Mapping the Holocaust in
Croatia

Until mid-1943, all the prisoners in the main camp of the Jasenovac Camp Compex, Jasenovac III, were men. Female prisoners deported to the camp were either murdered immediately upon arrival or deported to the Stara Gradiška camp. Yet, in June 1943, the first female prisoners arrived from the Stara Gradiška. At first, they were placed at the area dubbed "the economy" inside the main camp, but, in September, the camp section for women was moved to the east of the camp between the outer wall and the barbed-wired inner part. The conditions were extremely difficult and many perished due to starvation, illness and the terror of the guards. On April 21, Ustaša guards murdered the around 600 surviving women in the camp.

In this document, recorded by the Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Helpers, Sofija Spoljarić from the town of Novska testified about her imprisonment in the women’s section of the camp complex.

In the Stara Gradiška Camp and later also in Jasenovac III, there were not only men but also women among the guards. Several of these women acted just as cruel and brutal towards the prisoners as their male counterparts. The commander of the women’s section of the Stara Gradiška Camp was Maja Buždon. Immediately after the collapse of the Independent State of Croatia, Buždon was captured by the Communist authorities and sentenced to death by a military court. In this excerpt from her interrogation, she candidly talked about her crimes, which included murder of prisoners and participation in selections for extermination.

When examining interrogation records from the immediate postwar period in Socialist Yugoslavia, such as Maja Buždon’s, it is important to keep in mind that investigators often used coercion to elicit confessions from suspects. Although torture during interrogations was officially prohibited, it was a common practice in 1945 and 1946. Nevertheless, Buždon’s culpability is confirmed by numerous survivor testimonies.

While the subject remains marginalized and under-researched within Holocaust studies, recent research suggests that homosexual intimate relations were quite common both among female and male prisoners in the SS concentration camps. This excerpt from a report written by the Communist self-help organization in the women’s section of the Stara Gradiška camp indicates that this was also the case in this setting. The leadership of the Communist partisan movement in Yugoslavia associated homosexuality with bourgeois “decadence”; a perspective that may have influenced the negative attitude expressed by the author of the report.

While the subject remains marginalized and under-researched within Holocaust studies, recent research suggests that homosexual intimate relations were quite common both among female and male prisoners in the SS concentration camps. This excerpt from a report written by the Communist self-help organization in the women’s section of the Stara Gradiška camp indicates that this was also the case in this setting. The leadership of the Communist partisan movement in Yugoslavia associated homosexuality with bourgeois “decadence”; a perspective that may have influenced the negative attitude expressed by the author of the report.