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The greying, box-like building that houses the
Savsko Obdanište kindergarten has had many uses over the years.
At one point it was a restaurant; when you step
through the front doors you find yourself surrounded by musty, brown
1970s-style dining furniture.
Further inside, a door leads into what is now a
cavernous sports hall, the clanging sound of weights reverberating
from the gym upstairs. A stairway decorated with hand-painted Disney
characters directs visitors up to the proposed kindergarten.
Nothing about the building’s current uses hints at
its most troubling past incarnation: as a makeshift hospital in a
Nazi concentration camp.
Although Staro Sajmište has been touted as the
location for a proposed Holocaust memorial since the early 1990s,
progress to approve it has been slow. In the meantime, parts of the
site have been sold to private owners.
When residents of Belgrade heard that the site was
going to host a kindergarten, set to open this autumn, they were
outraged. “The kindergarten is inappropriate when you consider what
took place there,’’ says Robert Sabadoš, president of the Federation
of Jewish Communities of Serbia.
“But what’s an even bigger scandal is that pubs
have been located down there for years, decades even. There even
used to be a nightclub.
“That site was a place of misery and suffering and
that can’t be allowed to be forgotten.”
Situated just a couple of kilometres from downtown
Belgrade near the banks of the Sava River, the Staro Sajmište camp
opened in 1937 as a trade fair complex consisting of 11 buildings.
In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Yugoslavia, they converted it into
a concentration camp.
Figures vary for the number of Jews, Serbs and
Roma who passed through its gates before the liberation of the city
in October of 1944, with some estimating 30,000, and others more
than 90,000. A memorial plaque on the site of Staro Sajmište is
dedicated to over 40,000 people, who “were cruelly tortured and
murdered”.
In the years since, some of the buildings were
turned into tavernas, artists’ ateliers, a live music venue and even
offices for Serbia’s ruling political party, while the rest have
decayed. Staro Sajmište still makes headlines in the local media
every few years when a new business sets up shop, but the
controversies have been fleeting.
The kindergarten, however, is different. The
building was bought by Miodrag Krsmanović, a local businessman in
1998, when Serbia was undergoing a chaotic wartime transition from
socialism to capitalism.
Krsmanović rejects the accusations of desecrating
a place of historical significance, arguing he saved the building
from ruin.
“I’ve been battling for 20 years, investing in
this building, caring for it, nurturing it. I bought it in a
terrible state – totally ruined,” he says. “It didn’t even have a
roof, it was completely rotten. They should compare the state of
this building in ‘98 and today. They should all be saying ‘thank you
kindly, sir, excellent work, sir’.”
Krsmanović says he was unaware of the history of
Staro Sajmište when he bought the building – and in this he would
not be alone. The Holocaust in Serbia is a neglected topic; it took
until 1974 for a memorial plaque to be installed on the site. In
socialist Yugoslavia, the genocidal campaign against Serbia’s Jews
was widely interpreted as part of the Nazi’s general reign of
terror. Many Serbians still see the Holocaust as something that
happened in far away places, such as Auschwitz, not a short walk
from downtown Belgrade.
“The people [who operate businesses at Staro
Sajmište] aren’t to blame for the failure to build something on that
site. Three-quarters of them probably don’t even know what unfolded
there,” says Sabadoš. “That’s a symptom of a failure of our
collective memory.”
Both men blame the state for the disrepair of
Staro Sajmište, and are critical of the decision to sell it off in
the first place. Krsmanović says state attorneys have attempted to
evict him “seven or eight times”, but have been unsuccessful because
the sale was legal; he claims he would gladly sell if the state
offered to buy it back.
Staro Sajmište isn’t the only former concentration
camp in Belgrade to have been subject to commercial development. In
2005, the land that houses the ruins of the Topovske Šupe camp was
bought by the local property developer Delta Holding. The company
intends to move the ruins, brick by brick, to an adjacent plot of
land so it can build what it says will be the biggest mall in the
Balkans. This plan has provoked a backlash from the local Jewish
community.
In the Czech town of Lety, meanwhile, an
industrial pig farm was constructed on the site of a camp that held
Roma internees during the second world war. Opened in the 1970s, the
farm was purchased by the Czech government in 2017 and demolished
last year. Kathrin Meyer, executive secretary of the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, says it is the only other known
example of a camp transformed into a place of business.
She says the cases highlight the conundrum of what
to do with sites tainted by a history of human suffering.
“There can be no single ‘correct’ way of
preserving a former concentration camp,” says Meyer. “Each site has
its own unique and deeply disturbing history, and it is ultimately
defined by the horrific events that took place there. The priority
must be remembering the victims and survivors. To do this,
remembrance sites must serve to educate and inform the world based
on facts.”
Budapest’s House of Terror Museum is a useful
example of how this might be done successfully. Located on one of
the most elegant boulevards in the Hungarian capital, between 1944
and 1989 this majestic 19th-century building was used by successive
totalitarian regimes as a torture facility. In 2002, it reopened as
a museum commemorating the people brutalised there.
Belgrade’s Jewish community retains hope that a
memorial centre on Staro Sajmište might some day serve similar aims.
A law paving the way is currently being drafted, but remains some
way from completion.
“A memorial centre needs to have an educative
function,” says Sabadoš. “A statue where people go to lay a few
flowers a couple of times a year isn’t enough. It needs to be a
place where people can go to hear, to learn, to understand the
extent of what took place there – and that it’s not out of the
question that the same thing could happen again tomorrow if you’re
not vigilant.”
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