Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia by Jovan Byford

Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia by Jovan Byford

Author:Jovan Byford [Byford, Jovan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II, Modern, 20th Century, Political Science, Genocide & War Crimes, Europe, General
ISBN: 9781350015975
Google: N8LkDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-06-25T01:13:17+00:00


Figure 6.1 Touring exhibition ‘Concentration camp Jasenovac 1941-1945’, 1986 (reproduced from ‘Pukovniku ima ko da piše’, Front, 30 May 1986, 28–9; courtesy of Ministry of Defence, Republic of Serbia).

This was the first exhibition on Jasenovac since the 1940s, which overwhelmed the audience with graphic portrayals of violence. More than half of all photographs represented Ustasha brutality, most of them concentrated in three sections of the exhibition: on the ‘legalization of the crimes’ (which covered the persecution of Serbs, Jews and Roma more generally), on the killings in Jasenovac and on the suffering of children in the Independent State of Croatia. The display utilized the same visual rhetoric as exhibitions of atrocity photographs organized after the war. Individually, gruesome images testified to Ustasha brutality, whereas cumulatively, they signified the scale and the scope of the genocide.

And yet, just like in Zafranović’s documentary, most atrocity photographs used to illustrate the horrors of Jasenovac had little to do with the camp. It seems that it was enough for a photograph to show a mass grave for it to be designated a scene from Donja Gradina or to show an act of killing or a mutilated body to be attributed to Jasenovac. Also, photographs showing the same event (for instance, the series of photographs depicting the decapitation of captured Partisans in Slovenia or the aftermath of the execution in Sisak in May 1945) were distributed across different parts of the exhibition as if they depicted more than one crime. This suggests either that the authors did not engage with the material sufficiently carefully to notice the connection between the photographs or, more likely, that they consciously separated the exhibits in order to illustrate different aspects of Ustasha violence, create effective juxtapositions and enhance the impact of the display.53

The atrocity-focused nature of the exhibition was also revealed in the captions. Many of them directed the attention of the audience to the horror of the violence, often invoking the clichés of atrocity reporting and propaganda: sexual mutilation, extraction of the heart, macabre methods of torture and so on. On the other hand, some of the photographs were accompanied by unusually detailed and precise information about their subject matter. There were references to specific locations and events or even the identity of the victims or perpetrators.

Although the media at the time praised the authors of the exhibition for their ‘painstaking research and verification of every fact’ about the exhibits, most of the detailed captions and designations were unsubstantiated and in many cases demonstrably erroneous.54 For instance, one of the exhibits was a photograph of the head and torso of a fresh corpse of a man laid on the ground, with a visible wound to the neck, probably inflicted with a knife (Figure 6.2). This photograph had featured in both The Gospel of Evil and Blood and Ashes of Jasenovac as a generic illustration of the proclivity among the Ustasha for throat cutting. In the 1986 exhibition, the photograph was given a much more precise caption. It was



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