Spasavanje savskih žrtava od zaborava i negiranja: Istorija i sećanje na poslednje ustaške zločine u Sisku
Rescuing the ‘Sava victims’ from oblivion and denial: History and memory of the last Ustasha crime in Sisak

Summary/Abstract: The article explores the history and memory of the last Ustasha crime in Sisak; the massacre perpetrated on the banks of the river Sava on 4 May 1945, on the eve of the Ustasha withdrawal from the city. Although the victims of this massacre – known locally as “Sava victims” – became a visible object of public remembrance in Sisak after the war, no scholarly works have ever been published on the event, and memorialisation was accompanied by a striking lack of interest in the identities of the victims, or the facts of what happened to them. This article is an attempt to explain and counter this longstanding tradition of neglect and answer, for the first time, key questions about who the victims were, how many were killed and why. Examining the story of the Sisak massacre is important because, since the 1970s, there has been speculation that bodies discovered on the banks of the Sava were victims not of an Ustasha massacre, but of Partisan revenge killings perpetrated after the liberation of Sisak. This revisionist interpretation has gained traction in Croatia since the 1990s, and even some mainstream Croatian historians have suggested that, due to the paucity of historical evidence about the crime, the revisionists' views cannot be dismissed outright. The paper critically examines this argument, and by illuminating the facts of the case, hopes to provide some much-needed clarity. Also, in mapping the events in Sisak in the final weeks of the war, the article demonstrates that the massacre on the banks of the Sava in Sisak was not an isolated event. There were other crimes committed in and around Sisak in the final weeks of the war, crimes which are very much part of the story of the “Sava victims”, yet which were until now completely unknown. Among them are one of the last massacres of Serbs by the Ustasha, and what is probably the final act of the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia. The article brings to light these previously unknown crimes and reveals the identities of the victims.

• Details
• Contents