Dara of Jasenovac

3/22/2025

There's a particular discomfort in discovering, after decades of historical education and over a hundred Holocaust-related films, that significant chapters of atrocity have remained invisible to me. "Dara of Jasenovac" delivers precisely this uncomfortable revelation, chronicling horrors at Croatia's Jasenovac concentration camp - a genocide I had never encountered in history books or cinema. Predrag Antonijevic's unflinching film follows ten-year-old Dara through what was sometimes called "the Auschwitz of the Balkans", where the fascist Ustase regime murdered primarily Serbs, but also Jews, Roma, and political dissidents. That such a significant murder camp could remain relatively unknown in the Western conscious speaks to the politics of historical memory. What distinguishes this sto