The world terribly failed the young children in this photo.

The world continues to fail these children...

because reconciliation of this genocide has still not happened because of the Croatian government's inaction.

Indeed for a time, the Jasenovac Memorial, a memorial for the largest Ustasha run concentration camp, included a revisionist death toll on one of its plaques which was a significantly lower figure than what any historian or survivor lists as the actual death toll which ranges from 600 000 to well over one million. 

My grandmother was three years old when the genocide started. Both my maternal grandparents are/were Serbians from modern day Croatia.

They were both from areas that were decimated by the Ustasha. Thankfully, as far as we know only one family member was killed by the Ustasha (my great-grandfathers uncle.) The rest managed to hide in the forest for those four years. Constantly on the run and subsisting on leaves and grass and whatever else they could find.

They were the lucky ones. 

Both of them were so incredibly lucky. If they weren't so lucky I wouldn't be here today.

How many millions of people are not here today because of the hundreds of thousands heinously killed by the Ustasha? Indeed, many of those children in the picture would still be alive today. 

We must not let arguably the most brutal genocide in history go forgotten. We must not let Croatia get away with revising history and painting Ustasha war criminals as heroic patriots. 

The following is a quote taken from "Jasenovac: Aushwitz of the Balkans" by Dr. Greif (page 397): 

"The Nazi general Edmund Glaise von Horstenau described in his book ... his visit to Jasenovac....This is enough to make a man retch." 

He continues, "And then came the worst of all: along the walls of a room, on hay that was brought because of my visit, more than fifty naked children are lying, half of them dead, the other half dying. It should not be forgotten that the inventors of concentration camps were the British during the Boer War. However, these camps have reached the pinnacle of abomination here Croatia, under Poglavnik which we put in power. The greatest of evils must be Jasenovac, which an ordinary mortal cannot even imagine." 

That was a Nazi decrying the unfathomable depravity of the Croatian Ustasha.

Glaise von Horstenau was so moved by the unimaginable horrors of the Ustasha run concentration camp that he joined a resistance movement to overthrow the Ustasha, called the Lorkovic-Vokic plot, which ultimately failed. 

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