Belgrade, Serbia – A rock concert that was planned for Saturday at the site of a World War II Nazi death camp in Belgrade was canceled after protests by Jewish groups.
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The Serbian organizers of the concert said the event was canceled after “pressure from foreign and domestic media.”
Some 48,000 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies perished at the Sajmiste camp in the 1940s.
“We hope that the big publicity created around the Staro Sajmiste site will be used for solving the problem of renovating the place,” said the concert organizers.
Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi hunter, in a statement Friday called the planned concert “a heartless insult to the memory of the victims of the Nazis.”
For Serbia’s dwindling Jewish community, the planned concert was the latest indignity to befall the site, which they say needs to be saved from decades of neglect.
Nearly all of Belgrade’s 8,000 Jews were killed at Sajmiste soon after it was set up in 1941 at the site of the Belgrade Fair exhibition ground. Most of the inmates were murdered while being transported in “gassing trucks” — vans with their exhaust pipes attached to the sealed cabin — to mass graves on the outskirts of Belgrade. [AP]
They only cancelled the concert [at that site] because of “pressure by the international media” [& groups], not because it was the right thig to do. This further demonstrates the moral corruption of [most of] the local population in the Eastern European countries.