massacre of at least 3,775 Jews, Roma and Serbs by Hungarian units in Novi Sad at the end of January 1942.
The most important historical site of the Holocaust in Serbia is the former fairgrounds Sajmište in Belgrade, where up to 7,500 Jews had been murdered in 1942 and later the »Anhaltelager Semlin« had its premises. In 2020, Serbian parliament voted to create an adequate memorial site on the decrepit compound.
Remembrance
The city of Belgrade and the local Jewish community erected a memorial by artist Nandor Glid in the Dorćol quarter, which had until World War I been the Jewish quarter of Belgrade, in 1990. The sculpture »Menora u plamenu« (English: »Menorah in Flames«) is dedicated to the Jewish community of Belgrade as well as all Serbian Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The only other memorial in Belgrade in honour of the Jewish victims is the memorial to the Jewish victims of fascism on the Jewish cemetery.
Artist Nandor Glid (1924-1997), himself a Holocaust survivor who had been a forced labourer and partisan, created a number of well-known monuments in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, including the international memorial at the Dachau concentration camp memorial (1968) and further memorials in Yugoslavia. The Holocaust memorial in Thessaloniki, which was begun in 1997 and which represents a variation on the Belgrade Menorah, was completed by Nandor Glid's sons after his death.
Open
The memorial is always accessible.
Contact
Donaupromenade (Šetalište) Ecke Ulica Tadeuša Košćuška
11000 Beograd
