Jasenovac - Death of Dinko Savic, Leader of Death Camp

The death camp at Jasenovac is now nothing but a leveled park area, with closed museum, locked bathrooms, vacant and dry fountain memorials. Just some maps on pedestals, explanations at ground level as to the mass graves beneath your feet, an old train on a track with bullet holes, used for transport. An occasional biker, a man on a mowing machine, a willow. All its memorabilia sent to Washington DC, the Holocaust Memorial.

That is a disservice to the people of Croatia. The memory is being erased.

A reminder this week of Jasenovac: the death of Dinko Savic at age 86, reportedin the New York Times 7/23/08. The article says that the camp was known as the "Auschwitz of the Balkans," yet is is abandoned. No tourists. Nobody. He used to ride in on a white horse, with black boots, black uniform, whip and machine gun. Say survivors. He fled to Argentina and lived there for 50 years, and not in hiding. He said in his last years he was "proud of what he had done and would gladly do it again." NYT.

He died in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in Croatia serving a 20-year prison sentence. Crimes against humanity. He was found guilty, himself, of killing 2000 Serbs (Orthodox Christian, not Roman Catholic, and the Roman Church stood by, see post here on Cardinal Stepinac), Jews and Gypsies. Can we dare forget how they died? Withholding medical treatment, working ot death, hanging and leaving dangling in some cases until dead, if not immediately killed; personal shootings, including for smiling say some survivors; torture with blowtorch; starvation. When convicted, he laughed and clapped his hands.

The issue - proFascists - the numbers are exaggerated. Against - they are underestimated. But noone will exhume, in case the other side is proven right. Highest estimates of totals are in the hundreds of thousands. Lowest? Tens of thousands. So everybody go home and forget. There is not even a sign on the highway identifying it as a concentration camp.

Read more at ://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/466369, the same as appeared in the NYT; and ://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/08/08/03/0803reich_edit.html

Zagreb - King Tomislav, Crowned 925 - Disappeared 928 +/- AD

King Tomislav.
The Missing Has His Place

King Tomislav, Zagreb, Croatia

Tomislav stands on his mount here in the capital of Croatia, Zagreb.  This is at the entrance of the magnificent old train station, near the grandest hotel in Zagreb.

Tomislav was crowned in 925 AD, see ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomislav,  by the Holy Catholic Church in Rome.  This period precedes the later division in about 1000 (?) between the Latin-Roman Catholic Church and what we call the Eastern Orthodox, or Orthodox Christian, Church.

The later ecclesiastical division occurred when the Roman branch pulled away. At this earlier time, there was still only one Holy Catholic Church, as I recall from reading. But there is a mystery:  Tomislav "disappeared" and then was "declared dead" in 928 AD.

 VM, who provided us with the correct identification, refers us to another site:  www.croatian-king-tomislav.com/ where a Mr. Mojmir Damjanovic of Australia is researching where King Tomislav is buried, and even where the actual Crown might be  - looking for "the father of independent Croatia."

The site notes that little is recorded in history texts about the kingdom 923-1102 AD.

There had been discord ongoing at the time about whether the Croatian Catholic or the Latin Catholic Church should control in the area. The Croatian Kingdom, says the site, was "mightier than England at the time, mightiest in that part of Europe."

So:  Was the death a "planned strategy" to "quash its strength and its power, to deny the Croatian nation self-determination and its name; its independence." To be continued. Connecting other things here as well.

Roots of a country's memories go deep - King Tomislav from the 10th Century is so remembered. Whenever important matters are said to be unknown, does that mean 

1) that history is shaped by the victor's spin, and the representation may be concealment, or fabrication, to suit the victor, and

2) religions do not expand by truth and voluntary conversion primarily, but by politics and strategic killings through the centuries; and

3) countries that bloomed early, and are not empires any more, like Croatia, or those that were on the verge of greatness and expansion at in the 10th Century, are no less worthy in history because their leaders were overcome by other forces, than those who scrabbled themselves on top.

See King Tomislav in Bosnia - Bosnia or great parts of it once was part of the larger Croatian sphere of influence at that time, 900-1100. We have to check the dates, but see Bosnia Road Ways, Capilyn, Statue. The inscription, based on what we have been told by one VM (see the Zagreb post) shows that King Tomislav was crowned at Capilyn.  Spellings vary depending on the language being used.

King Tomislav mysteriously disappeared some three years after his coronation, in the context of a dispute with the Roman Catholic or Latin Catholic branch of Christendom, where the Croatian branch had wanted more autonomy.

• Ask the Vatican what happened to Tomislav? All it takes is access to the Vatican's library to get at the truth, we bet - we bet they have all that is needed in there. Ask for a library card.  Any more bets?

Connections, connections. Conflict with Rome and Big Consequences.  Look up the Nin post here and Bishop Gregory of Nin, and the guides tell us that he had wanted to do the Mass in Croatian.  But Rome stopped him. Post dated January 26, 2007.

Croatia now, reflecting then. Contemporary rock concert, WWII history, clash.

Who collaborated with the Nazis, who didn't, who was responsible or did not intervene effectively enough in the deaths of so many Orthodox, Gypsies, Serbs, other Croats, others, all this lives on in current events.

11/1/2007 - NYT Arts section. A Croatian rock group's concert, that had been scheduled for the cultural center run by the Croatian at the Church of St. Simon and Methodius, located at 10th Ave. and 41st St. It was canceled said spokesman Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (a goal there is to counter anti-Semitism),because of protests that some lyrics glorified the WWII government, the Ustache, that was a flip side of the Nazis in terms of support. The artist: Marko Perkovic (Thompson is the stage name). Apparently there is a slogan in a song that echoes the Ustache regime.

Protesters included Nenad Milinkovic, of a Serbian-American church in Manhattan.

• Of interest especially to us is the name, St. Cyril and Methodius - the same name of the Orthodox Church in Prague CZ where the assassins of Nazi Reinhold Heydrich were finally cornered and killed themselves. Go to the posts at Czech Republic Road Ways , specifically Operation Daybreak, Assassination of Reinhold Heydrich. Also look at Places of Petr Ginz, for a similar post, at An Assassination in the life of Petr Ginz. Petr Ginz was a 12-13 year old boy in Prague during the Occupation in WWII, and he had entries related to that assassination.

The names of saints recur in many countries - and people bring them to where they emigrate. Connections, connections.