At the Belgrade Fairgrounds

This chapter reveals that Holocaust remembrance in Serbia was never really about the Holocaust. During socialist Yugoslavia, Holocaust remembrance was placed within a larger narrative of Yugoslav antifascism and resistance—its multiculturalism and commitment to a pan-national socialist identity. To the extent that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were ever memorialized, this remembrance was either a product of Jewish organizations and initiatives or, in state efforts, a nonethnic remembrance that subsumed Jewish suffering under the larger framework of antifascist struggle and triumph. After the end of communism, however, Holocaust remembrance became a critical element in the total delegitimation of communism. This erasure of the communist past was built around an attack on Yugoslav multiculturalism, an attack which then provided legitimacy to the role of nationalism as the ordering principle in the postcommunist state and the increasing importance of maintaining an ethnically homogeneous body politic. A significant part of this project involved breaking the commitment to pan-national brotherhood and unity and thus making Yugoslavia retrospectively seem unnatural and artificial.