The Yugoslav exhibition at Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed for fifteen years as six successor states – where Nazi collaboration and war crimes fuel national divisions to this very day – couldn’t agree on the story they wanted to tell. Last month, they made a surprise announcement
VIENNA – It was an announcement that surprised even the Western Balkans’ keenest observers: Following more than a decade of painstaking negotiations, six successor states of the former Yugoslavia – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia – signed an agreement to renovate the old Yugoslav national exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The news broke shortly before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.
