Staro Sajmište and Belgrade’s Neglected Holocaust Landmarks
The fate of Staro Sajmište is a manifestation of the complicated legacy of occupation, collaboration, and resistance in the former Yugoslavia during the Second World War and the Holocaust.
By Liam Hoare
eJewish Philanthropy
On December 8, 1941, the Gestapo established a concentration camp on the exhibition grounds (sajmište) in Belgrade. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia had been occupied by Nazi Germany in April of that year and the capital broken into pieces between the fascist puppet Independent State of Croatia and German military administration in Serbia. Between December 1941 and May 1942, Staro Sajmište was a point of internment and death for thousands of Serbian Jews and Roma, executed in mobile gas chambers. Serbia was declared Judenfrei by August 1942. Staro Sajmište ceased operations in July 1944.
After the Second World War, during the reconstruction of Yugoslavia along socialist lines, Staro Sajmište became not a place of commemoration and reverence but emergency housing for low-income individuals and families, and a space for small businesses and artists’ studios. While successive Serbian governments have displayed an intention to change the status quo on the site, it remains a neglected area of mixed use to this day with only minimal evidence of memorialization, some of which negates the essential Judaic centrality of the Holocaust.
The fate of Staro Sajmište is a manifestation of the complicated legacy of occupation, collaboration, and resistance in the former Yugoslavia during the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as the unresolved national conflicts left over from wars of the 1990s.
Staro Sajmište is built around a central tower. During the Holocaust, the tower functioned as an administrative building where new camp inmates were registered. The possessions of murdered Jews, clothes and shoes, were stored here prior to sorting. Beginning in the 1950s, the building was given over to artists as studio space.
What is today low-income housing was intended to be the offices of a construction firm tasked with building the new districts of Belgrade that today surround the camp.