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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2022
This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.
1 The Jasenovac Concentration Camp compound included a ceramics workshop and brick factory which prisoners were forced to labour in. These figurines were created there by Croatian-Jewish sculptor and ceramicist Slavko Brill, who was murdered by the Ustaše in Jasenovac in 1943.
2 The Ustaše were brought to power by Nazi Germany and installed to carry out its racial and strategic goals. The movement grew out of interwar Croatian nationalist parties like the Party of Rights and its more extreme branch, the Frankist movement, which were discontent with the interwar Yugoslav state and Serbian hegemony. Understanding Serbs as the obstacle to Croatian statehood and the Croatian people's development, the Ustaše's goal was to create an ethnically pure Croatian state through the elimination of unwanted populations, most especially Serbs, as a national political category. Historians continue to examine the organisation and (dys)function of the Ustaše regime, its ideology, population goals, state institutions, structures, and the nature of their mass killings. Nevertheless, Jasenovac was the largest site where Ustaše ideological/population goals were pursued. The historiography on this subject is expansive, but essential readings include: Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005); Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution War and Political Violence Since 1878 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Newman, John Paul, ‘War Veterans, Fascism, and Para-Fascist Departures in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941’, Fascism, 6, 1 (23 June 2017), 42–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ivo Goldstein, Jasenovac (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2018); Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
3 Nataša Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945. Logor Smrti i Radni Logor (Jasenovac: Spomen-produčje Jasenovac, 2003), 157–8.
4 Here I mean the Jasenovac Memorial Site and museum, as well as other official state discourses, local initiatives, publications, documentary films, and more.
5 Brotherhood and Unity and the Partisan Myth were part of Yugoslav socialist ideology which promoted fraternity among nationalities and narrativised the Second World War as a period of joint suffering among Yugoslav peoples who together defeated fascist occupiers and their collaborators to achieve a better future. This framework did not acknowledge the collaborationist movements which committed crimes against various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia or their ideologies, but rather created broad politically useful categories. Hoepken, Wolfgang, ‘War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Societies, 13, 1 (1998), 190–227CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karge, Heike, ‘Mediated Remembrance: Local Practices of Remembering the Second World War in Yugoslavia’, European Review of History, 16, 1 (2009), 49–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jovan Byford, Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), especially chapters three through five; Joel Palhegyi, ‘Tito Under Glass: “Tito Under Glass: Museum and Myth in the Making of Croat Yugoslavism”’ (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2019); Horvatinčić, Sanja, ‘Formalna heterogenost spomenicke skulpture i strategije sjecanje u socijalistickoj Jugoslaviji’, Anali galerije Antuna Augustincica, 31 (2012), 81–106Google Scholar.
6 Byford, Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia, chapters six and seven; Mila Dragojević, Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), especially chapter five; Vjeran Pavlaković, “Flirting with Fascism: The Ustaša Legacy and Croatian Politics in the 1990s,” 115–143, in Darko Gavrilović, ed., The Shared History: The Second World War and National Question in Ex Yugoslavia (Seville: Center for History, Democracy and Reconciliation, 2008); Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002).
7 Jelena Subotić, Red Star, Yellow Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019); Radonić, Ljiljana, ‘Slovak and Croatian Invocation of Europe: The Museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum’, Nationalities Papers, 42 (2014), 489–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ana Milošević and Heleen Touquet, ‘Unintended Consequences: The EU Memory Framework and the Politics of Memory in Serbia and Croatia’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18, 3 (3 July 2018), 381–99; Radonić, Ljiljana, ‘The Holocaust Template – Memorial Museums in Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina’, Annals of the Croatian Political Science Association: Political Science Journal, 15, 1 (2018), 131–54Google Scholar; Gal Kirn, ‘Transnationalism in Reverse: From Yugoslav to Post-Yugoslav Memorial Sites’, in C. de Cesari and Anne Rigney, eds., Transnational Memory. Circulation. Articulation. Scales (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016), 313–38; Subotić, Jelena, ‘Foreign Policy and Physical Sites of Memory: Competing Foreign Policies at the Jasenovac Memorial Site’, International Politics, 57, 6 (2018), 1012–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See footnotes 6–7.
9 Important museum historiography to examine here includes Steven D. Lubar, Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Robert C. Post, Who Owns America's Past?: The Smithsonian and the Problem of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ana Lucia Araujo, Alice L. Conklin, Steven Conn, Denise Y. Ho, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Samuel J. Redman, ‘AHR Conversation: Museums, History, and the Public in a Global Age’, The American Historical Review, 124, 5 (1 Dec. 2019), 1631–72; Literature on cultural theory is also critical to understand this relationship. See especially Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, ‘Rethinking the “Base and Superstructure” Metaphor’, and ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, in David Morley, ed., Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019), 143–71, 257–76, 347–61.
10 Ana Milošević and Heleen Touquet, ‘Unintended Consequences: The EU Memory Framework and the Politics of Memory in Serbia and Croatia’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18, 3 (3 July 2018), 381–99.
11 Karge, ‘Mediated Remembrance’, 49–62.
12 Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945, 151–4; Alexandra Zaremba, ‘Constructing a Useable Past: Changing Memory Politics in Jasenovac Memorial Museum’, in Ana Milošević and Tamara Trošt, eds., Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 97–120.
13 Eric D. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002); Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995); Tea Sindbeak Anderson, Useable Past? Representations of Yugoslavia's Difficult Past from 1945–2002 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012); Sabrina Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Mila Dragojević, Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).
14 Dragojević, Amoral Communities, 11; Byford, Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia, chapter 7.
15 Nataša Mataušić argues that it is impossible to determine to what degree Serbian or Croatian forces were responsible for the destruction of JMM and the larger memorial site given their shifting occupation and use of the space. Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945, 155–6.
16 Operation Storm or Oluja was a massive military operation launched by Croatian forces on the Republic of Serbian Krajina (Republika Srpska Krajina), which resulted in the forced migration of between 150,000–200,000 Serbian civilians from Croatia. Nikica Barić, Srpska pobuna u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 2005), 533–67.
17 Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945, 158.
18 Turner's The Democratic Surround is an excellent example of how this would be achieved. See also: Covert, Lisa Pinley, ‘The GI Bill Abroad: A Postwar Experiment in International Relations’, Diplomatic History, 40, 2 (Apr. 2016), 244–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
19 Brown, ‘Cold War, Culture Wars, War on Terror’.
20 Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xiii, 37–8.
21 Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 65.
22 While there was significant debate around the establishment of the USHMM and the historical narrative it would convey, it seems that the USHMM escaped the same kind of intense public and political debate related to other facets of culture at the time. Plausible explanations include the long-term planning for the museum from the late 1970s, the level of private funding from benefactors that supported the USHMM in conjunction with that of the US government, along with the simultaneous boom in global Holocaust memorialisation after the Cold War.
23 ‘Governing Body: Committee on Conscience’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (last visited 10 July 2021), //www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/simon-skjodt-center/committee-on-conscience; Jacqueline Trescott, ‘Judgment at Washington: Despite a Few Missteps In Its First Five Years, The Holocaust Museum Is a Resounding Success’, The Washington Post (1974-Current File), 22 Apr. 1998, D1, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/hnpwashingtonpost/docview/1620399161/F2AEA20CD0094D96PQ/2?accountid=8285.
24 Writing to US embassies in Zagreb and Belgrade as well as to United Nations Ambassador Madeline Albright, they were notified that the Jasenovac Memorial Area experienced damage but that its collection was unaccounted for; Letter from Director of External Affairs Ralph Grunewald to Stuart Eizenstat, Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade, 10 July 1996; Letter from Chairman Miles Lerman to President Franjo Tuđman, 18 Mar. 1996; Letters from Chairman Miles Lerman to US Representative to the United Nations Madeline Albright, 13 Sept. 1994; Letter from Director of Collections and Acquisitions Jacek Nowakowski to the American Embassy in Zagreb, 19 Sept. 1994; in ibid., ASC 2007.084, Box 1: Collection, Correspondence with other institutions, Folder 39: Jasenovac; Letter from Director of External Affairs Ralph Grunewald to Samuel Berger of the National Security Council, 1 Aug. 1996; Letter from Chairman Miles Lerman to President Franjo Tuđman, 24 Apr. 1997; Director Ralph Grunewald's Country Correspondence Files, 1995–1998, in ibid., ASC 2002.072 Box 2, Folder 8.
25 Tuđman was a major proponent of historical revisionism in Croatia, downplaying Ustaše crimes committed at Jasenovac, reducing the number of victims, and relativising the Ustaše as national heroes in the fight for an independent Croatian state. See his Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy (M. Evans, 1989/1996). In 1996, Tuđman envisioned a general war memorial that would promote reconciliation by burying Ustaše remains on the former concentration campground. For more on this, see Vjeran Pavlaković, ‘Red Stars, Black Shirts: Symbols, Commemorations, and Contested Histories of World War Two in Croatia’, The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research Report, 1 Jan. 2008, 26–7. USHMM intervention in Tuđman's plans was encouraged by the Croatian Jewish community and also included an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by USHMM Director Walter Reich. It is unclear just how formative USHMM action was in derailing this plan, but President Tuđman unofficially abandoned it within the year, likely as a result of diplomatic pressure from the United States and EU. Letter from Chairman Miles Lerman to Franjo Tuđman, 18 Mar. 1996, with response from Ivo Sanader (Tuđman's chief of staff), 6 May 1996, in ibid., ASC 2007.084, Box 1: Collection, Correspondence with other institutions, Folder 39: Jasenovac; Correspondence from Ivo Goldstein of the Croatian Jewish community to Director of External Affairs Ralph Grunewald, 31 May 1996, in ibid., ASC 2002.072 Box 2, Folder 8; Reich, Walter, ‘A Plan that's Bad to the Bone’, Wall Street Journal, 3 Apr. 1996Google Scholar.
26 For a text that epitomises these kinds of orientalist tropes see Robert D. Kaplan's, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Picador, 1993). Print media on the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution is immeasurable, but relevant examples include: John Pomfret, ‘Balkans Must Confront a History of Hatred: Facing the Future in the Balkans (First of Three Articles)’, The Washington Post, 17 Dec. 1995. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/balkans-must-confront-history-hatred/docview/903470153/se-2?accountid=8285; Tom Gjelten, ‘The Fires of Ancient Hatreds’, The Washington Post, 9 Oct. 1994. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/fires-ancient-hatreds/docview/750866162/se-2?accountid=8285; Celestine Bohlen, ‘Fragile Truce in Yugoslavia: The Fighting Wanes, but Hatreds Smolder Shaky Yugoslav Truce’, New York Times, 8 Aug. 1991. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/fragile-truce-yugoslavia/docview/108702018/se-2?accountid=8285; Stephen Engelberg, ‘Brutal Impasse: The Yugoslav War, a Special Report: Yugoslav Ethnic Hatreds Raise Fears of a War without an End’, New York Times, 23 Dec. 1991. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/yugoslav-ethnic-hatreds-raise-fears-war-without/docview/108772435/se-2?accountid=8285; Pierre Hart, ‘Yugoslavia's Legacy of Ancient Hatreds’, Wall Street Journal, 8 Sept. 1992. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/yugoslavias-legacy-ancient-hatreds/docview/135646082/se-2?accountid=8285.
27 Todorova, Maria, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention’, Slavic Review, 53, 2 (1994), 453–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 458–61, 473–74.
28 Todorova's work draws on several examples from the twentieth century and earlier. It includes the 1993 Carnegie Endowment Report, ‘The Other Balkan Wars’, as a prime example of how Balkan othering functioned amidst Yugoslavia's dissolution. This report, originally written on the 1912/13 Balkan Wars, drew a direct line between that conflict and the 1990s conflict in Yugoslavia. It suggested that the causes and circumstances of the 1990s conflict were unchanged and a continuation of national political conflict that took place roughly eighty years earlier, implying the region and its peoples’ incompatibility and predisposition to violence and obscuring the contextual, contingent, and processual factors which produced Yugoslavia's destabilisation and violence in the region. Todorova, ‘The Balkans’, 455. See also Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
29 There is a need for additional analysis on Western and especially US media reporting on Yugoslavia's dissolution. The following texts, however, are relevant given Western political institutions’ joint maneuvering of Yugoslavia's dissolution and offer useful starting points that help us interpret the American context: Robison, Bridget, ‘Putting Bosnia in its Place: Critical Geopolitics and the Representation of Bosnia in the British Print Media’, Geopolitics, 9, 2 (2004), 378–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hammond, Andrew, ‘Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to the EU’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 3, 3 (2006), 6–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riikka Kuusisto, ‘Savage Tribes and Mystic Feuds: Western Foreign Policy statement on Bosnia in the Early 1990s’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 169–83; Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006); Margit V. Wunsch Gaarmann, The War in Our Backyard: The Bosnia and Kosovo Wars Through the Lens of the German Print Media (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2015).
30 For more on the history of museums and their self-prescribed role in these kind of interventions, see Shepard Keach III, Collecting Native America, 1870–1960 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
31 Email correspondence, 2000, personal archive of Radu Ioanid, Director of the International Archival Program at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Letter from USHMM Director Sara Bloomfield to Charge d'Affaires Charles L. English of the US Embassy in Croatia, 11 Oct. 2000, in ibid.
35 Memo from Human Rights Officer Richard Reiter of the US Embassy in Zagreb to USHMM, 29 Sept. 2000, in ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Radu Ioanid, author interview, 13 Aug. 2019.
38 Ibid.
39 Diane Saltzman, author interview, 25 July 2019.
40 Agreement between the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the USHMM, 27 Oct. 2000; Agreement Between Republika Srpska and the USHMM, 27 Oct. 2000; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076, Box 1 Folder 20: Jasenovac Press and Other, in ibid.
41 This idea was based on intel from the Department of State, who received internal information from Banja Luka on political reactions to US intervention on the Jasenovac collection. As a part of this political performance, the RS parliament created a commission to investigate the collection's removal from Banja Luka, the ‘Inquiry Commission on Jasenovac’. Internal email correspondence, 13–14 and 21 Feb. 2001, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.; internal email correspondence, 13–14 Feb.; Letter from Republika Srpska Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic to USHMM, 12 Feb. 2001; Letter from Director Sara Bloomfield to Miroslav Mikes Chairman, Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on Jasenovac Republika Srpska, 22 Feb. 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005 ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 18, in ibid.
42 Internal email correspondence: 14 Mar. 2001; 15 Nov. 2001; 23 July 2001; Letter from Serbian Unity Congress to Director Sara Bloomfield, 16 Nov. 2001; Letter from Fr. Irinej Dobrijević, Executive Director of External Affairs for the Serbian Orthodox Church in the USA and Canada, 15 Nov. 2001, 000000 in ibid.; Invitation from USHMM Chairman Rabbi Irving Greenberg to Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle, 29 June 2001; Letter from Director of External Affairs Wesley A. Fischer to Executive Director of External Affairs of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the USA and Canada, 23 Apr. 2001; Letter from Patriach Pavle to USHMM Chairman Rabbi Irving Greenberg, 6 July 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005 ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17, in ibid.
43 Internal email correspondence, 5 July 2001, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.
44 Potential historians included, Mark Biondich (University of Toronto), John Lampe (University of Maryland), Ivo Banac (Yale University), Dennis Reinhartz (University of Texas), Reneo Lukić (Laval University), and Sabrina Ramet (University of Washington). The only scholar listed in the former Yugoslavia was Ivo Goldstein, who later led the Jasenovac Committee established by the Croatian parliament; Handwritten notes, Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076. Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.
45 Emphasis mine. Letter from Director of External Affairs Wesley A. Fisher to Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, 11 Apr. 2001, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid..
46 Members of this committee included: Slavko Goldstein as representative of the Croatian Jewish community, Katica Sedman, representative of the Croatian parliament, Josip Kolanović of the Croatian State Archive, Zoran Prpić of the Jasenovac Municipality, Branko Petrina, who represented camp survivors, Kresimir Piskulić of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Veterans in Croatia, Stevo Djurdjević, who represented the Croatian Roma community, Djuro Zatezalo, who represented the Croatian Serb community, and Mate Rupić, Director of JMM; Internal email correspondence, 3 Aug. 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.
47 Some of these activities included Croatia's acceptance of the Stockholm Conference declarations, initiatives for training teachers to teach the Holocaust and the creation of associated materials, and participation on matters of Holocaust era property restitution with organisations like the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and International Council of Museum (ICOM); Internal email correspondence, 17 May 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Jack McCray, ‘Avery Museum Chosen for Exchange Program: [FINAL Edition]’, The Post and Courier, 9 Mar. 2004, sec. SCHOOLS PLUS, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/news/docview/374021923/89347735FABC43F0PQ/31?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021).
50 These include (but are not limited to) partnerships between museums in the United States and Moscow, Chile, Germany, Nigeria, Romania, and of course Croatia. ‘Art Exhibits: City Galleries’, Springfield News Leader, 25 Sept. 2008, sec. Weekend, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/news/docview/374021923/89347735FABC43F0PQ/31?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021); McCray, ‘Avery Museum Chosen for Exchange Program’; Harold A. Gushue and Telegram & Gazette Staff, ‘Exchange Program at Museums Links the Old and New Worlds: [SOUTH COUNTY Edition]’, Telegram & Gazette, 14 Apr. 1998, sec. LOCAL NEWS, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/docview/268688833/fulltext/44E480951E4441ADPQ/1?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021); ‘Region in Brief’, The Santa Fe New Mexican, 5 Mar. 1994, sec. SANTA FE/EL NORTE, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/news/docview/331251276/89347735FABC43F0PQ/2?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021).
51 It is worth noting that in the interim period before IPAM began, the Jasenovac Council appointed by the Croatian parliament began its own work (though it's difficult to ascertain the extent to which they were in conversation with JMM and how long the council functioned). The council introduced a resolution to have an annual National Holocaust Remembrance Day in Croatia which would be commemorated annually on 10 Oct., the date in 1941 when the Ustaše destroyed Zagreb's main synagogue. Similarly, the government of Croatia created a special commission that began working on the steps for Croatia's participation in the International Task Force for Holocaust Remembrance. Membership in the ITF would be important to JMM activities in the years that followed. Internal email correspondence, 5 May 2002, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2001–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.
52 Again, it is next to impossible to determine exact US Department of State or other official interest in JMM through this IPAM partnership. But based on the programme's conceptualisation and goals as well as grant completion reports which assessed these partnerships, it seem that the US not only intended to export its understanding of democratic values through museum exchange but also to monitor how those values were received and implemented abroad.
53 Internal correspondence, 12 Dec. 2000; 6 Mar. 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.
54 Report from Heather Erskine to USHMM officials, 14 May 2002; International Partnership Among Museums 2001–2003: Final Report and Evaluation, Collections Director: Records Relating to USHMM Efforts to Rescue the Collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia 2001–2005, ASC 2015.94 Box 1 Folder 6: Jasenovac IPAM 2003/2005, in ibid.
55 Internal memorandum, 24 Apr. 2002; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1, Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.
56 Prior to Jovičić's assumption of the role, Marica Karkaš (a Jasenovac Memorial Museum curator) was made interim director. Internal correspondence at the USHMM suggests that this change in JMM leadership was not politically charged but caused by former director Rupić's pursuit of other professional goals; Internal email correspondence, Collections Director, ASC 2015.94 Box 1 Folder 6: Jasenovac IPAM 2003/2005, in ibid.
57 Email from Collections Director Diane Saltzman to K. Lakey with the American Alliance of Museums, 5 Jan. 2003, in ibid.
58 Jasenovac Memorial Museum International Task Force Fund Project Proposal Application, in ibid.
59 Report, International Task Group for Jasenovac, 14–17 Feb. 2004, in ibid.
60 Ibid.; exhibition brief, 2004, in ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Report, International Task Group for Jasenovac, 14–17 Feb. 2004, in ibid.
63 Internal email correspondence, 14–18 Jan. 2005; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1, Folder 16, in ibid.
64 Handwritten notes, ‘Concept of a new Permanent Exhibition in the Jasenovac Memorial Museum’, Curator Exhibition Files (Steven Luckert), ASC 2008.219 Box 14 Folder 4: Records from the Curator of the PE related to the exhibition.
65 Greg Naranjo, author interview, 30 July 2019.
66 Internal correspondence between Arthur Berger and Diane Saltzman, 4 Dec. 2006, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia 2000–2005 ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.
67 Zaremba, ‘Constructing a Useable Past’, 110–17.
68 Soon after the 2006 exhibit opened, the USHMM received a letter from Israeli historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, who was immediately critical of the exhibit but was initially dismissed by USHMM staff as the only ‘sour note’ of the new exhibit's opening. While JMM continued to invite USHMM officials to annual commemorations in Croatia in the years that followed, the USHMM was no longer involved in its activities. Letter from the Efrain Zuroff to the USHMM, Nov. 2006, and internal correspondence between Arthur Berger and Diane Saltzman, 4 Dec. 2006, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia 2000–2005 ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.
