engleski

Hidden in Plain Sight- The Case of Sisak Concentration Camp for Children

In 1942, during WW2, children of Serbian descent from areas of Kordun, Banovina, Kozara, and Slavonija were brought to Sisak Concentration Camp for Children. The Camp was scattered around different already existent buildings all throughout the city of Sisak. It was officially called “Refugees Children’s Orphanage Sisak”, and was formed on the 3rd of August in 1942 by the government of the Independent state of Croatia. The contradictory heritage of what would be the rarest example of a concentration camp – one for children – is shown right away, in its title, which some still use nowadays (“orphanage”). There were many who wrote about the Sisak camp, but it is interesting to see how the narrative changed through time. The first written trace of the camp, other than archival data, are the Diaries of Diana Budisavljević. In 1950s and after, the majority of writings about the camp consisted of statistical data, but the problem that was present from the very start, and that seemed to consistently show up in literature, was the obvious lack of serious research about the exact locations of the camp, with names of the locations varying from book to book / article to. Also, since the buildings used for camp’s purposes were mostly pre-existing buildings that continued to function after the camp’s closing, such as factories, schools, community centers – the addresses of the streets, but also the names of the buildings changed over time. There is also the other side of writing – that of journalists and historians that take on a subjective narrative in order to support specific political ideas. So, between the contradicting facts about the location, the general lack of information shown to the public and different narratives used to describe the camp, the mere existence of this locality faded away from the community’s memory.

memorystudies ; musealisation ; campsites ; secondworldwar ; traces ; COST

nije evidentirano