ZAGREB, 10 July 2022 - The 80th anniversary of the rescue operation launched by Diana Budisavljevic who played a crucial role in saving Serb children and finding a foster home for about 1,600 of them in Zagreb during the WW2, was marked in the capital on Saturday evening.

The commemorative event was held in a yard in downtown Zagreb where a majority of the saved children had been brought from Ustasha-led concentration camps to be taken by their foster families.

The commemoration was organised by the Documenta nongovernmental organisation, the Serb People's Council (SNV), and the Jasenovac Memorial Centre in memory of 10 July 1942 when humanitarian Diana Budisavljević arrived in the NDH-led Stara Gradiška camp and started registering children in a bid to save them.

Documenta leader Vesna Teršelič said that Budisavljević had actually begun her operation in October 1941 as soon as she had got information about the camps in Loborgrad which prompted her to do something and rescue children from those camps.

The commemorative events are also scheduled for Sunday, 10 July.

Teršelič said that Croatia was still dealing with many challenges concerning the legacy of the Nazi-style Independent State of Croatia (NDH), and warned that the For the Homeland Ready salute and Ustasha insignia had not yet been outlawed.

She expressed satisfaction with the attendance of young people from Italy, Germany, Greece, Ukraine, and Slovenia at the commemoration, within the EU-supported project "Between Memory and Oblivion - WWII places of memory".

Born in Innsbruck in 1891, Diana nee Obexer married Julije Budisavljevic in 1917, who at that time worked as an assistant at the surgical clinic in Innsbruck. By 1919, the couple had moved to Zagreb. She lived in Zagreb with her husband until 1972, when they moved back to Innsbruck. She died on 20 August 1978, aged 87.

In 2020, researcher and historian Natasa Matausic issued a book about Diana Budisavljevic in which she writes that this humanitarian woman of the Austrian ethnic background saved about 7,700 children from homes and Ustash-run camps during WWII.

ZAGREB, 2 Oct, 2021 - A ceremony was held in Sisak's Diana Budisavljević Park on Saturday to commemorate the children who had died in an Ustasha concentration camp in this city during the Second World War.

About 6,000 children passed through this first children's camp in the Ustasha-ruled Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The camp operated from 3 August 1942 until 8 January 1943, during which time about 1,200 children, aged several months to 10 years, died, Serb National Council president Milorad Pupovac recalled.

"More children would certainly have died had it not been for people who rose above the evil that reigned in people's hearts at the time, such as Diana Budisavljević and women and men around her, such as nurses, people from the Red Cross and the Caritas charity of the Zagreb Archdiocese, who tried to alleviate the horror of children being separated from their mothers and wives from their husbands," Pupovac said, adding that many residents of Sisak and Zagreb had taken in those children and saved their lives.

"That's why we have to thank those who were not only at risk of being scorned and censured but who also risked their own lives. They did what others, who were supposed to, did not want to," Pupovac said.

"This place should become a place where we would gather to show that we can rise above the evil we went through not so long ago in our country, Croatia, and in Yugoslavia.

The commemoration was organised by the Serb National Council and the Council of the Serb Minority in Sisak. It was attended, among others, by the deputy head of Sisak-Moslavina County, Mirjana Olujić, the mayor of Sisak, Kristina Ikić Baniček, representatives of the Serbian Embassy and several survivors of the camp. The memorial service was led by the Serb Orthodox parish priest Veselin Ristić.

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