The Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia was virtually decimated during the Holocaust, with 85 percent of its members having perished during the German occupation. Nitza Gonen’s documentary, The Forgotten Ones, now available on the Izzy streaming platform, is billed as the first film to document this tragedy.
The narrator, identified only as Stella, was a resident of Sarajevo who immigrated to Israel with her family at the age of eleven. In this impassioned film, she visits her former homeland and interviews survivors and historians.
She begins on a personal note. Her great grandfather, Ahmed Sadik Sarlop, was a Muslim businessman from Salonica, Greece, who immigrated to Sarajevo. Due to his dealings with Jews, he spoke Ladino. During the Holocaust, he hid several Jews in his home. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, has recognized him as a Righteous Gentile.
Stella does not delve into her Muslim and Jewish family connections. The absence of this material is a missed opportunity to add substance to a film that tends to be short on granular details.
She does, however, give viewers a brief lesson in modern Yugoslavian history.
Yugoslavia, a confederation of Balkan provinces, won its independence after World War I. Its Jewish population was about 80,000 on the eve of World War II. Today, some 6,000 Jews live in the territories that comprised Yugoslavia before its dissolution.
On March 25, 1941, Yugoslavia joined the Axis powers after signing a friendship pact with Germany. Two days later, Yugoslavia pulled out of it, enraging German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. On April 13, Germany, in league with Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria, invaded and occupied Yugoslavia.
Hitler then proceeded to partition Yugoslavia. Germany took Serbia. Bulgaria annexed Macedonia. Hungary grabbed the Bachka region. Montenegro and much of the Adriatic coast was allotted to Italy. Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina formed the Independent State of Croatia, which was controlled by the Ustashe fascist movement.
Forty thousand Jews lived in Croatia, 16,000 in Serbia, 16,000 in Bachka, and 8,000 in Macedonia. How they were mistreated after the German invasion varied from region to region. Jews, who had been well integrated into Serbian society, were immediately singled out for persecution after the spring of 1941.
Eliezer Papo, an Israeli scholar, tells Stella that Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, was the first city in Nazi-occupied Europe to be declared Judenrein, or free of Jews.
At the end of that year, Jewish women and children from Belgrade and other parts of Serbia were sent to Saimishte, a concentration camp on the site of a fairground. In January 1942, a gas van was dispatched to the camp.
Jews from the Serbian town of Pancevo were transported to the Topovske Shupe camp, where they were shot en masse. A former Jewish resident recalls that ethnic Germans participated in the persecution of Jews.
Nearly all of the Jewish survivors speak to Stella in Hebrew, which presumably means that they immigrated to Palestine/Israel after the Holocaust.
Over two days in Bachka in January 1942, ethnic Hungarians slaughtered some 11,000 Jews. Some were thrown into the icy Danube River. A second wave of killings took place in 1944, when the survivors of the first atrocity were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland.
Around this time, Jews in Slovenia were rounded up and murdered.
By Stella’s reckoning, 98 percent of the Jews of Macedonia — an area handed over to Bulgaria by Germany — were killed.
In Croatia, Jews were treated mercilessly. Many were interned in the Jasenovac camp, the biggest of thirty Croatian concentration camps. Footage of Croatian fascists demolishing a synagogue is chilling. Slavko Goldstein, a survivor, says that some Jews joined partisan bands, which treated them well.
The treatment of Jews in the Italian sector, though better, was still harsh. Unfortunately, Stella leaves out the details. This is one of the film’s problems. All too often, Stella omits the historic back story and relies far too heavily on the impressionistic recollections of survivors. The film would have benefited greatly from even a bit of commentary about each region’s policy toward Jews.
This fault notwithstanding, The Forgotten Ones provides a sweeping overview of the Shoah in Yugoslavia, a topic that was barely mentioned, if at all, in Yugoslavian schools prior to Yugoslavia’s breakup.