While nobody may expect the Spanish Inquisition, everybody has heard of the Spanish Inquisition. Between November 1, 1478 and July 15, 1834, the infamous tribunal prosecuted over 150,000 people in Europe and Spanish America. While the official records at the Vatican maintain that between 3000 and 5000 people were executed, most historians estimate the real number to be much higher. It is rightfully considered to be one of the darkest episodes in European history. The Spanish Inquisition is far from the worst atrocity committed by Catholics armed with state and military power. In October of 782, Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, had over 4500 Saxon pagans put to death. Queen Mary I of England, also known as Bloody Mary, burned 284 English Protestants alive, and drove another 800 into exile. Anywhere from 8,000 to 30,000 French Huguenots were murdered during the St. Bartholomew massacre of 1572. The very worst massacre carried out by an explicitly Catholic regime, however, took place in the Balkans. Between August of 1941, and April of 1945, the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet regime of Nazi Germany, maintained the third largest concentration camp in Europe. By conservative estimates, at the confluence of the Slava and Una rivers near the town of Jasenovac in Croatia, 80,000 Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Roma were shot, clubbed to death, or sliced to ribbons by the pious executioners of Ante Pavelić’s Ustaše government.
Based on the testimony of survivors and eye witnesses and directed by Predrag Antonijević, Dara of Jasenovac is a dramatization of this little known genocide in the Balkans. Harshly criticized in the west as Serbian nationalist propaganda by critics like Linda Marric of the Jewish Chronicle and Jay Weissberg of Variety, neither of whom dispute the film’s historical accuracy, Dara of Jasenovac is not strictly speaking a movie about the Holocaust. The Ustaše were not Germans. Hitler had no intention of exterminating the Serbs, nor was he particularly interested in the Balkans, only deciding to occupy the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after he had been drawn into the region by Mussolini’s defeat in Greece. Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše, like many of Hitler’s collaborators in Europe, were opportunists with heir own agenda. What’s more, the Jasenovac death camp, like the Rape of Nanking, is an inconvenient event that established British and American historians who control the official narrative of World War II in the English speaking world would like to forget. Were the Japanese, our current allies and trading partners, as bad as the Germans? Were the Serbs, who have been demonized in the west ever since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, victims of a genocide as brutal as the genocide inflicted on the Poles and Ashkenazi Jews?
As the Dara of Kasenovac opens, the title character, played by the luminous child-actor Biljana Čekić, who seems to have subconsciously internalized the historical trauma of the Serbian people so well she barely has to act, is being marched with her older brother Jovo past a group of Croatian peasant women working in the fields. “Why aren’t they being rounded up?” she asks. “Because they’re not Serbs,” he answers. When she wonders how anybody can tell the difference, he explains that Orthodox Christians cross themselves differently from Catholics. We are not in the world of Nazi racist science — Serbs and Croatians are genetically identical — or western social Darwinism, but a much older conflict, one that goes back to the Fourth Crusade, and to the the extermination of western Europeans in Constantinople during the Massacre of the Latins in 1182. After the First World War, the Croatians, who had been the most loyal subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the very people who saved Franz Joseph and the Habsburgs from Louis Kossuth and Hungarian nationalism, suddenly found themselves very junior partners in a pan-Slavic federation dominated by Orthodox Serbs and governed, not from Zagreb or Vienna, but from Belgrade. We are sitting on the fault line between east and west, Byzantine and Venetian, Greek and Latin, Ottoman and Habsburg. It was at Jasenovac where Croatian traditionalists, nationalists and Catholics, many of whom would go on to deny they were even Slavic, would take their savage revenge against their eastern brothers who they believed had forced them into an oriental kingdom against their will. The Roman Catholic Cain would exterminate the Orthodox Abel.
This is not a subtle movie. Predrag Antonijević made a strong dramatic choice and stuck with it. He would abandon realism for Grand Guignol black comedy, the great tradition of Serbian film, taken to its blackest extreme. The Ustaše guards at Jasenovac don’t look like monsters. The men look like handsome southern European dandies. Some of the women look like fashion models. But they act like utter demons. This makes it all the more shocking. When the camp commandment Marko Janketić, played by Vjekoslav Luburić, orders a little entertainment for a visiting Nazi delegation — a game of musical chairs where the loser gets his throat cut — the Germans are offended, not so much morally, but aesthetically. This is not the clean, well-lit , efficient world of Auschwitz and Zyklon B, but a crudely violent dance of death vomited up from the very bowels of hell. “Welcome to the Balkans,” a senior German officer remarks to a junior colleague who has gotten squeamish. Not only does Marko Janketić have a strong stomach when it comes to violence, it seems to make him even hungrier. Indeed, he spends so much time eating that you almost wonder why he hasn’t gotten as fat as Brendan Fraser in The Whale. When he decides to finish off a Serbian prisoner with a pistol, he does so with an apple in his mouth, almost as if he were a roast pig wielding a Luger. Marko Janketić’s sister Nada, played by Alisa Radakovic, almost seems to be a test. How hideously evil, how demonic, can we make a beautiful young woman? If Marko Janketić’s favorite dessert after mass murder is food, then Nada’s is sex. She’s so turned out by all of the musical chairs and throat slitting that she ducks into the back seat of a car with her husband for a quick fuck, climaxing the moment the latest victim’s carotid artery spews blood all over the ground. If Emir Kusturica used sex in the opening scene of Underground, two people fucking while Belgrade was being bombed, as an expression of a crude life force surviving in the middle of horror, then for Predrag Antonijević sex and food are a feast for Thanatos, a black mass for the Satanic worship of death.
But where I think Dara of Jasenovac triumphs is not so much in its portrayal of evil but in it’s portrayal of good. Biljana Čekić, who plays the 10-year-old Dara, and Jelena Grujičići, who plays Blanicka, a young Jewish woman who helps her and her brother escape, are both superb actresses portraying tough minded solidarity and resistance to evil. The heroism that both Dara, who’s utterly determined to keep her word to her dead mother and protect her brother Bude, and Blanicka, who instinctively gives her up life for another woman’s children, is not an idealized, ethereal good. Quite the contrary, it involves making hard, sometimes agonizing choices. For Blanicka, choosing to save Dara and Bude means choosing not to save hundreds of other children. For Dara, overcoming evil does not mean floating above evil. It means staring right into the face of evil — Biljana Čekić’s large brown eyes see everything and take in everything — and defeating it by any means necessary. There is, for example, only food for a fraction of the women and children at Jasenovac. Why feed prisoners you intend to kill anyway? Dara is determined that Bude will be fed. The problem is she doesn’t have a bowl or a spoon, and they won’t give her food without one. But when a guard who looks like an extraordinarily sadistic nerd decides to “solve” the problem by machine gunning a dozen women and children, Dara calmly walks past the victims, picks up a bowl and a spoon, gets a ration of watery gruel and brings it back to her little brother. What is genuinely extraordinary about this scene is that somehow Biljana Čekić manages to express how Dara knows she is in the presence of evil, suspects that perhaps she is committing evil by taking the bowl, yet she does it anyway. Dara is not good because she is without sin. Dara is good because she is determined to survive. If the Ottoman Empire couldn’t defeat her ancestors, the Ustaše will not wipe her family from the face of the earth.
The climax of Dara of Jasenovac comes an extraordinarily cruel scene that is not only a striking piece of cinema but also reminds us that the Ustaše were the only regime in all of Europe that had a death camp expressly for children. For the children of Jasenovac the most dreaded word is “the hospital.” In Jasenovac, the hospital, which in the outside world is a place of healing, is a place of certain death. For most of the film Dara manages to keep Bude, who is sick and getting sicker, out of the “hospital” by pleading that “he’s hungry.” Finally, however, one of the beautiful young Ustaše demons decides she’s had enough and sends Bude to the hospital and to his doom. But Blanicka has a plan. They will dress Bude up as a girl and send her away with a Red Cross inspection team that is allowed to take a token number of children away from the camp to safety. Ante Vrban, Marko Janketić’s most brutal enforcer, has other plans. As Dara and her brother hide only a few yards away, he locks most of the children of the “hospital” in a basement. The light shines on their milky white faces, their eyes pleading for the mercy they know they won’t get at his hands. If Dara looks into the face of evil and overcomes it, then Ante looks into the face of innocence pleading for mercy and affirms his worship of the devil. One by one he makes eye contact. For a moment, he even seems to hesitate. But then he shakes up a grenade loaded with poison gas, throws it inside and slams the door. Vrban is not Himmler, a clinical mass murderer who wanted to keep his hands clean. Instead he is dark romantic, clerical, Catholic fascist who believes that by going to hell he is serving his country and his people. In real life he ended up at the end of a communist rope. Perhaps he got his wish.
Dara of Jasenovac has been accused of hostility to Croatians and it certainly portrays most of them in a bad light. But my response is really “so what?” Everything in the movie actually happened. Nobody is disputing that. The Klansmen in Mississippi Burning, the rapists and murderers in Brian De Palma’s Vietnam War film Casualties of War, the sociopathic mobsters in Goodfellas and The Sopranos all paint Americans in an extraordinarily bad light and yet they reflect something about the American realty. Perhaps Predrag Antonijević could have made Blanicka a “good” Catholic Croatian instead of Jewish. But perhaps most Croatians are mature enough to understand that their country has done evil like most other countries, that Tito and many members of the partisan resistance movement were Croatians, and that the Ustaše do not represent them as a people. Certainly no western critic complained that Andrzej Wajda’s film “Katyn” portrayed Russians or communists in a bad light. Even if the aesthetic of Dara of Jasenovac is not to your taste, it is still history we forget at our own peril.