Biography
Krinka Vidaković Petrov is a scholar, professor, and diplomat. She has held the position of Full Professor/Scientific Advisor. She has worked at the Institute for Literature and Art (Belgrade), the University of Pittsburgh, and Ohio State University (USA). She served as the Ambassador of Yugoslavia to Israel (2001-2006) and has been the Director of the Memorial Centre "Staro Sajmište" in Belgrade since 2022. She has published numerous scholarly monographs and studies, as well as articles in domestic and international publications in Serbia/Yugoslavia and abroad. Her fields of interest include comparative literature, folklore studies, Hispanic, Sephardic, and Jewish studies, Holocaust research, diaspora culture, and memory studies.
JASENOVAC, DEATH CAMP: TESTIMONIES AND MEMORIES OF JEWISH PRISONERS
Abstract: Our research focuses on a collection of secondary sources consisting of testimonies and memories of Jewish prisoners of Jasenovac, gathered and published during the war and in the post-war period. The first in this series is a brochure titled Jasenovac Camp: Statements of Prisoners Who Escaped from the Camp, published as early as 1942 by the partisan printing press (NOVJ). After the war, a collection titled Crimes of the Fascist Occupiers and Their Collaborators Against Jews in Yugoslavia was published in 1957, with a section dedicated to Jasenovac, published by the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The Jewish Memories of the Jasenovac Camp collection, initially published by the same publisher in 1972, was the result of a personal initiative by surviving camp inmates. A series of personal memoirs begins with Egon Berger’s 44 Months in Jasenovac (1966) and continues with Albert Maestro’s Memories of the Ustasha Camps (1996), Ervin Miller’s Jasenovac: Memories of a Surviving Prisoner (1997), Cadik Danon’s Cut Down Tree of the Danon Family: A Holocaust Witness – Memories of Jasenovac (2000), and Imre Rochlitz’s Accident of Fate: A Personal Account 1938-1945 (2011). To these, we must add personal testimonies from surviving camp inmates stored in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, including the testimony of one of the few surviving members of the Jewish community in Zemun, who was deported to Jasenovac by the Ustashe in 1942. Lastly, valuable testimonies have been published in the multi-volume series We Survived, issued by the Jewish Historical Museum and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia and Montenegro. The research includes an analysis of these texts and their contribution to shedding light on Jasenovac, which, according to Slavko Goldstein, was "primarily and by far the death camp."
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