E LATTICEWORK TOWER pokes up from the banks of the Sava, the river that divides the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Laundry clipped up on clotheslines flows in the breeze next to the faded white structure, as it looms without apparent explanation alongside roaming dogs, junkyards, and squatters’ homes.
Down closer to the banks of the river is a monument that will tell you something about what used to be here, at a place called Semlin. “This is the place where the Nazi concentration camp at the old Belgrade fairgrounds used to be,” the plaque on the monument reads in Serbian and English. “The victims were mostly Serbs, Jews and Roma.”
Still, that doesn’t tell you that in a period of just a few months in 1942, half of all Jews in Nazi-occupied Serbia had gone through here and been exterminated, with the help of local collaborators. An estimated 6,300 of Serbia’s Jews, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were murdered in mobile gas vans driven by Nazis all around the streets of central Belgrade. But Semlin’s period as a temporary detention camp is arguably more widely known than its role as an extermination camp for Jews and Roma.
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