Pančevo Holocaust

On the occasion of Yom Hashoa, 2015, the Pančevo Jewish community, in cooperation with the Pančevo Historical Archive, organized the exhibition One Day Has 52 Lives by Gabriela Nikolić. In several exposed large format graphics, the artist revived the memory of the fifty-two members of her family killed in a single day in 1942, and commemorates the milllions of innocent Holocaust victims.

The opening of the exhibition, on April 16^th, was attended by the Canadian Ambassador in Sebia, H.E. Philip Pinnington, Mrs.Pinnington, members of the Jewish Community, and many citizens. The exhibition was opened by Milan Jakšić, director of the Historical Archive.

On the same day, a Kadish service and wreath-lying ceremony were held at the site of the mass execution of Jews in 1941, known as Stratište, by a delegation of the Pančevo Jewish Community . It is inferred from a Nazi report that more than ten-thousand Serbs, Jews, and Roma were murdered at the Jabuka execution site. A monument, erected in 1986, is located at the site, on the road between Pančevo and Jabuka village. Today, the monument is devastated, and there are no markings left on it.

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In April 1941 Germany established a military occupation administration in Serbia. An indigenous administration and police force, nominally supervised by a puppet Serb government under former Yugoslav general Milan Nedic, was also established at this time. German military and police authorities interned most Jews and Roma (Gypsies) in detention camps — Topovske Supe, Dedinje, Sabac, Niš, and Semlin (Sajmiste) in Croatia — during the summer of 1941.

By the end of summer 1941, an uprising, based in Serbia and Bosnia, and initiated by both the Communist-led Partisan Movement and the Serb nationalist Cetnik Movement of Draza Mihailovic, had inflicted serious casualties upon German military and police personnel. Hitler ordered that, for every German death (including ethnic Germans in Serbia and the Banat), German authorities were to shoot one-hundred hostages.

During the late summer and autumn of 1941, German military and police units used Hitler's order as a pretext to shoot virtually all male Serb Jews (about 8,000 persons); an estmated two-thousand actual and perceived communists, Serb nationalists, and democratic politicians of the interwar era; and approximately one-thousand male Roma.

In the Fall of 1941, the German Security Police rounded up Jewish women and children and incarcerated them in the Semlin Detention Camp. A year later, in the winter of 1942, the Reich Central Office for Security sent a gas van — a truck with a hemetically sealed compartment that served as a gas chamber — to Belgrade. Between March and May 1942, German Security Police killed 6,280 persons, virtually all Jewish women and children from Semlin Camp. By the summer of 1942, few Jews remained alive in Serbia; the exceptions were Jews who had either joined the Partisans or managed to remain hidden.

(source: Holocaust Museum in Washington DC)

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Links

1. Holocaust in Serbia
2. YouTube: One Day Has 52 Lives
3. YouTube: Holocaust Rememberance Day
4. Jewish Community of Pančevo

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List of Pančevo Holocaust Victims

Glossary

1. Domaćica = a housewife
2. Majka = mother
3. Odoca = son of
4. Otac = father
5. prodavac stoke = cattle vendor
6. Rođena = was born
7. Rođen u = born in
8. ubijena u transportu sa Sajmišta = killed in transport from fairgrounds
9. ubijen u gasnom kamionu u transportu sa Sajmišta = killed in gas truck in transit from fairgrounds