Diary of Dare from Jasenovac

As far as I remember, The Diary of Anne Frank we didn't read in elementary or high school. Admittedly, I don't remember very well what we talked about in school about the Second World War and the Holocaust. I would say that we spoke very generally and very little, and that I also forgot that a little quickly. But I still remember very well that once, I think it was in the third grade of high school, I borrowed some history notes from a schoolmate and found the name Albert Hitler in them. And I remember how inconceivable it was to me that someone at the age of seventeen did not know that Hitler's name was Adolf. Because I am, regardless of the schools and the reading prescribed for us, and regardless of the fact that I hadn't read it until then The Diary of Anne Frank, grew up in a world where it was impossible not to know about the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler. And it was not clear to me how my colleague managed to do that.

Twenty years later it is much easier for me to understand. Today, in Slovenia, as well as in a large part of Europe, it is very easy to grow up without Hitler and without the Holocaust. It's not just that our children don't watch partisan movies like we do as if they were movies about some little wizard, but they are simply more removed from the bad times than we were. Concentration camps, final solutions and gas chambers, all this is no longer family history and it is not something that is kept silent about at home, or maybe whispered here and there with difficulty, but it is something that is answered in front of the board, and then forgotten after answering. As a child, my grandfather showed me where the bullet entered his leg and where it exited, and today my father tells my children about how he broke his leg playing football.

This is what Europe fought for and it is, at least apparently, a good thing, which is why the indifference with which Slovenia recently greeted the removal The Diary of Anne Frank from school programs, and therefore also from our tomorrow's consciousness, somewhat understandable. Especially in these strange, breaking news overloaded times. It wasn't until the Union of Fighters publicly rebelled, shouting that in this way we were quietly returning to the dark past, and most of the other observers probably agreed that our children no longer need Anne Frank and her fate, because after seventy-six years the Holocaust can only be an hour away. history.

And maybe they are right, but I am afraid that we are forgetting that the Holocaust is not only the greatest and most monstrous evil that we were capable of imagining, but also the only great and terrible evil that created and shaped the consciousness of a time, that is, of a world, and which was committed to others. Six million murdered Jews and one million murdered Roma for several decades formed the consciousness of several generations of us Europeans who are neither Jews nor Roma. Of course, all the peoples of Europe, including the Germans, were victims of Nazism, but the Holocaust was still committed by "them". Which meant that for the first and perhaps the last time in history, the tragedy of another determined our understanding of man and the world, and - what is even more important - our understanding of good and evil.

Without the Holocaust in our consciousness, we will very quickly return to nationalist stories in which evil is always inflicted on us and in which others are usually evil and perverse. So we will return to exactly the kind of stories narrated by Predrag Antonijević's film Dara from Jasenovac.

In the story of the Holocaust, that film replaces the Jewish girl Anne Frank with the Serbian Dara, which in itself is completely legitimate. Serbs have the right to tell the story of Jasenovac and the Serbs who perished in that horrible camp, just as they have the right to barely mention Jews, Roma, communists and all other victims of Ustasha crimes in that story (neither did the numerous films about Nazi camps filmed by Jews were dealing with other victims, so we didn't blame them for that). But it is difficult to overlook the very transparent desire to use this film to perform a lobotomy on the national consciousness and further strengthen the Serbs' feeling that they are the greatest victims of history. Because nationalism may be able to do without heroism, but it cannot do without the position of victim and historical guilt. The director's announcement that his next project will deal with the Storm only further confirms what this is all about.

That is why I am surprised by the fact that in Serbia such film projects have not been realized before. Because Croatia already did this in the 1990s, when it systematically turned its Homeland War with the help of bad films into a simple and banal story about the bad them and the good us, so that later high-budget films about national tragedies during and after the Second World War would be shot all over Eastern Europe. world war. In Slovenia, fortunately, the right did not use the film, but that is why, in all other possible ways, it persistently pushed the communist crimes committed by the evil communists to the good Slovenians into the center of our consciousness at the site of the Holocaust.

And to make matters worse, all these nationalistic counts of their own victims happened and are still happening at a time when The Diary of Anne Frank disappears from school textbooks and when the holocaust, from an experience that once brought together and united European peoples and more than anything determined post-war Europe, slowly turns into a mere historical fact that affects our reality less and less.

And maybe that's why it's too late to ask whether a united Europe can survive without the Holocaust, because I'm afraid we'll find out soon.