Audience Member
I lost a number of kin at Jasenovac. In our district, one in four were killed in WWII, by fascists, simply because we went to an Eastern Orthodox church and were therefore considered 'Serbian' by nationality. My DNA is 33% aboriginal to Croatia, my family had lived in Karlovac county, specifically, for at least the past 200 years, as far back as Ancestry.com will speculate. Still, we were driven from these lands we have always lived in, accused, in the western press, of being invading genociders. An example of one of those Really Big Lies. Operation Storm was an extinction event. I am one of the last. The culture that produced Tesla and held the border of Europe for 350 years against further Moslem colonization, is now lost in Total Diaspora, far too small and scattered for the culture to survive. We will all simply be absorbed wherever we land.
The reviews I am reading are sickening. They are accusing us of wanting this movie made simply to make Croatians and Catholics look bad. How would a Jewish Holocaust survivor talk about what's happened to his family without saying something negative about the actions of some Germans? I am very familiar with the testimonies and documentation concerning the clerical fascist state of Croatia. Are you? This movie was extremely restrained in the stories it told. For example, the musical chair scene was based on numerous testimonies, but the game was not being played by adults in reality. Little children were being forced to play it. Perhaps my family's little four-year-old Milka, who was lost in Jasenovac? Was that the last thing she experienced? She failed to find a chair and her throat was cut?
Some of the statements in these reviews are outright lies or ignorant misstatements. There WERE gypsy and Jewish prisoners in the storyline. There WERE heroic Croats. Was someone asleep? Were they so intent on seeing bias they exerted some of their own? As someone told me, we have the misfortune that the people who have hated us and abused us behaved so badly that when we try to report on it, people think WE'RE deranged.
We survivors have waited 70 years for a beautifully made, international feature film, with a moving orchestral soundtrack and wonderful acting to be made telling the world the truth about what happened to us, which we are not over yet. Human beings NEVER recover from this kind of trauma in that short period of time. I just watched a movie last week about the sufferings of Koreans at the hands of Japanese in a labor camp, "Battleship Island." It was wonderful. I see no one complaining that it's just anti-Japanese propaganda. You will often hear Chinese and Korean people say that they may be optimistic about current relations with the Japanese, but they will NEVER forget what happened. Nobody can ever forget when things like this happen. No human beings can.
For everyone else in the world, it seems, it is understood that people want respectful attention for what has happened to them, and a chance to tell the story of their brave struggle against such evil. But that principle has never been applied to us. Not even after 70 years will there be a respectful moment where we can feel like we matter. What's happened to us is as bad as it gets, anywhere, ever, and no one knows, no one cares. No one wants to know.
Some say 80% of Croatia was Eastern Orthodox at the beginning of the 19th century. By mid-20th century that was down to 15% after one in four of us had been destroyed as sadistically as it gets. I wonder if it just became expedient to the Austro-Hungarian empire to influence the people to become western, instead of eastern, identified. From there flowed one of the most horrendous cultural, psychological, homicidal genocide stories ever. It's horrible what happens to people when you convince them they're inferior and need to become what you want them to be. And then promote them based on how deeply they will betray their (former) own. The 'Father of the Croatian Nation' was half Serb. He went all the way to the top, by being the first to call for the extermination of the subhuman Serbs. His own mother.
It's sickening, in general, the amount of propaganda the West has been heaping on the Serbs since the 90s. The West, by the way, gained control over strategically invaluable land -- the easiest land route between Europe and the Middle East -- the year after Yugoslavia was destroyed. Where does that route run? Through Serbia, Kosovo to be specific. The largest US military base in Europe now sits in that thoroughfare. I've just given you a hint on the reason the word for 'divide and conquer' is 'balkanization.' Just remember the words, 'strategic military location' and all the complexities of the Balkans become very simple. It's not us who are crazy, but all the avaricious superpowers throughout history trying to make us so.
Yes, there are some corrupt politics going on with this movie. They are in regard to the political agendas of the powerful who think they can write the postscript to anyone's story they please. And then, of course, there are the rumors that a PR firm in Los Angeles under contract with the government of Croatia, paid off some of those prestigious reviewers to deliver THEIR propaganda. Just a rumor. Of course, just a rumor.
And the reviewer who accused the movie of being made by a nationalistic Serbian government? When you ask any Serbs, they'll tell you their government is a puppet of the West. How can there be such a disconnect?
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Great movie! Worth of watching. Touching story depicting the suffering of human beings from the hands of the other human beings. It makes one ask him/herself how was this possible. The movie prompts to thinking and introspection.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
Full Review
greg r
I have studied the Holocaust for years. Traveled to Auschwitz/Birkenau. Other camps. I am neither Serb nor Croat. German nor Jew. This movie sucks. Period. Sucks. I went in thinking the reviews against it were a Hollywood alliance because of the atrocities of Serbs in my lifetime. It is not. The movie is over the top and just bad. Poorly written, clearly a hit piece, and written with an anger no different than the perpetrators of the atrocities this movie details. How this has the high audience rating I have no idea. This is garbage. The critics are correct. Even if some are racially biased. I turned it off almost an hour before the end. So many better movies about the Holocaust. Important movies.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A visually strong film that portrays a little known part of the Holocaust that raged in Europe in WWII. During the war, the Nazis helped establish the Independent State of Croatia in 1941 which was run by the Croatian Ustasha fascist regime. Fanatically loyal to Hitler and his racial theories, they created death camps, the largest of which was called Jasenovac. The random violence and sick games and terror plays out at times as in Schindler's List when the German Commander Amon Goth toyed with his victims. In this film the Ustasha are nameless guards and overseers with no limits to their evil. The acting is medicore and predictable at times but maybe something is lost in the translation to subtitles. Overall, a good film and one that is historically very accurate and a solid contribution to the Holocaust genre. I believe also probably the only feature film about the Jasenovac camp and the crimes committed against Croatia's minority Serbs and Jews in WWII.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
WalterReid
This is a poignant and deeply moving film, seen through the eyes of a child, about human suffering, the evil and cruelty of man's inhumanity to man and the triumph of the human spirit against all odds. The cinematography is superb, the production values and attention to detail of the sets is outstanding and the acting is impeccable. I highly recommend it. The film takes place during the Holocaust era of World War 2 as seen through the struggle for survival of a young girl who is being robbed of her childhood by the unspeakable evil she witnesses.
The setting is the Jasenovac extermination camp complex where unspeakably brutal crimes of torture and mass murder were perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews & Roma-Sinti peoples in the pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia (a satellite state of Hitler's Nazi Germany from 1941-1945), set up and run - not by the Nazi SS - but by the Croatian clerical-fascist "Ustashi" regime, many of whom were Roman Catholic priests, including the commander of the camp in 1942, a Franciscan friar. German lieutenant Artur Hefner of the Wermacht transport corps, visited Jasenovac in February 1942, and described it in a letter to the Nazi German Foreign Ministry in Berlin as a camp "of the worst kind, equal to Dante's inferno".
The grim reality of the extreme sadism and brutality of the crimes commited in the camp obviously had to be toned down in the film (for example the musical chairs murder sequence actually historically involved child victims and not adults). While any dramatic film about the Holocaust will have some aspects of it that will be disturbing to some viewers, nevertheless remembering these terrible crimes is essential in order to warn current and future generations. If you want to see a film about the triumph of the human spirit during times of great adversity and against overwhelming odds, then this film is a must see. 5 stars. As mentioned above, one of the most notorious Ustashi camp killers who at one time commanded the Jasenovac camp was a Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan order (an individual named Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, dubbed "Friar Satan" by the camp prisoners) who relished in extremely barbaric and sadistic torture against the camp prisoners, including women, children and babies. Renowned British historian Avro Manhattan in his book "The Vatican's Holocaust" describes this bloodthirsty killer bragging and inciting his fellow Ustashi to murder Serbian and Jewish children:
"Father Filipovic killed a child with his own hands in the village of Drakulic, while addressing a battalion of Ustashi: "Ustashi," was his curt brotherly exhortation, "I re-Christen these degenerates in the name of God. You follow my example." Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan order, Father Dionizije Juricev, in his role as an Ustashi official in a special department dealing with forced conversions to Roman Catholicism, on 22 October 1941, in a public speech said the following:
"In this country only Croats may live from now on, because it is a Croatian country. We know precisely what we will do with the people who do not convert! I have purged the whole surrounding area, from babies to seniors. If it is necessary, I will do that here, too, because today it is not a sin to kill even a seven-year-old child, if it is standing in the way of our Ustashi movement! Do not believe that I could not take a machine gun in hand just because I wear priest's robes. If it is necessary, I will eradicate everyone who is against the Ustasha state and its rule - right down to babies!"
On June 2nd, 1941, in a speech given at Nova Gradiska, Milovan Zanic, the Ustashi Minister of Justice and author of many legal decrees, revealed quite clearly the government plan: This state, our country, is only for Croats and for no one else! There are no ways and means which we Croats will not use to make our country truly Croat, and to cleanse it of all Orthodox Serbs. All those who came into our country 300 years ago must disappear. We make no attempt to conceal our intention. It is the policy of our state, and during its realization we shall do nothing else but follow the principles of the Ustashi."
On May 5, 1941, thye Croatian "Poglavnik" Fuehrer Ante Pavelic jointly with the Minister of Education and Cults Dr Mile Budak adopted the Religious Conversion Law that obliged the Orthodox to convert to Catholicism. It was Mile Budak who announced during his speech in Gospic on June 22, 1941: We shall slaughter one third of the Serbs, deport another third, and force the last third into Roman Catholicism and thus make them Croats. We shall destroy every trace of theirs, and all that will be left will be a bad memory of them. For Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies we have three million bullets!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
04/15/21
Full Review
Audience Member
I highly recommend everyone to watch this movie. It's a story about the hidden part of history, Jasenovac concentration camp in which Ustasha Croatian regime killed 700 000 people, of which 500 000 are Serbs. One of the world's greatest researchers of the Holocaust, Gideon Greif wrote a book "Jasenovac Auschwitz of Balkans" which tells the horrors in Jasenovac concentration camp, describing 57 brutal ways of killing, which made even Nazis sick.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/19/23
Full Review
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