The Holocaust did not take place only in the well known concentration camps of central Europe.

Here is a good website about the Semlin Judenlager, just across the river from downtown Belgrade, where several thousand Jews were murdered with the support of a mobile gas van:

On 29th May 1942, German Foreign Office representative in Serbia Franz Rademacher proudly declared that ‘the Jewish question is no longer an issue in Serbia. All that is left is to sort out the question of property’.

Crimes on this scale of course give all sorts of reasons for those who survive not to talk about them. The British Academy project behind the website explores this phenomenon in the Serbian context:

… the destruction of the Jews was assimilated within the dominant symbolic orders, first within multi-ethnic Yugoslavia – where the heroism of the Partisans, rather than the victimisation of the civilian population, constituted the primary object of memory – and later within the post-Yugoslav ideological milieu, which was dominated by Serbian nationalism and preoccupied with the suffering of Serbs under the Ustasha regime in Croatia during the Second World War.

A rather unhappy formulation – juxtaposing ‘multi-ethnic’ (ie nice) Yugoslavia with the ‘post-Yugoslav ideological milieu, dominated by Serbian nationalism’ (ie nasty)? But the page on the site dealing with this is better.

There is a world-weary view of foreign policy – exemplified in this bantamweight article by Sir Christopher Meyer which keeps reappearing on the Times website as if it were Deep Truth – which insists that ‘nationalism’ never goes away and can only be contained/managed:

Ethnic and nationalist rivalry is as old as sin, and as inextinguishable…

Globalisation and interdependence were supposed to have swept aside these ancient feuds and rivalries. Theories of the postmodern state now abound. Tony Blair preached how national interest would be trumped by the spread of “global values”. This is self-evident rubbish.

For here is the paradox of the modern world. Money, people, culture, business and electronic information cross porous frontiers in ever-increasing volume. But as national boundaries dissolve in cyberspace, so everywhere the sense of nationhood and national interest strengthens. Five minutes in Beijing, Washington, Tehran or Moscow will tell you that.

Well, a definite ‘maybe’.

But when one looks closely at latter-day ‘nationalism’ across former Yugoslavia it is hard not to conclude that the Tito regime created the specific circumstances for the subsequent nationalist convulsions, by suppressing or twisting for many decades the truth of what happened in WW2 for its own communist ideological purposes.

And this left millions of grieving traumatised people grappling to find an identity based on moral and psychological reference points which were not lies or otherwise dishonest.

Nothing now can put right what happened at the Semlin camp.

But it can be remembered in our best attempt at a thoughtful, respectful – and above all honest – way.